Ted Cruz is wrong about how free speech is censored on the Internet

[Commentary] Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) wants to engineer a United States takeover of a key Internet organization, ICANN, in the name of protecting freedom of expression. Cruz’s proposal is one of the key sticking points in finalizing the government spending bill necessary to avert a government shutdown on Sept. 30. But the misguided call for the United States to exert unilateral control over ICANN does nothing to advance free speech because ICANN, in fact, has no power whatsoever over individual speech online. ICANN — the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers — supervises domain names on the Internet. The actual flow of traffic, and therefore speech, is up to individual network and platform operators. We hope Congress will avoid the risk of breaking apart the extraordinary technical platform that connects the whole world.

[Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989, is professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and founding director of the World Wide Web Foundation. Weitzner is director of the MIT Internet Policy Research Initiative and was deputy chief technology officer in the White House from 2011-2012.]