US govt: Why we're OK with letting control of the internet slip into ICANN's hands

A highly anticipated report from the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) has given the green light to a shift of critical internet functions away from the government to domain overseer ICANN. The report [PDF], published Friday, provides a neutral and explanatory rundown of the decision by the Department of Commerce (DoC …

[RedneckMother]

ah... ah... ahh.. aEEEEAH!

Don't move - I'll bring you a towel.

[Anonymous Coward]

If it becomes an issue in the presidential election?

I'm sure if someone asks Trump, or hell any of the republican candidates, "is it a good idea that the US is giving up its control of the basic infrastructure of the internet?" they'd all say hell no and derail the whole thing. But that won't happen because they're too busy asking him questions about pressing issues like women he called ugly or conspiracy theorist fantasies like ISIS training camps inside the US.

I'm sure everyone else is happy with the idea of the US is loosening its grip on the internet, but handing control to ICANN is like Caesar handing over his throne to Stalin - most of the world outside of Rome might be happy Caesar is gone, until they realize he's been replaced by someone much worse.

[Ken Hagan]

"handing control to ICANN is like Caesar handing over his throne to Stalin"

There is no throne. The job is just keeping accounts and publishing standards. If ICANN were to try anything that actually stops foreign powers using the internet the way they want, those foreign powers would just tell ICANN where to stick it and do what they want anyway.

Or to use the traditional meme, the internet will just route around the damage.

[Dan 55]

I rather think it would fragment around national boundaries or trading areas. There's not much routing around that the average user can do.

[Gene Cash]

> The job is just keeping accounts and publishing standards

And that's not a huge deal by itself? Standards pretty much control what you do on the Internet, except for one-off little projects.

[Yes Me]

There is no throne?

"There is no throne. The job is just keeping accounts and publishing standards."

Factual correction: IANA and ICANN don't publish the standards. The IETF does that (along with the W3C etc.)

There *should* be no throne since IANA's job is basically clerical. Unfortunately though, ICANN's control over top level domain name policy has led - through greed - to something approaching regal behaviour.

[Mikel]

Translation

We are ready with Internet II, but somebody has to totally break Internet I before anyone will adopt it.

Besides, now that all the numbers are given out, the job of giving out the numbers is light work we can hand off to a probie.

[Pascal Monett]

So the Internet we know is doomed

The despicable manglement of ICANN is going get its grubby mitts on even more power when it cannot begin to be honest and transparent over what power it already has, great idea. I wonder if somebody isn't planning a career change to become an ICANN board member.

Oh well, seems that the future of the Internet will be regionalized, with countries managing their own Internet locally and plenty of issues with global communications. Then again, most people just want the thing to work, Big Money will want it to work, and the Cat Video cabal will positively shred all the drapes until it works, so maybe ICANN is not all that important anyways and we will still have access to our porn, uh, I mean news sites in this new Internet future.

[Rick Giles]

I for fucks sake

Time to step up the wireless mesh game and get all these fuckers out of my computer...

[Yes Me]

Re: I for fucks sake

@Rick Giles: You understand remarkably little about how the network works.