In early June, the Federal Register official journal of the US Federal Government, which contains proposals from government agencies and public communications, appeared in the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).
It asked whether the United States government should take control of the
IANA functions of managing IP address spaces and top-level domains.
Next, let's talk about where this idea came from.
/ Flickr / Kev / CCIANA Transfer
Initially, the IANA functions were performed by the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration, or
NTIA (National Telecommunications and Information Administration). It deals with communications policy in America. Responsibility for managing the space of top-level domains, IP addresses and other Internet protocols rested with the NTIA, since it concluded a contract with ICANN.
However, the contractual conditions created an imbalance in the management of the Internet, therefore, 20 years ago, in 1998, the world community
began work on transferring the management of the DNS address space to the private sector. The US government has agreed that this will allow better adaptation to the high speed of network development and will contribute to the promotion of the idea of an open Internet. The privatization procedure was initiated by ICANN itself.
The final stage of this process
began in 2014, when the representatives of the NTIA asked ICANN to create a community of politicians, representatives of private companies, technical experts and ordinary Internet users. Its participants were to form a new model for managing the global network.
Convinced of the viability of the proposed model, in the fall of 2016 (when the contract expired), NTIA transferred the right to exercise the IANA functions to the ICANN internal unit. It
includes representatives from all countries, as well as technical experts, experts from the Internet industry and network users.
Thus, the US authorities voluntarily handed over the opportunity to influence the domain zones to the world community.
Why did they return to this question again?
On June 5,
NTIA published in the Federal Register a
written request to all those who are not indifferent to the organization’s Internet policy for 2018 and subsequent years.
The request contained the question: “Is it worth returning control of IANA into the hands of the government? If so, why and how? If not, why not? ”(
P.3, section II, clause D ). The organization wanted feedback and comments from all interested parties.
The fact is that individual members of the government are thinking again about a return to control. In particular, Senator Ted Cruz. One of the reasons why this issue was raised at all was the
series of ICANN failures related to attempts to bring the Whois service to work in accordance with the requirements of the GDPR. At the same time, Ted Cruz believes that the loss of control over the IANA undermined the status of the United States.
So the question about returning IANA “under the wing” of the government was asked publicly. The goal is to get community feedback and explore the proposed ways to implement this initiative.
/ Flickr / perzon seo / CCHowever, many representatives of the industry were skeptical about the decision. Even the head of NTIA, David Redl (David Redl),
said that he personally considers this task impracticable.
With all this, David Redl nevertheless
noted that the NTIA was concerned about the situation around ICANN and Whois (we wrote about it in
our blog posts). Redl argues that NTIA will continue to insist on retaining all Whois functions that are valuable to Internet users.
Status quo
Although ICANN has
been repeatedly
criticized for acting on Whois, it’s hard to imagine that the US government would seriously consider reversing its decision and “returning” IANA. The Register
suggests that such a move may cause disapproval from the world community, as well as lead to the fragmentation of the global network addressing system.
Therefore, it is likely that the status quo will remain: NTIA will continue to
serve as presidential adviser in the telecommunications industry and Internet technologies, IANA will still be responsible for managing the DNS root zone, and ICANN will
monitor IANA activities.
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