Obama administration joins critics of U.S. nonprofit group that oversees Internet

The California nonprofit organization that operates the Internet's levers has always been a target for such global heavies as Russia and China that prefer the United Nations to be in charge of the Web. But these days, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is fending off attacks from a seemingly unlikely source: the Obama administration.

Concerned about the growing movement to cede oversight to the UN, the U.S. government, which helped create ICANN in 1998, has been reprimanding the nonprofit group to give foreign nations more say over the Web's operations. The battle has come at a sensitive time for ICANN, which this month is meeting with foreign governments as it pulls off the biggest expansion ever of Web suffixes - including .gay, .muslim and .nazi. Also this fall, the nonprofit organization is seeking to hold on to its federal contract to oversee the Web's master database of addresses - a sweeping power that governments fear could be used to shut down foreign domains that the United States finds unsavory.