U.S. to Hand over Control of Internet Naming System to Private Corporation
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The U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) will cede control of the Internet’s Domain Naming System (DNS) on October 1. The DNS is a critical component of the Internet’s governance, assigning simple web addresses such as “idropnews.com” to their affiliated IP addresses. Without it, users would have to type unwieldy IP addresses into their web browsers to find websites.
This power will soon be handed over to ICANN — the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers– a private “multi-stakeholder” nonprofit corporation, according to BBC News. It’s helpful to note that while the NTIA has retained ultimate authority over the naming system through a 1998 contract with ICANN, this power has remained largely symbolic and has rarely been exercised. And it is this contract that the US government has chosen not to renew, relinquishing its final say over the DNS. Because ICANN has already been handling the day to day operations of the DNS since 1998, billions of internet users will remain unaffected by the transition, a report by Quartz says.
Why now? Largely for diplomatic reasons. Other countries, such as China and Russia have been clamoring for the U.S. government to give up its domain name authority and transfer it to the UN for years, BBC News reports. Fearing that passing this authority to the UN would open the Internet to interference by repressive regimes, the Obama administration has opted to shift control to ICANN, whose stakeholders include governments, companies, and other entities. Obama’s argument is that this decision places DNS in the control of a suitably global and diverse group of vested interests rather than governments.
Of course, this move has been fiercely criticized by Republicans who argue that it opens the Internet to interference and could endanger national security, The Wall Street Journal reports. The Obama administration and other leaders of the tech community argue that this is necessary for international diplomacy and that it would have no practical effect on users.
