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| The "IANA Functions Operator" is ICANN--a clerical role, the Administrator is the US Department of Commerce, and the Root Zone Maintainer is Verisign |
Kudos to John R. Levine for illuminating both
Why Iran is not going to lose the .IR domain and
how limited ICANN's
current role in the IANA functions really is--
John R. Levine's blog - Internet and e-mail policy and practice:
"... the lawyers completely misunderstand ICANN's relationship to country code domains (ccTLDs). A few ccTLDS have agreements to make voluntary contributions to ICANN, but Iran doesn't, so ICANN gets no money from them. ICANN's role in ccTLD management is easy to tell from this diagram [see above]
, which comes from their IANA Functions contract with the US Department of Commerce. In the figure the IANA Functions Operator is ICANN, the Administrator is the Department of Commerce, and the Root Zone Maintainer is Verisign. The Root Server Operators are a dozen separate organizations, three of which are outside the US and not subject to US law. So ICANN's only role is clerical. They get the change requests from the TLD Operator, which in Iran's case is the Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences in Tehran. Once they have processed the change request, which means verifying that it really came from the proper party, and that it isn't technically defective (sometimes a problem with small less sophisticated countries), they pass it on to DoC for approval... DoC sends it along to Verisign who updates the root zone and distributes the zone file to the root server operators. From this it should be evident that ICANN has nothing to give the lawyers...." (read more at the link above)
So the litigation involving Iran's ccTLD again shows how limited ICANN's role in the IANA functions really is--only "clerical." And a
staff of only 10 people. So is there any reason why IANA should not be separated from ICANN? Of course not! The only ones objecting to that are power-mad ICANN and its sycophants.
