Donald Trump Doubles Down on Internet Ignorance

[Commentary] Donald Trump wants to make the Internet great again. Problem is, the GOP nominee doesn’t know enough about the Internet to understand what, if anything, that means.

On Sept 21, Trump’s campaign came out against an Obama Administration plan to relinquish US control of one important aspect of the Internet: the supervision of domain names. The plan is to remove the US government control of that function and transfer it more fully to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, a global body. Trump’s sometime-nemesis Sen Ted Cruz (R-TX) is threatening to hold the government-spending bill hostage unless Congress rejects President Barack Obama’s plan. Sen Cruz wrongly states that the ICANN transition would “empower countries like Russia, China and Iran to be able to censor speech on the Internet, your speech." On this Trump agrees. “The Republicans in Congress are admirably leading a fight to save the Internet this week, and need all the help the American people can give them to be successful,” a Trump campaign spokesman said in a statement. “Congress needs to act, or Internet freedom will be lost for good, since there will be no way to make it great again once it is lost.”

But Trump and Sen Cruz are wrong. And it’s Trump who has repeatedly threatened to shut down the Internet to keep Americans safe from terrorists. He’s offered few specifics about how this might be achieved.

[Tim Karr is the senior director of strategy for Free Press]