Speech at the Internet Governance Principles panel at ICANN 49, Friday
21st March, 2014, Singapore.

I wanted to approach the panel's topic from the angle of the people in
the organisation that I work with, the Internet Engineering Task Force
or the IETF. I will first talk about our general engineering angle on
Internet governance, and then continue about the specific and current
hot topic of IANA evolution.

The engineers, and the IETF, obviously care a lot about the Internet.
That it works well, and that all aspects of managing it are done
carefully, with sufficient knowledge, and with stability and growth of
the Internet in mind. We realize of course that there are multiple
topics in the area of Internet governance, and some are further away
from us than others. As an example, we care about names and addresses,
but their management is the daily task of other organizations. Whereas
protocol parameters - such as port number allocations - are something
that we directly depend on.

Some of the key principles for any work that we do include open
participation, getting input from different parties, and broad
consensus on decisions. A natural fit for the multi-stakeholder model.
And as engineers we obviously care a lot about the technical aspects.
Solutions should provide global interoperability and scalability.
Technical merit and implementability matters. These need to be taken
into account even in Internet governance.

But we also like our technology to serve as building blocks for
further innovation. We sometimes talk about the concept of
permissionless innovation that is behind so many successes in the
Internet. What this concept implies is that users and developers have
an ability to create their own innovations on top of generally usable
technology. And the technology largely allows that. This has
also interesting implications for Internet governance. For instance,
new identifier spaces are created all the time, just witness hash tags
or social media nicknames and the like. The Internet evolves fast.

Finally, I wanted to get back to the more specific question of IANA
evolution, and particularly the protocol parameters aspect. Our role
in that space relates to setting the allocation policies and ensuring
their faithful registry implementation. Working together with IANA.

Earlier this month the IAB held a session in our meeting to discuss the 
principles regarding IANA evolution from our perspective. I wanted to
highlight a couple of the results.

First, I want to make the observation that IANA functions have evolved
over time. In the last decade, the IETF and IANA have seen the
creation of MoUs, SLAs, role definition RFCs, and groups to track the
relationship. Not to mention 1000s of RFCs on protocol parameter
allocation policies.

Second, the process recently started by NTIA is just another step in
that evolution. And I think that step is well justified, given IAB
view, supported by the community, that the protocol parameter registry
function as being and continuing to be capably provided by the
Internet technical community, without the need for external parties.

Third, I wanted to observe that we consider the protocol parameters
work a big success. Everything is running very well, we are happy with
the services provided by the IANA function, and we keep making
continuous improvements. I would like to offer that this operating
model is a good basis in many situations. That is, we have agreements
in place for the function to be performed, there are specifications
about how the process should work, and there are boards that are
accountable to the specific parts of the efforts on both sides.