In a report issued earlier this month, the U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) found that the “proposal developed by the global Internet multistakeholder community meets the criteria NTIA outlined in March 2014 when it stated its intent to transition the U.S. Government’s stewardship role for the Internet domain name system (DNS) technical functions, known as the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) functions.”
One of many elements of NTIA’s review process was to evaluate the proposal against the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations (COSO) of the Treadway Commission Internal Control Framework Assessment. The use of the COSO framework was in alignment with the U.S. Government Accountability Office recommendation of how NTIA could enhance its review.
NTIA’s COSO Assessment was favorable, with no items flagged as red. Of the 70 areas assessed only eleven received a yellow rating relating to four areas:
- PTI governance (5 items)
- PTI Audit Committee (1 item)
- ICANN’s new investigatory process (2 items)
- PTI Operations (3 items)
Although NTIA does not require that any of the recommendations flagged as yellow be resolved as a pre-condition for the completion of the transition, we are confident that there is a clear path forward to address every item. We reviewed each of the items against NTIA’s recommended action, and implementation notes have been developed where further work is needed. NTIA’s recommendations and ICANN’s plans to address them can be found here.
Of the eleven items that were rated yellow:
- Two have already been addressed and do not require any further action
- Six are already accounted for in the transition work plan and we anticipate completion by the time of transition
- Three are expected to be completed post transition either as part of scheduled implementation work, or as part of normal operational planning
We appreciate NTIA’s thorough review of the community-developed proposal. We will work with the community and NTIA to ensure that the plans to address these items will meet the expectations of NTIA and the ICANN community.