Subject: [iucg] USG position on the IANA nature.

From: JFC Morfin <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Nov 2011 04:52:32 +0100

Bjoern,

the issue is currently actively discussed on my lists in France. The 
reason why is the nature of the IANA as it results from : 
https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=5c2ed0cd9584c5fb886574826f39ca40&tab=core

The main issues are :

1. the legal definition given to the IANA as :

>"services to maintain the continuity and stability of services 
>related to certain interdependent Internet technical management 
>functions, known collectively as the Internet Assigned Numbers 
>Authority (IANA)."

Because it says "certain" and not "some" or "the". The services are 
particular and/or specific.

2. the govermental constraint which specifies in what they are particular :

>The Contractor shall be:
>
>a) a wholly U.S. owned and operated firm or fully accredited U.S. 
>university or college operating in one of the 50 states of the 
>United States or District of Columbia;
>b) incorporated within one of the fifty (50) states of the United 
>States or District of Columbia; and
>c) organized under the laws of a state of the United States or 
>District of Columbia.
>
>The Contractor shall perform the primary IANA functions of the 
>Contract in the United States and possess and maintain, throughout 
>the performance of this Contract, a physical address within the 
>United States. The Contractor must be able to demonstrate that all 
>primary operations and systems will remain within the Unites States 
>(including the District of Columbia).

3. the fact that the IANA service is considered as a good US citizen 
pro bono service. This plainly establish that this is an US service, 
by American interests, for American users that other people may use. 
This was something we never considered since for us the IANA was 
hosting the IETF registries. IETF is not mentionned in the USG tender 
and this raises questions about the IETF nationality.

All this seems to mean that other governments should do the same - 
and actually have the duty to do the same (I refer to the recent 
Indian Gov. proposition supported by Brazil, and to the AFRAC 
(http://afrac.org) organization we tested a few years ago towards a 
French IANA, with national security concerns in mind). In such a case 
the problem is the data consistency between the different national IANAs.

I think this is an issue for this list. This is why I started 
documenting the work we engaged. I hope I can come in the coming 
weeks with more data and comments.

It seems that the emerging IUse community tends to consensually 
consider that the size of the Internet makes it a universal that 
should abide by the cosmological principle in order to stay 
indefinitly coherent, efficient and neutral. In such a case the IANA 
should actually be an US (since the US Gov wants its this way) 
instantiation of the multiglobal referential layer necessary to 
operate the Internet.

In any case, we will report our findings and projects to Nelly Kroes, 
the EC Commissioner for Digital Agenda.

jfc

At 03:17 10/11/2011, Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:
>Hi,
>
>   Some time ago I wondered about mirroring the registry details from the
>IANA web site in some public revision control system, so you could, for
>instance, subscribe to some Recent Changes feed, or run statistical ana-
>lysis tools on the data, like to report on how frequent changes are or
>how long it takes for entries to show up.
>
>I encountered mainly three problems: the first is that the FTP site does
>not include all the data; I would have to look up examples, but I recall
>some large seemingly XML-driven registry with "sub-directories" on the
>web site but no corresponding sub-directories in the FTP data. The other
>two problems are legal: can I actually set this up without any copyright
>concerns? And how to handle confidentiality and privacy breaches (IANA
>might accidentally publish information it shouldn't have, removes it the
>next day, but the mirror might hold the information forever; how should
>a mirror be organized to minimize problems that may result from this?)
>
>regards,