The Internet Being Handed Off

I've seen many posts expressing concern that the United States is handing off the internet to foreign entities. First off, the internet is already international. It isn't owned by any one country. What really is happening is that ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is being privatized instead of continuing to be under the stewardship of the U.S. Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). It is already a privately owned nonprofit organization, incorporated in 1998. While that seems like just yesterday for some of us, it's eons in terms of changes in the internet.

 ICANN performs the actual technical maintenance work of the central Internet address pools and DNS Root registries pursuant to the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) function contract. In other words, they handle the registry of domain names (DNS) and IP (Internet Protocol) addresses. ICANN is very significant in how we as users on the internet access websites, email, and other information that most internet users don't even see.

The details for privatizing ICANN were ironed out in 2014, but the plan of ICANN from its inception was for United States control of it to be temporary.

As a conservative, I see decreasing government control of ICANN to potentially be a good thing. Of course only time will tell, but it's not handing the internet over to political adversaries. We most likely will not see any major changes in how we use the internet. It may even increase our capabilities to use the internet. Privatizing the phone systems in the United States decreased user cost and opened up possibilities that no one dreamed of when your only option was a black phone connected by cable to the wall and used by turning a dial. Privatizing the organization that oversees the domain naming and internet protocols will likely open the internet up even more than what we've seen already.

These are exciting times to someone who enjoys using technology.