Four States Sue To Stop Internet Transition (thehill.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: Republican attorneys general in four states are filing a lawsuit to block the transfer of internet domain systems oversight from the U.S. to an international governing body. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt and Nevada Attorney General Paul Laxalt filed a lawsuit on Wednesday night to stop the White House's proposed transition of Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) functions. The state officials cite constitutional concerns in their suit against the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, U.S. government and the Department of Commerce. "The Obama Administration's decision violates the Property Clause of the U.S. Constitution by giving away government property without congressional authorization, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution by chilling speech, and the Administrative Procedure Act by acting beyond statutory authority," a statement released by Paxton's office reads. The attorneys generals claim that the U.S. government is ceding government property, pointing to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) review that "concluded that the transition does not involve a transfer of U.S. government property requiring Congressional approval." Paxton also echoed Texas Sen. Ted Cruz's warnings that the transition could harm free speech on the internet by giving Russia, China and Iran a voice on the international governing body that would oversee internet domain systems. "Trusting authoritarian regimes to ensure the continued freedom of the internet is lunacy," Paxton said. "The president does not have the authority to simply give away America's pioneering role in ensuring that the internet remains a place where free expression can flourish."

Comments

Goodbye, internet!

[mveloso]

The internet has flourished in many ways because it's been controlled by a liberal free market country like the United States. The US is all about free speech, free flow of ideas, etc - much more so than any other country on Earth.

For most of the countries on Earth the idea of free speech (as in "say anything you want") is an alien concept. Go ahead and say something bad about the Thai royals in Thailand. How about registering "putinsucks.ru"? Have fun in the gulag.

Hey, you're going to create a website that competes against the national phone company? Good luck with that, little toad. You're going to blog about how government ministers are idiots? Yeah, goodbye to that too.

It'll happen slowly, and accelerate over time, like everything.

It only takes one bureaucrat to decide that zombo.com is a threat to the world order, and bam it's gone.

If anything, the whole-hearted embrace of the "world internet" here shows that most slashdot readers never left their parents' basement.

Re:Obama....

[MerlynEmrys67]

The internet isn't being taken over. All ICANN controls is the DNS subsystem. If it becomes abused - the internet will treat it as a failure and route around the failure (ie. One of the alternate DNS systems will become popular instead). How simple is it to route around this failure... Run your DNS resolver and adjust the root hints file to point to somewhere other than the 13 DNS roots out there.

This is a non-event at worst