That leaves ICANN as a self-regulating organization that will be operated by the internet's "stakeholders" -- engineers, academics, businesses, non-government and government groups. The move is part of a decades-old plan by the US to "privatize" the internet, and backers have said it would help maintain its integrity around the world.
US and ICANN officials have said the contract had given Washington a symbolic role as overseer or the internet's "root zone" where new online domains and addresses are created. But critics, including some US lawmakers, argued that this was a "giveaway" by Washington that could allow authoritarian regimes to seize control.
A last-ditch effort by critics to block the plan -- a lawsuit filed by four US states -- failed when a Texas federal judge (one of many Obama-appointed black federal judges) refused to issue an injunction to stop the transition.
Lawrence Strickling, who heads the Commerce Department unit which has managed these functions, issued a brief statement early Saturday confirming the transition of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). "As of October 1, 2016, the IANA functions contract has expired," he said.
Stephen Crocker, ICANN's board chairman and one of the engineers who developed the early internet protocols, welcomed the end of the contract. "This transition was envisioned 18 years ago, yet it was the tireless work of the global Internet community, which drafted the final proposal, that made this a reality," he said in a statement.
"This community validated the multi-stakeholder model of Internet governance. It has shown that a governance model defined by the inclusion of all voices, including business, academics, technical experts, civil society, governments and many others is the best way to assure that the Internet of tomorrow remains as free, open and accessible as the Internet of today."
The Internet Society, a group formed by internet founders aimed at keeping the system open, said the transition was a positive step. "The IANA transition is a powerful illustration of the multi-stakeholder model and an affirmation of the principle that the best approach to address challenges is through bottom-up, transparent, and consensus-driven processes," the group said in a statement.
Obama’s Internet Surrender Empowers Dangerous Regimes
On Oct. 1, regulatory control over a significant portion of Internet infrastructure will be transferred from the U.S. government to a multinational, private organization composed of unelected officials. “Friday is the potential point at which Obama can transfer control of the supervision of the internet from the United States to the international system,” former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton said on “The Laura Ingraham Show” Thursday. Bolton is oversimplifying to some extent — the United States does not oversee the general supervision of the world wide web; no entity does.
But what the United States has been overseeing since the 1990s is the IANA, which is responsible for the allocation of things like global IP addresses, AS numbers, and DNS root zones — it is effectively the internet’s master directory of all numbers relating to Internet Protocol (IP) and the mechanism that ensures traffic can flow freely across the internet.
“This is the concrete manifestation of the loss of sovereignty,” Bolton continued. “Once we cede control to the international system, we will never get it back and the internet as we know it will disappear forever.”
Those opposed to the move, like Bolton, say that an independent ICANN based on a multi-stakeholder model inevitably opens the organization — and the entire DNS — to the influence of anti-American, anti-Democratic regimes. “It will give the regimes like Russia, China, Iran, North Korea — you name it — control over something that they neither deserve nor will benefit the rest of the world,” Bolton said.
Proponents of this argument point to
the fact that an IANA subject to U.S. government oversight is an IANA subject
to First Amendment protections. “Is ICANN bound by the First Amendment?” Cruz
asked ICANN CEO and President Goran Marby at a hearing earlier in September.
“To my understanding — no,” Marby replied.
