PAB Proposal for support of IANA.

[Javier SOLA <jsola@aui.es>]

PAB,

Here is a proposal for supporting IANA. Please comment on it very quickly
(language and spelling included), as it needs to be sent almost immediately.

Javier

The Policy Advisory Body (PAB), created by the signature of the Generic Top
Level Domain Memorandum of Understanding and now including more than 200
companies and associations from all around the world, would like to comment
on the Third Iteration of the Bylaws for the New IANA published by IANA.

The IFWP process, has, for the last two months, brought together a
significant number of stakeholders of the Internet from around the world.
The participants do not represent, by far, the whole of the Community of
Internet Users, but their participation has permitted discussing some of
the most important issues regarding the re-engineering of IANA.

As Tamar Frankel -leader of the IFWP- demanded, consensus search has been
carried out in small break-out sessions, not in the plenary sessions of
this meetings, so that we could talk about work-in-progress, and not
consensus of the Internet Community, which would have been false.

In spite of this, many of the results of the IFWP seem to reflect clear
consensus of the Internet Community, and -we believe- have been correctly
understood by IANA and incorporated in the Third Iteration of the Bylaws.

In some other issues, the Consensus is not that clear. One of them is the
type of membership that this organisation will have, a key issue, as any
non-profit corporation must have members. Almost everybody seems to agree
that membership organisations should participate in the New IANA as
members. We support this view. There are opinions in the sense that
"anybody" could become a member, but this opens the organisation to
"capture" by a powerful company with many customers, specially if voting
through proxies is allowed. The model developed for PAB, which seems to
work quite well, does not allow individual members, and we think it could
be applied to the New IANA. The participation of specific companies should
be analysed very carefully, specially if members are a primary source of
financial stability for the New IANA. None of the funds received by the
organisation may have any strings attached, nor the possibility of
attaching them later.

We encourage IANA to continue with their work towards re-engineering its
structures to fit into a non-profit organisation that will -in a fair way-
regulate and manage the common resources of the Internet.

Javier