It actually will be Obama who decides whether to end US government oversight of the internet The decision whether to end US government oversight of the internet will likely come down to a personal decision by President Obama on Thursday. In an extraordinary series of arguments and counter-arguments this past week, a last-minute push by Republicans looks likely to succeed in placing a funding freeze on the Department …
I find the arguments that it would be a good thing to see how well the very latest round of accountability reforms work before handing it over to be very persuasive. Previous rounds of reform have proven to be utterly ineffective, why should we believe that these will actually work?
And, in any case, what's the rush? Why is this happening at all? What problem is ending the DoC contract trying to solve? To my knowledge, the DoC/US Govt. in general, has done precisely nothing to interfere with ICANN/IANAs operations.
There have been some in government calling for it though - like the ones who wanted to pull Iran's country code and hand it over to people suing them.
It is only a matter of time before dimwittery wins out and something stupid like that is seriously considered or even happens.
Nonetheless, ICANN needs much stronger controls in place before it should become independent of the US. At least under the US there's some sort of check on their more extreme behavior, who knows what sort of crackpot moneymaking schemes they'll come up with for more top level domains, selling off single letter domains, probably lots of stuff I never even considered is being planned in secret for when they win their freedom.
The problem that I see is that ICANN has no transparency or accountability at all. They seem very secretive, and often do things that make one question their competency. All this makes me want to not trust them with full control of the root domain, even if it does put me on the same side of the question as idiots spouting nonsense about Iran taking over the Internet.
Also, as another poster pointed out, the fact that outfits like Apple, Google and Farcebook are in favor of the takeover should give one pause. Perhaps they have pre-bribed ICANN to do their bidding? I smell something fishy here.
a) no matter how much you might disagree with his conservative views, nobody seriously argues that Ted Cruz is not a deadly serious politician.
b) On this issue, whether you agree with it or not, you have to admit that it deserves debate, and frankly, this was flying well under the radar outside of techieland until Cruz got involved.
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