'Core Internet institutions' snub US government

The US may just have lost that much more control over the way the Internet is governed.

Ever since its creation, the core functionality of the Internet has more or less been under the direct supervision of the US, by way of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) Functions Contract. But now, after an Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) summit meeting in Montevideo, Uruguay, many of the major bodies responsible for Internet governance are calling for "accelerating the globalization of ICANN and IANA functions, towards an environment in which all stakeholders, including all governments, participate on an equal footing." Milton Mueller, writing for the Internet Governance Project, reported on this meeting with no small amount of sangfroid, describing the released statement as "an explicit rejection of the US Commerce Department’s unilateral oversight of ICANN.” Mueller attributed this movement away from the US' default oversight to backlash from "the Snowden revelations about NSA spying on the global Internet," and noted that "You know you’ve made a big mistake, a life-changing mistake, when even your own children abandon you en masse."