U.S. Government Loosens Grip on Internet

After first incubating it and then overseeing it for a number of decades, the government of the U.S. announced on Friday to would release the final elements of control it had on the Internet.

The U.S. Commerce Department originally handled the core parts of Internet, but has gradually pulled back from those important duties, through a contract that is in place with a nonprofit organization named Internet Corporation for Assigned Numbers and Names or ICANN.

On Friday, in a prepared statement, the Commerce Department requested ICANN to convene the parties involved to formalize an approach that is multistakeholder for governance of the Internet.

The basics of that work is involved in running the DNS or Domain Name System of the Internet, which translates Internet Protocol numeric addresses into the more human readable convenient domain names such as xyz.com. In addition, manage the root servers holding those records of DNS for use by other machines. As well as, to oversee the ongoing explosive growth of the new top-level domain names like .cleaning, .social and .berlin.

This has been a wait of a long time, as the process of privatization started in 1997 under then-President Bill Clinton. In an interview two months ago, Fadi Chehade, the CEO of ICANN said the oversight by the U.S. is no longer sustainable.

ICANN has grown and matured, the Department of Commerce committed to handing over the responsibility at a certain point and the recent revelations over the government’s surveillance from the Edward Snowden leaks increased the necessity to hand over control now, said Chehade.

Chehade added that the revelations by Snowden hastened the dialog for a hand over. Many companies that do business internationally were worried due to a lack of a trust factor over the Internet.

Working closer to the hand over, ICANN already set up a meeting on the governance of the Internet for April 23-24 in Brazil. The DOC generally is together with ICANN on using the term multistakeholder.

The stakeholders included the Internet Architecture Board, the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Regional Internet Registries and the Internet Society.

The Registries oversees the IP address distribution to those that register new domain names.

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Roxanne Briean

I am a geek, a gamer and a writer. I have always been fascinated with the online community. At the moment I work as a full-time writer and study interior design. When I'm not scouring the net in search of interesting new gadgets and software I spend my time in MOBAs or drawing.