US asks if it should take back control over ICANN

The US government has asked the public whether it should reverse its 2016 action to relinquish oversight of the domain name system root.
“Should the IANA Stewardship Transition be unwound? If yes, why and how? If not, why not?”
That’s the surprisingly direct question posed, among many others, in a notice of inquiry (pdf) issued yesterday by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration.
The inquiry “is seeking comments and recommendations from all interested stakeholders on its international internet policy priorities for 2018 and beyond”. The deadline for comments is July 2.
The IANA transition, which happened in September 2016, saw the NTIA remove itself from the minor part it played, alongside meatier roles for ICANN and Verisign, in the old triumvirate of DNS root overseers.
At the handover, ICANN baked many of its previous promises to the US government into its bylaws instead, and handed oversight of itself over to the so-called Empowered Community, made up of internet stakeholders of all stripes.
The fact that the question is being asked at all would have been surprising not too long ago, but new NTIA chief David Redl and Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross expressed their willingness to look into a reversal as recently as January.
Back then Redl told Congresspeople, in response to questions raised primarily by Senator Ted Cruz during his confirmation process:

I am not aware of any specific proposals to reverse the IANA transition, but I am interested in exploring ways to achieve this goal. To that end, if I am confirmed I will recommend to Secretary Ross that we begin the process by convening a panel of experts to investigate options for unwinding the transition.

Cruz had objected to the transition largely based on his stated (albeit mistaken or disingenuous) belief that it gave China, Iran and a plethora of bad guys control over Americans’ freedom of speech, something that has manifestly failed to materialize.
But in the meantime another big issue has arisen — GDPR, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation — which is in the process of eroding access rights to Whois data, beloved of US law enforcement and intellectual property interests.
NTIA is known to be strongly in favor of retaining access to this data to the greatest extent possible.
The notice of inquiry does not mention Whois or GDPR directly but it does ask several arguably related questions:

A. What are the challenges to the free flow of information online?
B. Which foreign laws and policies restrict the free flow of information online? What is the impact on U.S. companies and users in general?
C. Have courts in other countries issued internet-related judgments that apply national laws to the global internet? What have been the practical effects on U.S. companies of such judgements? What have the effects been on users?

NTIA’s statement announcing the inquiry prominently says that the agency is “working on” items such as “protecting the availability of WHOIS information”.
It also says it “has been a strong advocate for the multistakeholder approach to Internet governance and policy development”.
While GPDR and Whois are plainly high-priority concerns for NTIA, it’s beyond my ken how reversing the IANA transition would help at all.
GDPR is not ICANN policy, after all. It’s a European Union law that applies to all companies doing business in Europe.
Even if the US were to fully nationalize ICANN tomorrow and rewrite Whois policy to mandate the death penalty for any contracted party that refused to openly publish full Whois records, that would not make GDPR go away, it would probably just kick off a privacy trade war or mean that all US contracted parties would have to stop doing business in Europe.
That sounds like an extreme scenario, but Trump.
The NTIA’s inquiry closes July 2, so if you think the transition was a terrible idea or a wonderful idea, this is where to comment.

Concern as ICANN shuts down “independent” security review

Just a year after gaining its independence from the US government, ICANN has come under scrutiny over concerns that its board of directors may have overstepped its powers.
The board has come in for criticism from almost everyone expressing an opinion at the ICANN 60 meeting in Abu Dhabi this week, after it temporarily suspended a supposedly independent security review.
The Security, Stability and Resiliency of the DNS Review, known as SSR-2, is one of the mandatory reviews that got transferred into ICANN’s bylaws after the Affirmation of Commitments with the US wound up last year.
The review is supposed to look at ICANN’s “execution of its commitment to enhance the operational stability, reliability, resiliency, security, and global interoperability of the systems and processes, both internal and external, that directly affect and/or are affected by the Internet’s system of unique identifiers that ICANN coordinates”.
The 14 to 16 volunteer members have been working for about eight months, but at the weekend the ICANN board pulled the plug, saying in a letter to the review team that it had decided “to suspend the review team’s work” and said its work “should be paused”.
Chair Steve Crocker clarified in sessions over the weekend and yesterday that it was a direction, not a request, but that the pause was merely “a moment to take stock and then get started again”.
Incoming chair Cherine Chalaby said in various sessions today and yesterday that the community — which I take to mean the leaders of the various interest groups — is now tasked with un-pausing the work.
Incoming vice-chair Chris Disspain told community leaders in an email (pdf) yesterday:

The Board has not usurped the community’s authority with respect to this review. Rather, we are asking the SOs and ACs to consider the concerns we have heard and determine whether or not adjustments are needed. We believe that a temporary pause in the SSR2 work while this consideration is under way is a sensible approach designed to ensure stakeholders can reach a common understanding on the appropriate scope and work plan

Confusion has nevertheless arise among community members, and some serious concerns and criticisms have been raised by commercial and non-commercial interests — including governments — over the last few days in Abu Dhabi.
But the board’s concerns with the work of SSR-2 seem to date back a few months, to the Johannesburg meeting in June, at which Crocker said “dangerous signals” were observed.
It’s not clear what he was referring to there, but the first serious push-back by ICANN came earlier this month, when board liaison Kaveh Ranjbar, apparently only appointed to that role in June, emailed the group to say it was over-stepping its mandate.
Basically, the SSR-2 group’s plan to carry out a detailed audit of ICANN’s internal security profile seems to have put the willies up the ICANN organization and board.
Ranjbar wrote:

The areas the Board is concerned with are areas that indeed raise important organizational information security and organizational oversight questions. However, these are also areas that are not segregated for community review, and are the responsibility of the ICANN Organization (through the CEO) to perform under the oversight of the ICANN Board.
…
While we support the community in receiving information necessary to perform a full and meaningful review over ICANN’s SSR commitments, there are portions of the more detailed “audit” plan that do not seem appropriate for in-depth investigation by the subgroup. Maintaining a plan to proceed with detailed assessments of these areas is likely to result in recommendations that are not tethered to the scope of the SSR review, and as such, may not be appropriate for Board acceptance when recommendations are issued. This also can expand the time and resources needed to perform this part of the review.

This does not seem hugely unreasonable to me. This kind of audit could be expensive, time-consuming and — knowing ICANN’s history of “glitches” — could have easily exposed all kinds of embarrassing vulnerabilities to the public domain.
Ranjbar’s letter was followed up a day later with a missive (pdf) from the chair of ICANN’s Security and Stability Advisory Committee, which said the SSR-2’s work was doomed to fail.
Patrick Falstrom recommended a “temporarily halt” to the group’s work. He wrote:

One basic problem with the SSR2 work is that the review team seems neither to have sufficient external instruction about what to study nor to have been able to formulate a clear direction for itself. Whatever the case, the Review Team has spent hundreds of hours engaged in procedural matters and almost no progress has been made on substantive matters, which in turn has damaged the goodwill and forbearance of its members, some of whom are SSAC members. We are concerned that, left to its own devices, SSR2 is on a path to almost certain failure bringing a consequential loss of credibility in the accountability processes of ICANN and its community.

Now that ICANN has actually acted upon that recommendation, there’s concern that it sets a disturbing precedent for the board taking “unilateral” action to scupper supposedly independent accountability mechanisms.
The US government itself expressed concern, during a session between the board and the Governmental Advisory Committee in Abu Dhabi today.
“This is unprecedented,” US GAC rep Ashley Heineman said. “I just don’t believe it was ever an expectation that the ICANN board would unilaterally make a decision to pause or suspend this action. And that is a matter of concern for us.”
“It would be one thing if it was the community that specifically asked for a pause or if it was a review team that says ‘Hey, we’re having issues, we need a pause.’ What’s of concern here is that ICANN asked for this pause,” she said.
UK GACer Mark Carvell added that governments have been “receiving expressions of grave concern” about the move and urged “maximum transparency” as the SSR-2 gets back on track.
Jonathan Zuck of the Innovators Network Foundation, one of the volunteers who worked on ICANN’s transition from US government oversight, also expressed concern during the public forum session yesterday.
“I think having a fundamental accountability mechanism unilaterally put on hold is something that we should be concerned about in terms of process,” he said. “I’m not convinced that it was the only way to proceed and that from a precedential standpoint it’s not best way to proceed.”
Similar concerns were voiced by many other parts of the community as they met with the ICANN board throughout today and yesterday.
The problem now is that the bylaws do not account for a board-mandated “pause” in a review team’s work, so there’s no process to “unpause” it.
ICANN seems to have got itself tangled up in a procedural quagmire — again — but sessions later in the week have been scheduled in order for the community to begin to untangle the situation.
It doubt we’ll see a resolution this week. This is likely to run for a while.

ALAC throws spanner in ICANN accountability discussions

The At-Large Advisory Committee has yanked backing for a key ICANN accountability proposal.
The ALAC, on of ICANN’s policy advisory groups, this afternoon voted unanimously “to withdraw support for the Membership model” at ICANN 54 in Dublin.
The Membership model is a proposal out of the Cross Community Working Group on Accountability (CCWG) that would change ICANN’s legal structure to one of formal membership, where a Sole Member gets legal rights to enforce accountability over the ICANN board of directors.
The model has some fierce support in the CCWG, but over the last few days in Dublin the group has started to explore the possibility of a “Designator” model instead.
That would be a weaker accountability model than one based on membership, but stronger than the “Multistakeholder Enforcement Mechanism” proposed by the ICANN board.
ALAC chair Alan Greenberg said in a statement to the CCWG mailing list:

In its formal response to the CCWG-Accountability proposal issued in August 2015, the ALAC said that it could support the model being proposed, but preferred something far less complex and lighter-weight, and that we saw no need for the level of enforceability that the proposal provided. Moreover, the ALAC had specific concerns with the budget veto and the apparent lack of participation of perhaps a majority of AC/SOs.
In light of the reconsideration of a designator model by the CCWG, along with the recommendations of the Saturday morning break-out sessions, the ALAC felt that a revised statement was in order. Accordingly we decided, by a unanimous vote of the 14 ALAC members present (with 1 not present), to withdraw support for the Membership model.
I want to make it clear that this is not a “red line” decision. Should a Membership model become one that is generally advocated by the CCWG, and supported by a supermajority of Board directors (who ultimately MUST support any changes that they will be called upon to approve, else they would be in violation of their fiduciary duty), then the ALAC reserves its right to support such a model.

The move revises the battle lines in the ongoing accountability debate. It’s no longer a simple case of CCWG versus ICANN board.
Dublin is a crunch time for the accountability proposals.
The clock is ticking — if the ICANN community cannot agree on a consensus proposal soon it risks delaying the transition of the IANA functions from US government oversight and possibly killing off the transition altogether.
Yet, while the CCWG is making steady progress cleaning up remaining areas of disagreement, the differences between itself and the board are still as sharp as ever.

Chehade outlines five ways ICANN could die

Aarrgh! We’re all going to die!!!!1
ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade has outlined five ways in which the internet could fall to pieces if the IANA transition fails, and they all seem really horrible.
Chehade presented the list at a telephone meeting of leaders of ICANN supporting organizations and advisory committees yesterday.
I don’t know what was said yet, but I can guess the tone from one of Chehade’s accompanying slides:

5 Risks we face if the IANA Stewardship Transition is Delayed/Fails:
I. ICANN’s community may fracture or fray slowly, becoming divided, acrimonious, bitter — potentially risking ICANN’s stability, effectiveness — and impacting the participation of global stakeholders
II. The technical operating communities using IANA may go separate ways, with the IETF and the Numbering communities choosing to take their business elsewhere — ending the integrity of the Internet’s logical infrastructure
III. Governments (encouraged by G77) may lead an effort starting at this year during the WSIS review to shift Internet Governance responsibilities to a more stable and predictable inter-governmental platform
IV. Key economies that shifted positions since NTIA’s announcement in March 2014 may reverse their support for ‘one Internet’ logical infrastructure coordinated by ICANN
V. The resilience and effectiveness of the multistakholder model will be questioned by those seeking solutions to the emerging Internet Governance issues in the economic and societal layer (e.g. cyber security, trade, privacy, copyright protections, etc.)

Judging by the slides, ICANN reckons that the community needs to have its transition proposal delivered by December, if ICANN is to meet the current September 30, 2016 transition deadline.
There are a whole host of sessions devoted to the transition at the forthcoming public meeting in Dublin.
The transition process is currently in a very tricky spot because the ICANN board of directors does not agree with the community proposals to restructure ICANN.

Chehade confirms he’ll be gone before IANA transition is done

ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade has laid out his current best thinking for the timeline of the IANA’s transition from US government oversight, and he’ll be gone well before it’s done.
At the opening ceremony of the ICANN 53 meeting in Buenos Aires today, Chehade described how June 2016 is a likely date for the divorce; three months after his resignation takes effect.
Chehade said:

I asked our community leaders, “Based on your plans and what you’re seeing and what you know today, when could that finish?” The answers that are coming back to us seem to indicate that by ICANN 56, which will be back in Latin America in the middle of 2016, a year from today, the contract with the US Government could come to an end.

He showed a slide that broke the remaining work of the transition into three phases.

Work being carried out within ICANN is not entirely to blame for the length of time the process will take.
The US National Telecommunications and Information Administration needs 60 to 90 days to review the final community-developed transition proposal.
And under forthcoming US legislation, 30 legislative days will be required for the US Congress to review the NTIA’s approval of the plan.
Thirty legislative days, Chehade explained, could mean as many as 60 actual days, depending on the yet-unpublished 2016 Congressional calendar.
He urged the community focus hard on Phase One in his graphic — actually producing a consensus transition plan.
The target for delivery of this is the next ICANN meeting, 54, which will take place in Dublin, Ireland from October 18 to October 22 this year.

After slamming the ccNSO, India joins it

India has become the newest member of ICANN’s country-code Supporting Organization, the ccNSO, just one month after the local registry slammed the group for not representing its interests.
The National Internet Exchange (NIXI), which runs .in, became the 152nd ccNSO member yesterday, according to a note on its website.
I haven’t reported on the first 151 ccTLDs to join, but this one’s interesting because NIXI’s mononymed CEO, Dr Govind, led a charge of criticism against the ccNSO for excluding non-members from the IANA transition review.
In July, Govind complained that a “significant section of the ccTLD Registry operator community do not share the objectives of the ccNSO membership are now excluded from the process.”
By joining the ccNSO, registries agree to follow the policies it creates for ccTLDs (though I understand they may opt out), which has led 103 ccTLDs to stay out of it completely.
Some ccTLDs are primarily concerned that the ccNSO does nothing to dilute or overturn RFC 1591, the 20-year-old standards document that states ccTLDs can only be redelegated with the consent of the incumbent.

ccTLD anger over IANA group “capture”

Operators of dozens of ccTLDs are said to be furious that they don’t have representation on the group coordinating the transition of the IANA functions from US oversight.
The IANA Stewardship Transition Coordination Group (ICG) has been “captured” by members of ICANN’s country-code Names Supporting Organization, which does not represent all ccTLDs, according to ccTLD sources.
While the ccNSO is the official body representing ccTLDs within ICANN, many refuse to participate.
Some registries fear that signing up to ICANN and its rules may one day lead to them losing their delegations, while others have sovereignty or liability concerns.
It is believed that while 151 ccTLDs participate in the ccNSO, 104 do not.
None of these 104 are represented on the new ICG, which met for the first time to draft a charter in London last Thursday and Friday.
The ICG is tasked with holding the pen when the community writes a proposal for replacing the US government in the management of the DNS root zone and other IANA functions.
The ccTLD community was given four seats on the ICG, out of a total of 27. All four seats were taken by ccNSO members, picked by a five-person selection committee that included one non-ccNSO member.
I gather that about 20 non-ccNSO ccTLDs are up in arms about this state of affairs, which they believe has seen them “proactively excluded” from the ICG.
Some concerns originate from operators of ccTLDs for dependent territories that may face the risk of being taken over by governments in future.
Because IANA manages the DNS root zone, the transition process may ultimately impact ccTLD redelegations.
But the loudest voice, one of only two speaking on the record so far, is India’s government-established National Internet Exchange of India, which runs .in.
Dr Govind (apparently he doesn’t use his first name), CEO of NIXI, said in a statement last week:

Clearly the process has already been captured by a subset of the ccTLD community. The selection process controlled by the ccNSO resulted in all four seats being assigned to their members. A significant section of the ccTLD Registry operator community do not share the objectives of the ccNSO membership are now excluded from the process.

Balazs Martos, registry manager of Hungary’s .hu, added:

I am very concerned that the ccNSO seem to feel they speak for the whole ccTLD Community when dealing with every IANA matter. They do not, .HU is an IANA service user, but we are not a member of the ccNSO.

The joint statement also raises concerns about “cultural diversity”, which seems like a cheap move played from a position in the deck close to the race card.
The ccTLD representation on the ICG comprises the UK, New Zealand, China and Nigeria.
The chair of the ccNSO, .ca’s Byron Holland, has stated that the way the these four were selected from the 12 candidates (two of whom were non-ccNSO) was a “very difficult task”.
The selection committee had to consider factors such as geography, registry size, candidate expertise and available time, governance structure and business model, Holland said.
Blogging last week, addressing Govind’s concerns if not directly acknowledging them, he wrote:

Given the criteria we had to balance, there were no ‘reserved’ seats for any one group. The fact is four seats only allowed us to ensure some – not all – of the criteria were met. The discussion was difficult and the outcome was not unanimous. We did, however, reach consensus. In paring this list down to the final four, we balanced the selection criteria – balance being the keyword here. Geographic diversity is a good example of this – while there are five ICANN-defined geographic regions, we only had four seats on the Coordination Committee.
…
Did we meet the all of the criteria set out at the beginning of the process? No, but given the constraints we were facing – four seats to represent a community as large and diverse as ccTLDs – I have no hesitation in endorsing each of them for their ability to be representative of the global ccTLD community – both ccNSO members and non-members – effectively.

Unanimous support for new ICANN appeals process

The Generic Names Supporting Organization has issued an “unprecedented” statement of “unanimous” support for a new way for ICANN community members to appeal ICANN decisions.
All seven constituency groups signed onto a statement that was read by representatives of registries, non-commercial users and intellectual property interests at the ICANN 50 public forum last week.
“It only took us 50 meetings, but I think the rarity of what you’re witnessing this afternoon sends a very strong message about our views,” the Registries Stakeholder Group’s Keith Drazek said.
This is the meat of the demand:

The entire GNSO joins together today calling for the Board to support community creation of an independent accountability mechanism that provides meaningful review and adequate redress for those harmed by ICANN action or inaction in contravention of an agreed upon compact with the community.

Rafik Dammak of the Non-Commercial Users Constituency added that the creation of such a mechanism is “a necessary and integral element of the IANA stewardship transition.”
“The Board’s decisions must be open to challenge and the Board cannot be in a position of reviewing and certifying its own decisions,” he said.
“We need an independent accountability structure that holds the ICANN Board, Staff, and various stakeholder groups accountable under ICANN’s governing documents, serves as an ultimate review of Board/Staff decisions,” said Kristina Rosette of the Intellectual Property Constituency.
What they’re basically looking for is a third way to appeal ICANN decisions beyond the existing Independent Review Process and Request for Reconsideration mechanisms.
IRP is considered too time-consuming and expensive for anyone other than well-funded commercial stakeholders. It cost ICM Registry millions in legal fees to win its IRP in 2010.
RfR, meanwhile, sees the ICANN board review its own decisions, and is only successful (in 15 years it’s only happened once, a week ago) when a requester can bring new evidence to the table.
What the GNSO seems to be looking for is a third way — independent review of ICANN decisions that doesn’t cost a bomb and can be used to reexamine decisions on the merits.
In many ways the demand represents the low-hanging fruit of the amorphous “accountability” discussion that took place at length at the London meeting last week.
ICANN accountability is being examined simultaneously with the proposed transition of the IANA stewardship functions from the US Department of Commerce to a yet-undefined mechanism.
There seems to be broad community consensus that the transition should be linked to improvements in accountability.
During the “constituency day” sessions on Tuesday, during which the ICANN board visits in turn with each GNSO constituency, accountability was the theme common to each and every session.
Time and again, CEO Fadi Chehade pushed the constituency he was addressing to provide some specifics.
“What is accountability and how accountable are we today?” he asked the RySG. “Who are we accountable to for what? We need to get precise before you ask us to answer a question that says when you finish accountability, then you can move to the transition.”
The GNSO statement two days later, which still needs fleshing out with details, appears to be the first step toward providing the precision Chehade wants.
Chehade said multiple times that the accountability review and the IANA transition discussions are “interrelated” but not “interdependent.”
If one were dependent on the other, it would be easier for opponents to stonewall the IANA transition by delaying the accountability review, he said.
“There are people in this community would like the transition from the US government to never happen,” he told the RySG. “They won’t admit it, but there are several, in this room even, who want this to never happen.”
He later told the NCUC that these bogeymen were “not in this room”, highlighting perhaps his belief that one or more gTLD registries is preparing to throw a spanner in the works.
Suspicion immediately fell on Verisign, forcing Drazek to issue a separate statement at the public forum on Thursday denying that the company (his employer) opposes the transition:

VeriSign supports NTIA’s March 14th, 2014 announcement. VeriSign supports NTIA’s four key principles. VeriSign Supports the bottom-up multistakeholder process that is now under way and that we have already been very much engaged. VeriSign supports the target date of September 2015 for transition. We support these things provided the multistakeholder community recommendations for ICANN’s accountability reforms are accepted by NTIA before the final transition, and sufficiently implemented by ICANN subject to measurable deliverables.

It’s not much of a denial, really, more of a clarification of where Verisign stands and confirmation that it wants, as Chehade alluded to, accountability reform prior to the IANA transition.
In my view, accountability is the more important of these two threads.
The Department of Commerce doesn’t actually do much in terms of its hands-on role as steward of the IANA functions as they related to domain names. It merely checks that ICANN’s proper procedures have been followed before signing off on DNS root zone changes.
If sanity prevails in the ICANN community’s transition discussions (and I have no reason to believe it will) whatever replaces the US should be similarly mute and invisible.
However, Commerce’s arguably more important role has been to act as a constant Sword of Damocles, a threat that ICANN could lose its IANA powers if it goes rogue and starts acting (in the US government’s view) against the best interests of the internet community.
That’s a very crude accountability mechanism.
What ICANN needs in future is not a direct replacement of that existential threat, but a mechanism of accessible, independent third-party review that will give the ICANN community and internet users everywhere confidence that ICANN isn’t a loose cannon with its hand on the internet’s tiller.

London meeting already ICANN’s second-biggest

Over 2,200 people have already registered for ICANN 50, which kicks off this coming weekend in London.
According to ICANN, that puts the upcoming meeting second only to last year’s one in Beijing, which had 3,141 pre-registrations and 2,532 eventual attendees.
London’s a pretty convenient “hub” city to fly to, but I suspect a lot of the interest might be related to the IANA transition process, which has put a new spotlight on ICANN in recent months.
ICANN has already laid on overflow viewing rooms for discussions related to the IANA topic.
The meeting officially starts with the welcome ceremony on Monday, but the work begins as usual on Saturday, when the various constituencies gather to decide what they want to moan about this time.
As usual, you don’t have to actually be in London to “attend” the meeting — there’s a full schedule of remote participation opportunities if your diary, bandwidth and time zone permits.
It’s a packed schedule as usual, and it could look overwhelming to a newbie.
A good trick is to simply follow the board of directors around on the Tuesday, when it invites each constituency into the room in turn for some passive-aggressive feedback sessions.
You’ll get a relatively concise breakdown of the top three or four issues on the mind of ICANN participants in that way, but probably not a great deal of insight into the board’s thought process.
The public forum on Thursday is also a highlight. Anyone can take to the mic to say or ask anything (relevant) they please. Comments and questions can also be submitted remotely.
For ICANN 50 the forum has actually been shortened to two hours to accommodate discussions of the IANA process, causing some in the community to question whether ICANN is trying to stifle the crazy.

US House passes anti-ICANN bill

The US House of Representatives has passed the DOTCOM Act, which would prevent the Department of Commerce from walking away from its oversight of the DNS root zone.
The bill was approved as an amendment to a defense authorization act, with a 245-177 vote that reportedly saw 17 Democrats vote in line with their Republican opponents.
The DOTCOM Act has nothing whatsoever to do with .com. Rather, it’s a response to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s plan to relinquish its role in root zone management.
The bill as passed (pdf) would prevent NTIA from agreeing to any multistakeholder community-created IANA transition proposal until the Government Accountability Office had issued a study on the proposal.
The GAO would have one year from the point ICANN submits the proposal to come up with this report.
That means that if ICANN and NTIA want to stick to their September 2015 target date for the transition, either the ICANN community would need to produce a proposal at unprecedented and unlikely speed or the GAO would need to take substantially less than a year to write its report.
I don’t think it’s an impossible target, but it’s certainly looking more likely that NTIA will have to exercise one of the two-year automatic renewal options in the current IANA contract.
That’s all assuming that a matching bill passes through the Democrat-controlled Senate and then receives a presidential signature, of course, which is not a certainty.
Assuming a bloc vote by the 47 Republican Senators, only four Democrats (or independents) would need to switch sides in order for the DOTCOM Act to become, barring an unlikely presidential veto, law.
To the best of my knowledge there is not currently a matching bill in the Senate.