Jerry Brito on the Final Step in Privatizing the Internet

Last
month, the Obama Administration announced that it would relinquish
the last bit of formal control the U.S. government exercises over
the Internet—control over the system that maps domain names to
Internet addresses. A late-Friday announcement hinted at how
controversial the Administration expected the announcement to be,
and they weren’t wrong. The plan has been pounded by criticism for
weeks, culminating in a House hearing last Wednesday at which
Congress hinted it might try to block the move.

But, as Jerry Brito points out, the likely candidate to get full
control over the domain name system is the Internet Corporation for
Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a non-profit created by the
U.S. government in 1998 that today already manages the system under
contract with the U.S. Indeed, the Administration’s announcement is
actually the culmination of a decades-long process of
privatization.

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