The United States government has announced that it will be giving up control of ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers).
ICANN is responsible for maintaining the domainnaming system for most of the internet. The body is a non-profit organisation responsible for maintaining the DNS (domain name system) root zone, which converts IP addresses into readable domain names (.com, .uk, .org and so on). Without the root zone, we’d all need to type long strings of numbers instead of website names to browse the internet.
In a momentous move, ICANN will cease to be controlled by the US Commerce Department, and organisations from across the world will be invited to run it or replace it with a more international body. It has yet to be decided who these organisations will be, although the UN has previously expressed an interest in running the root zone. The US government’s control of the root zone was often criticised by other countries, with Russia in particular pushing for it to come under international control. Pressure on ICANN to be internationalised increased in the wake of last year’s revelations about the NSA’s spying programmes, which damaged global trust in the US.
ICANN chairman Dr Stephen Crocker has downplayed the connection with the NSA scandal. “The US has long envisioned the day when stewardship over it [the root zone] would be transitioned to the global community… Now it’s up to our global stakeholder community to determine the best route to get us there.” While this move has been welcomed as making the internet more democratic, it could also give countries such as Russia and China – who heavily censor the internet – more influence in the choosing of domain names.
