The IANA Stewardship Transition passed another milestone last week, with the United States’ NTIA (National Telecommunications and Information Administration) announcing that the final transition proposal had fulfilled all of its stated criteria.
This was expected but welcome news, and again vindicated the efforts of the entire Internet community over the past two years to develop the transition proposal.
The NTIA’s full assessment of the proposal is available on its website, along with an FAQ document explaining the current status.
What happens now?
With this latest announcement, it appears that the US Government still intends to proceed with the IANA Stewardship Transition. That said, it is still possible for the transition to be prevented, for instance by legislation introduced through Congress: alongside the NTIA announcement last week, Republican Senators Cruz and Duffy introduced the “Protecting Internet Freedom Act bill”, intended to “prevent the Obama administration from giving the internet away”.
Regardless of the political process, work on implementation of the transition proposal has been underway to ensure that the all pieces are in place by 30 September.
The RIRs and ICANN have now finalised the Service Level Agreement (SLA) for IANA services, which was approved by the ICANN Board last month. The SLA will not become effective until 30 September, however it is planned to be signed by the RIRs and ICANN during the upcoming ICANN 56 meeting in Helsinki this month.
There are other implementation tasks to be completed by ICANN and Verisign in relation to the DNS root zone, and ICANN must establish the community structures proposed to oversee ICANN and the post-transition IANA.
The NTIA has asked ICANN to report on the progress of the implementation work by 12 August 2016, to ensure that all will be ready for the transition to hopefully occur after the expiration of the current IANA functions contract on 30 September 2016.
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