ALG Criticizes NTIA for 'Sitting on' FOIA'd IANA Transition Docs
Americans for Limited Government criticized NTIA Thursday for “sitting on” the “most responsive documents” in the conservative group’s Freedom of Information Act request on analyses of the legal and policy justifications for the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority transition until after…
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the switchover’s completion. NTIA released a batch of documents on the IANA oversight handoff to ALG Jan. 26, almost four months after the transition’s Oct. 1 completion (see 1609300065 and 1610030042). ALG claimed the only NTIA documents on legal justification for the handoff were created March 25, 2014 -- 11 days after then-Administrator Larry Strickling announced the transition (see report in the March 17, 2014, issue) and two days after the Wall Street Journal's Gordon Crovitz raised concerns about the legal justification for the transition. “If these documents had been made available in a timely manner, even in the redacted form we now see, [ALG] and others would have had legal recourse to appeal the privileged determination that they were exempt documents,” said ALG President Rick Manning in a news release. “It took almost 3 years to produce the most responsive documents in our FOIA and only now is the agency claiming its privileged exemptions when it is too late to appeal except for the historical record.” The fact “that whatever legal justification existed for the Internet giveaway was sat upon until long after the transition was over” denied critics of the switchover “a critical indication about whether any legal analysis was performed prior to the transition's announcement,” Manning said. NTIA didn’t comment.