As ICANN Gains Full Oversight Of Domain Name System, Some Wonder If It Means the US Has Given Away The Internet (bbc.com)

The U.S. has given up its remaining control over the Internet. The formal handover, which took effect on Saturday, followed a last-ditch attempt by a group of Republicans to block the move. They had argued that the US concession would open the door for authoritarian governments get control of the network of networks, leading to greater censorship. From a BBC report:A judge in Texas has put the kibosh on a last-minute legal attempt to block the controversial decision for the US to give up control of one of the key systems that powers the internet. It's a move being breathlessly described by some as the US "giving up the internet" to the likes of China, Russia and the Middle East. For starters, while they can take the credit for inventing the underlying technology, the US never "had the internet" to begin with. Nobody did. It's a, duh, network. Decentralised. That's what makes it so powerful. But there are bits of internet infrastructure that some people and governments do have control over, and that's what this row is all about. One of them is the DNS - Domain Name System. This is the system for looking after web addresses. Thanks to the DNS, when you type bbc.com, you're taken to the correct servers for the BBC website. It saves you the grief of having to remember a string of numbers. That pairing of names and numbers is kept in one great big master file, the land registry of the web. The only organisation that can make changes is Icann, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. As of Saturday 1 October 2016, Icann will no longer be under US government oversight.

Comments

The US never "owned" the Internet.

[gweihir]

The only thing critical contributed by the US was TCP/IP. Sure, for a time the US was custodian of the top-level part of the DNS system, but if they had misbehaved too badly, it would just have been taken away from them forcefully. That would have been rather easy, as the majority of the top-level DNS servers are not located in the US anyways. One level below, the US was never relevant except for some domains. Country-specific domains were always under control of that country. Even .com and the like would have been removed from US control if abused too badly.

So, no, nothing was really given away, because the US never had real power over the Internet.

Re:Different ideas, indeed

[fyngyrz]

The only change is what court ICANN answers to.

Yes, that's precisely what I was saying. It's a huge change, one that could bring additional restrictions on speech.

Thanks for putting such a fine point on it. :)

Re:It's the reporting

[Dutch Gun]

I had to explain the same thing to my mom, who was concerned about how we were "handing over control of the internet". I told her that this was sort of like handing control over the entity that assigns unique telephone numbers to people, but it doesn't control the phone lines themselves.

Besides which, the internet is somewhat resistant to change of *any* sort, as evidenced by the extremely slow adoption of things like IPv6 and DNSSEC, both of which would be very useful, but simple mass inertial keeps adoption rates down. So, any radical changes by these bodies would likely just be ignored not only for ideological reasons, but for practical ones as well.