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ICANN Announces Incorporation of Public Technical Identifiers (PTI)

11 August 2016

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ICANN today announced that the incorporation documents for the "Post-Transition IANA" organization have been filed and received by the California Secretary of State under the name Public Technical Identifiers (which will now be referred to as PTI). With this filing and receipt, PTI is now formed as a nonprofit public benefit corporation and controlled affiliate of ICANN.

The PTI Incorporation Documents were drafted to reflect the recommendations of the IANA Stewardship Transition Coordination Group (ICG) proposal, as provided to the ICANN Board and transmitted to NTIA on 10 March 2016. PTI was formed to perform the naming-related IANA functions under contract with ICANN.

The PTI Articles were posted for public comment on 1 July 2016. At its meeting on 9 August 2016, the ICANN Board approved the PTI Articles and directed ICANN staff to move forward with the incorporation of PTI.

Although PTI now exists as a legal entity, it is not yet performing any work. PTI will not perform any services under the IANA Functions Contract with NTIA. PTI will only start performing the IANA functions upon the successful completion of the transition. At that point, PTI will perform the IANA functions pursuant to an IANA Naming Functions Contract with ICANN (released for public comment from 10 August – 9 September 2016) and the subcontracts with ICANN for the performance of the numbering and protocol parameter services.

For purposes of coherence of the IANA functions and overall operational logistics, the ICG proposal requires that the performance of the IANA numbering and protocol parameter functions be subcontracted to PTI. These subcontracting agreements are drafted and will be executed between PTI and ICANN so that they are in effect upon transition.

The proposed Articles of Incorporation are the first of the various governance documents that will be necessary for PTI to be put into operation. In the coming weeks, ICANN will also be posting the final versions of the PTI Bylaws, Conflict of Interest Policy, Board Code of Conduct, and Expected Standards of Behavior. Each of these documents has already been subject to public comment, and will be submitted for ICANN and PTI Board approvals (where appropriate) before the transition.

All efforts surrounding the Incorporation of PTI are designed to meet one of key the recommendations in the ICG proposal: the formation of a new legal entity to perform the three IANA functions. All implementation-planning efforts can be tracked at https://www.icann.org/stewardship-implementation.