Sen Ted Cruz is Trying to Sabotage the Internet’s Governance Transition

The US government’s plan to relinquish stewardship of key Internet governance functions is under attack from Republicans who are using blatant falsehoods and fear-mongering to obstruct the historic transfer, according to Internet policy experts. Led by Sen Ted Cruz (R-TX), Republicans are working to sabotage the US government’s long-standing plan to transfer oversight of core Internet technical functions, including management of the Domain Name System (DNS), to a nonprofit group of global stakeholders. Sen Cruz and his GOP allies claim that the Oct 1 transfer would undermine global Internet freedom, imperil US national security, and violate federal law—and they’ve pledged to use the federal budget process to block the move. Sen Cruz has even gone so far as to threaten federal employees working on the transition with prosecution and imprisonment. “The Obama administration's proposal to give away control of the Internet poses a significant threat to our freedom,” Sen Cruz said, warning darkly of “the significant, irreparable damage this proposed Internet giveaway could wreak not only on our nation but on free speech across the world.”

Internet policy experts say Sen Cruz’s attempt to delay the transition, which is largely clerical in nature and unlikely to even be noticed by the world’s 3.2 billion internet users, poses serious risks to global Internet governance and could embolden repressive regimes around the world to undermine Internet freedom and seek greater government-led or intergovernmental control of the Internet. "There’s no legitimate way for him to get to that conclusion,” Milton Mueller, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Public Policy and a leading authority on global internet governance, told PolitiFact, which rated Sen Cruz’s claims as FALSE. “What he’s doing is fear-mongering and trying to create a bogeyman, which is the United Nations.”