Re: [registrars] the iana function

[Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine <brunner@nic-naa.net>]

Rick,

Thanks for the heads-up. I'd no idea that this was being bandied about.

> As registrars fund a majority of the ICANN budget and the IANA function is
> paid for though ICANN funding, the registrars are effectively funding the
> IANA function.

There are goofier things on the corporation's budget.

> Registrars do not benefit from the IANA function ...

I disagree with this, in nit, and whole-cloth. Nits first.

Rrars:	http://www.iana.org/assignments/registrar-ids
cctld:	http://www.iana.org/cctld/cctld-whois.htm
whois:	http://whois.iana.org/ (granted, the registrar opportunities for
	.int are rather limited at present)
i18n:	http://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets (granted, its RACE
	in some incantation for domain names, but the registrant billing
	data is in "local", for large values of "local")

rrp:	http://www.iana.org/assignments/port-numbers	rrp 648/{tcp,udp}
epp:	http://www.iana.org/assignments/port-numbers	epp-temp 3121/{tcp,udp}
cnrp:	http://www.iana.org/assignments/cnrp-parameters (maybe, maybe not)
crisp:	http://www.iana.org/assignments/somewhere-eventually

gtld: 	Hmm. Nothing specific for VGRS/AF/NSNL/GNR/RCOM/ comes to mind.

> I propose that the registrars encourage the DoC to put the IANA function
> out to bid so that ICANN is more capable to focus on domain name issues.

In some other venues, anything that gets ICANN out of IANA, or the reverse,
will be wildly popular.

Now the whole cloth ...  This could be far reaching.

As an ISP (small, Maine, New England and the Atlantic Maritimes), an IANA
disconnected from ICANN means that I've no interest in ARIN contributing
any part of my dues to ICANN. I want addresses (and bandwidth) and routing,
not names -- just like any other dhcp operator.

As a Registrar (small, ditto), I similarly have difficulty finding the
post-IANA business interest in the -to-address part of the DNS mapping,
or even the protocol part of DNS. Its all just strings.

As a webhost I have a limited interest in names and address and protocols,
but this is an industry that is in free-fall, and the margin to "care"
about anything that isn't either A/R or A/P is close to zero.

Having spent a part of 2001 in Beijing, and 2002 compeating .org by way of
Zurich, and having ears for non-decorative purposes, I'm not shocked that
"... a number of ccTLDs, disgruntled ..." would put in a bid.  I expect a
number of competent bids from a number of parties who fit that bill.

> Remember if the
> IANA goes away it will just leave registries and registrars to fund an
> organization with the sole objective of domain names.

Is this really a win? I honestly don't agree.

Without the IANA <-> ICANN <-> IETF set of linkages, we could have worked
on registry provisioning without regard to provisioning address registries,
or even registries other than top-level ones for which ICANN accreditation
is a manditory entry cost.

This would have simplified the EPP saga, since we could have been out of
the "open" IETF format, and back into the PreRegProto [1] format. We'd be
done by now, but EPP'd be limited to info/biz/pro/name, with little by-in
by ccTLDs, and complexity of the registry-interface is a cost issue to
some registrars.

Regards,
Eric

[1] PreRegProto existed between IETF-49 and IETF-51, participants were
limited to VGRS, NeuStar, TuCows, Register, GNR.