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Post-Transition IANA

Status of Post-Transition IANA

1 October 2016: The post-transition IANA has been incorporated under the name of Public Technical Identifiers (“PTI”) and is now performing the IANA functions on behalf of ICANN.

 

Overview

In the ICG proposal, the domain names community specified that a new legal entity should be formed as an affiliate of ICANN to perform the IANA naming function. For purposes of coherence of the IANA functions and overall operational logistics, the ICG proposal also required that the performance of the number and protocol parameter services be subcontracted to PTI.


PTI Incorporation

ICANN worked with the CWG-Stewardship and its external legal counsel to develop Articles of Incorporation for PTI. The PTI Articles describe the purpose of PTI, ICANN’s role as the sole member, as well as other legal specifications relating to the corporate and non-profit standing of PTI.

The PTI Articles were posted for a 30-day public comment period beginning on July 1, 2016. At its meeting on August 9, 2016, the ICANN Board approved the formation of PTI and directed ICANN’s CEO to proceed with the incorporation of PTI. On August 10, 2016, the PTI Articles were filed and received by the California Secretary of State, under the name Public Technical Identifiers ("PTI”). On September 28, 2016, the PTI Board adopted the Articles.

PTI Bylaws

To ensure PTI has appropriate governance requirements, ICANN worked with the CWG-Stewardship and its external legal counsel to draft the PTI Bylaws. The PTI Bylaws define requirements for the PTI Board and annual PTI budget, and are consistent with both the domain names community requirements in the ICG proposal and the requirements of the new ICANN Bylaws.

The PTI Bylaws were posted for a 30-day public comment period on July 12, 2016. Prior to the close of the public comment period, ICANN and the CWG-Stewardship legal counsel agreed on appropriate language to address the remaining concerns of the CWG-Stewardship. The staff report and final Bylaws were published on August 18, 2016. On September 15, 2016, the ICANN Board approved the PTI Bylaws. On September 28, the PTI Board adopted the Bylaws, which are now in effect. 

PTI Governance Documents

While not required by the ICG proposal, ICANN developed PTI to be an entity with strong governance practices. In NTIA’s COSO assessment and recommendations, NTIA made several recommendations that reinforced a need to develop a core set of documents to guide the directives, attitudes and behaviors of those participating in PTI, and encourage adherence to important ethical standards.

To satisfy both ICANN’s objective to set high governance standards for PTI and the recommendations made by NTIA in its COSO assessment, ICANN drafted a conflict of interest policy, Board code of conduct, and expected standards of behavior document for PTI. Each of these documents was modeled off of versions currently in use at ICANN.

All three of these documents were published for a 30-day public comment period from July 8 – August 7, 2016. After incorporating comments received in the public comment process, final versions of these documents were posted on August 12, 2016. These documents were adopted by the PTI Board on September 29, 2016 and are now in force.

Naming Function Agreement

The IANA Naming Function Contract was drafted based on a draft statement of work by external legal counsel of the CWG-Stewardship included in the ICG proposal. A draft of the contract was shared with the CWG-Stewardship and its external legal counsel on July 15, 2016 for review and discussion, which resulted in updates to the document to address concerns raised.

The revised draft IANA Naming Function Contract was published for a 30-day public comment period on August 10, 2016. After addressing comments received during the public comment period, ICANN published the final IANA Naming Function Contract on September 15, 2016. On the same day, the ICANN approved the Contract. On September 28, the PTI Board approved the Contract. ICANN and PTI signed the Contract on September 20, 2016. The Contract allows PTI to perform the IANA naming function on behalf of ICANN and is now in effect.

Service Level Expectations (SLEs)

The domain names community included a requirement in the ICG proposal for a new set of Service Level Expectations (SLEs) that will replace the performance standards for the IANA naming function established under the now expired IANA functions contract. The new SLEs will require PTI to measure, record, and report additional details of transaction times for root zone change request processing.

To operationalize the SLEs, ICANN made updates to the RZMS to collect the necessary data for the new SLEs. Once the updates were completed, roughly three-and-a-half months of data was collected to set proposed thresholds for each of the SLEs.

ICANN held discussions with the CWG-Stewardship to review and adjust the proposed thresholds. The thresholds for all SLEs were agreed upon by both ICANN and the CWG-Stewardship, and were incorporated into the IANA Naming Function Contract that the ICANN and PTI Boards approved. These new SLEs are now in effect.

Subcontracting Agreements

While not a requirement of the domain names community, the ICG proposal required that the performance of the protocol parameters and Internet number functions be subcontracted to PTI for purposes of coherence of the IANA functions and overall operational logistics.

ICANN drafted subcontracting agreements for the protocol parameters and number functions and provided the drafts to the respective communities for review and feedback. Both were approved by the PTI Board on September 28, 2016, signed by ICANN and PTI, and are now in effect.

Services Agreement

 

To ensure that PTI has the funding and resources to perform the IANA functions, ICANN drafted a Services Agreement that set forth the direct and shared services arrangements that ICANN will provide PTI to operate and perform the IANA functions.

The draft Services Agreement was shared with the three operational communities for review on August 12, 2016 and was finalized on September 15, 2016. On the same day, the ICANN Board approved it and the PTI Board approved it on September 28, 2016. ICANN and PTI signed the agreement on September 30, 2016 and it is now in effect.

 

Relevant Links

 
Domain Name System
Internationalized Domain Name ,IDN,"IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet ""a-z"". An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Many languages also use other types of digits than the European ""0-9"". The basic Latin alphabet together with the European-Arabic digits are, for the purpose of domain names, termed ""ASCII characters"" (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These are also included in the broader range of ""Unicode characters"" that provides the basis for IDNs. The ""hostname rule"" requires that all domain names of the type under consideration here are stored in the DNS using only the ASCII characters listed above, with the one further addition of the hyphen ""-"". The Unicode form of an IDN therefore requires special encoding before it is entered into the DNS. The following terminology is used when distinguishing between these forms: A domain name consists of a series of ""labels"" (separated by ""dots""). The ASCII form of an IDN label is termed an ""A-label"". All operations defined in the DNS protocol use A-labels exclusively. The Unicode form, which a user expects to be displayed, is termed a ""U-label"". The difference may be illustrated with the Hindi word for ""test"" — परीका — appearing here as a U-label would (in the Devanagari script). A special form of ""ASCII compatible encoding"" (abbreviated ACE) is applied to this to produce the corresponding A-label: xn--11b5bs1di. A domain name that only includes ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens is termed an ""LDH label"". Although the definitions of A-labels and LDH-labels overlap, a name consisting exclusively of LDH labels, such as""icann.org"" is not an IDN."