Speech given by Jari Arkko at the IANA transition session at the LACNIC 21 meeting in Cancun, Mexico, May 5th, 2014. I am very happy to be here today and talk about this topic. I welcome the process started by NTIA, and I believe we all together have and will evolve the IANA in a responsible manner. I wanted to give the engineering and IETF viewpoint on this. We have, of course, a direct dependency on IANA regarding protocol parameters. As a part of our standards work, we end up allocating protocol parameters, such as port numbers. The IETF role in that space relates to setting the allocation policies and ensuring their faithful implementation. We work together with the Elise's team at 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 parameters aspect of of IANA functions. First, the practices have evolved over time. The process recently started by NTIA is just another step in that evolution. 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 100s of RFCs on protocol parameter allocation policies. Those policies have been set by thousands of IETF contributors in a consensus process. The process is open to all, with participants ranging from academics to businesses to regulators. Overall, the IANA process works and has worked very well from our perspective, and we are also very happy with the work that Elise and her team is doing. Finally, some suggestions on the way forward in the changes process. First, let us run bottom up community-based processes. Second, the discussion of the IANA changes go beyond ICANN. I think it is beneficial to push parts of the discussion to the organisations that are responsible for the individual parts, such as the IETF and protocol parameters or RIRs and IP addresses. As you know, there is ongoing planning at ICANN on how the changes process will be run. The Internet Architecture Board submitted a proposal last week, so that indeed much of the changes process can be done in our communities. This is a refinement of the draft process that came out from ICANN in the early days of the planning. I hope you at LACNIC can support this proposal as well.