The U.S. Commerce Department announcement that it will end its unilateral control of the DNS root stimulated a great deal of debate and discussion during the Singapire ICANN meeting March 21 – 27. Thanks to the IGP proposal, structural separation of ICANN and IANA is a much-discussed option in the transition.
The country code registry for New Zealand, InternetNZ, has contributed additional value to this debate. It has prepared a set of diagrams that map out just what activities and functions are part of current governance arrangements for the domain name system. It shows what IANA, ICANN, the NTIA and Verisign actually do. Related functions are neatly grouped into boxes. The InternetNZ diagrams show how various approaches to the IANA transition would parcel out those functions to various entities. InternetNZ thus provides us with a very useful guide to the IANA transition. The 9-page document, which is must reading for anyone interested in the IANA transition, can be downloaded here:
2014-03-ICANN-IANA-Role-Structures