I hope you’re right, Sam. However, this paragraph of the NTIA press release is what prompted my question:

> From the inception of ICANN, the U.S. Government and Internet stakeholders envisioned that the U.S. role in the IANA functions would be temporary.  The Commerce Department’s June 10, 1998 Statement of Policy stated that the U.S. Government “is committed to a transition that will allow the private sector to take leadership for DNS management.”  ICANN as an organization has matured and taken steps in recent years to improve its accountability and transparency and its technical competence.  At the same time, international support continues to grow for the multistakeholder model of Internet governance as evidenced by the continued success of the Internet Governance Forum and the resilient stewardship of the various Internet institutions.


The paragraph somehow indicates (as I read it at least) that the “How to do this” is associated with the “Why the changes”. So to rephrase my question; I wonder wether after some 17 years, does the NTIA’s belief in ICANN’s maturity and competence reflect its confidence in ICANN to simply be the convener of a dialogue amongst the different stakeholders to collectively reach some form of consensus on how to transition NTIA’s role to a yet undetermined institution, or does it reflect confidence in ICANN to coordinate this discussion in order to see how best ICANN can assume this role without NTIA involvement?

Frankly, ICANN's “…, steps in recent years to improve its accountability and transparency…,” still leave much to be desired. Yeah…, steps were taken, but ICANN’s not quite there yet. In fact, several actors across different stakeholder groups have recently been voicing discontent claiming the exact opposite of this. One of the earlier examples is NCSG’s reconsideration request of ICANN’s decision to expand the scope of the Trademark Clearinghouse to include up to 50 confusingly similar variants of brand names.

I still don’t know if my concerns are unfounded or not, but I do find it difficult to simply dismiss them, but we will all see how things’ll unfold over the next few months.

Thanks.

Amr

On Mar 15, 2014, at 2:36 PM, Sam Lanfranco <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Amr Elsadr poses the questions: 
> 
> On the other hand, have any proposals suggesting that institutional separation of the IANA function from ICANN been preemptively squashed?? 
> Or is the principle still a viable option that can be promoted??
> 
> What this announcement does is set a deadline on what has to be done, in the absence of delays by unforeseen forces at play. The key implication is to shift the discussions from "What changes" and "Why the changes" to the "How to do this" while honoring the four stated principles and producing a set of viable and sustainable structures and processes.  That will have ripple effects in structures and processes across the Internet ecosystem. This is more than just replacing one structure by another, and probably nothing has been preempted. A successful outcome will call for heightened stakeholder awareness and engagement, within ICANN, within constituencies, and beyond ICANN. 
> 
> Sam Lanfranco