Dear Members of the ASO Address Council (ASO AC) –
The NRO EC has considered the AFRINIC situation at length and now seeks the ASO AC’s assistance with two tasks that should help strengthen the RIR system.
1. ICP-2 Implementation Procedures
Internet Coordination Policy 2 (ICP-2) provides clear requirements for the accreditation of new RIRs, and these requirements are also applicable to the maintenance of that accreditation. However, ICP-2 lacks corresponding procedures for the validation of initial or ongoing compliance, for review of compliance, or for specific outcomes of a review process.
The NRO believes that these procedures are important to the transparent operation of the overall Internet number registry system, and is therefore initiating a development process, in consultation with the Internet numbers community and ICANN. In particular, the NRO will prepare a draft of procedures, and will ask the ASO AC to review that draft, in consultation with regional communities. Upon completion of the review, the ASO AC may recommend final procedures to the NRO EC for their finalization and adoption, in consultation with ICANN (and possibly the wider ICANN community).
2. Strengthening ICP-2
The NRO EC also believes that provisions of ICP-2 require strengthening in order to better represent the accountability of the RIR system to the Internet community. To this end, the NRO EC asks that the ASO AC establish and manage a process to update ICP-2 in the 2024 / 2025 timeframe.
The update process should include developing an initial draft of the updated ICP-2 proposal, and a consultative process by which the the update can be reviewed in each of the RIR communities. The ASO AC would incorporate feedback from these consultations to produce a cohesive consensus update to ICP-2 for recommendation to the NRO EC for their finalization and adoption, in consultation with ICANN (and possibly the wider ICANN community).
We hope the above requests are clear and would welcome any questions and/or would be happy to review with the ASO AC at a future meeting if desired.
Thank you, /John
John Curran 2023 Chair Number Resource Organization on behalf of the NRO EC