Speech given by Jari Arkko at the ICANN49 IANA transition opening session
in Singapore, March 24th, 2014.

I am very happy to stand here today and talk about this topic. I
welcome the process started by NTIA, and I believe we all together,
the Internet technical communities, you all, have and will evolve the
IANA in a responsible manner.

I wanted to give the engineering and IETF viewpoint on
this. Obviously, we care a lot about the Internet.  That it works
well, and that all aspects of managing it are done carefully. But
there is a particular aspect that we have a direct dependency on:
protocol parameters.

As a part of our standards work, we end up allocating protocol
parameters, such as port numbers or option numbers. The IETF role in
that space relates to setting the allocation policies and ensuring
their faithful implementation. We work together with IANA, who
actually maintains a database of those allocations. The IETF and ICANN
have a contract that specifies the roles of the different parties very
clearly.

And I want to make a couple of observations about the protocol numbers
aspect of of IANA functions. First, the practices have evolved over
time. In the last 15 years, the IETF and IANA have seen the creation
of the contract, SLAs, role definition RFCs, and groups to track the
relationship. Not to mention 1000s of RFCs on protocol parameter
allocation policies.

Second, the process recently started by NTIA is just another step in
that evolution.

Finally, I have a couple of personal suggestions on how we will reach
a good result in the process that is now starting. First, I think it
is necessary to stay focused - there are many problems in the
Internet, but in this discussion let us focus on just the arrangements
for IANA. Second, this is broader than ICANN. Some of the discussion
has to happen in other organisations, for instance, the IETF needs to
form also its own opinions. Third, let us run community-based
processes so that the community itself can show the path forward. We
are doing this in the IETF.