IANA Considerations

[sm@…]

At 20:50 09-07-2011, John C Klensin wrote:

(B.32) Section 5, IANA Considerations

In practice, it doesn't make any difference who "facilitate[s]
the establishment of the relationship between the RFC
Production Center and IANA" because that relationship is
working and doesn't need fixing much less "facilitating". But,
if anything needs to be said here, the coordination of that
relationship should lie with the IAB, since it has formal
responsibility for both the RFC Editor and the IANA. Were any
conflict to arise between the Production Center and the IANA
that could not be resolved informally, resolving it would
certainly fall to the IAB. By contrast, the IAOC, which is
designated as doing the facilitation in that section of this
document, does not appear to me to have any relationship with
the IANA at all: there are no contracts, no legal arrangements,
and no oversight. The IETF Trust does have a limited
relationship with IANA, but the Trust is not mentioned in this
document at all.

I am unfortunately unable to provide references to supplement some parts of this message as the www.iab.org move to Wordpress broke the old "links".

Many protocols defined in RFCs make use of identifiers consisting of constants and other well-known values. The IETF uses a registry function to record these protocol values and their associated semantic intent. Historically, this registry is referred to as the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.

A proposal about defining IETF Internet Assigned Numbers Authority as it applies to the IETF Standards Process was submitted in December 2002. The publication of the proposal through the IAB Stream in April 2011 resulted in RFC 6220. For what it is worth, this is done under contract but I prefer not to get into that.

In the text quoted above, John Klensin discussed about the relationships between various bodies and IANA. I'll steal a few words from him: "In practice, it doesn't make any difference". Where it makes a difference is when the IAB takes a position on the IANA NOI.

The previous IAB was of the opinion that:

"The IAB has the responsibility to appoint an organization to

undertake the delegated functions of the Protocol Parameter Registry
Operator for each IETF protocol parameter."

If the current IAB would like to maintain that opinion, I suggest that it uses "Protocol Parameter Registry Operator" instead of "IANA" in some parts of draft-iab-rfc-editor-model-v2-02. The roles are clearly defined in RFC 6220. I note that RFC 6220 states that:

"Any intellectual property rights of IETF protocol parameter

assignment information, including the registry and its contents, and
all registry publications, are to be held by the IETF Trust on behalf
of the IETF."

The following suggested changes should be viewed as work in progress pending a stable version of the RFC Editor Model document:

In Section 2.3:

"4. Engaging in dialog with authors, document shepherds, IANA,

and/or stream-dependent contacts when clarification is needed;"

Suggested change:

4. Engaging in dialog with authors, document shepherds, Protocol

Parameter Registry Operator, and/or stream-dependent contacts when
clarification is needed;

"9. Coordinating with IANA to perform protocol parameter registry

actions;"

Suggested change:

9. Coordinating with the Protocol Parameter Registry Operator;

"11. Establishing publication readiness of each document through

communication with the authors, document shepherds, IANA and/or
stream-dependent contacts, and, if needed, with the RFC Series
Editor;"

Suggested change:

11. Establishing publication readiness of each document through

communication with the authors, document shepherds, Protocol
Parameter Registry Operator and/or stream-dependent contacts,
and, if needed, with the RFC Series Editor;

I suggest removing the following sentence from Section 5:

"The IAOC will facilitate the establishment of the relationship

between the RFC Production Center and IANA."

Regards,
-sm

[jmh@…]

After discussion, the IAB concluded that leaving the term as IANA in the document was the best choice.