Reporting and Statistics
IANA regularly undertakes projects to evolve the service it provides to the Internet community. Here we summarise key projects ongoing within IANA.
IANA has conducted public consultations on its procedures for technical testing of root zone changes (comments), processing changes to root zone glue that impacts multiple entities (comments), implementing process alterations including an emergency backout procedure for evaluation IDN TLDs (comments) and handling of country-codes that have been retired from the ISO 3166-1 standard (comments). These comments are being reviewed with an anticipation that it will filter into future ICANN policy work, as well as root zone automation processes being developed.
IANA is implementing internal systems and processes in order to allow us to sign the .ARPA zone with DNSSEC. It is our expectation that this will be an important project to help prepare for implementation of DNSSEC in the DNS Root once policy has been developed on that area.
IANA is performing initial investigations and consultations on RPKI work, which involves signing IP address assignments using security certificates. This work is being actively developed by the Regional Internet Registries.
One of IANA's key projects is to move processing of IANA root zone management requests from a predominantly manual system into a new online system that will sherpherd a request through its various processing stages. Key benefits of this will be greater transparency on the status of requests to their requestors, plus optimisation of some tasks that are currently labour intensive. This work is being done with close cooperation of the community of top-level domain managers.
IANA intends to convert the internal formatting of all protocol registries it maintains to XML. This will allow easy exporting of these registries to the legacy text format, but also to other new formats that can be more easily machine read. Other possible features include syndication, RSS feeds of updates and so forth. The project is currently in a pilot, and consultations will be held with the IETF community before full implementation. IANA is also using an intermediary XML format internally for some of its other registries (such as the root zone database).
IANA has been asked by the ICANN President's Advisory Committee on IDNs to introduce additional functionality to the IDN Practices Repository. The first set of functionality will be introduced in the revised IANA web site, with additional functionality being developed later in 2007.
After an almost complete rewrite of the IANA website was published for community review in June 2007, IANA staff will now focus on implementing new documentation and features to the web site in order to provide better service to the community. The new web site has been designed to be much more accessible, with a logical structure that makes its contents much easier to discover.