US gives up its remaining control over the Internet to ICANN

Forty seven years after the first message was sent over the forerunner to today’s pervasive global network, the US has given up its remaining control over the internet. The formal handover, which took effect on Oct 1, followed a last-ditch attempt by a group of Republicans to block the move. They had argued that the US concession would open the door for authoritarian governments to get control of the network of networks, leading to greater censorship. However, supporters of the handover plan maintained that it was the only way to prevent a greater threat to the internet, since foreign governments who resented the US control would end up walling off their own national networks, eventually Balkanising the global system.

On Sept 30, a judge in Texas refused to grant an injunction requested by four Republican state attorneys-general to bar the move. That followed the end of an attempted Congressional rebellion, led by Sen Ted Cruz (R-TX). The last vestige of US control lay in its power over the internet’s naming and addressing system. Though largely technical in nature, this theoretically gave Washington the power to make entire countries “go dark” on the internet by removing them from the central naming system — though such a drastic action was considered self-defeating since it would have led to the immediate fragmentation of the internet. The US concession has officially launched an experiment in global governance designed to handle borderless digital communications. Control over addressing and naming on Oct 1 passed to Icann, an international body that had already been handling the system under a contract from Washington, but now operates independently.