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In less than two months the U.S. Department of Commerce will hand over control of the Internet to international authorities:
The department will finalize the transition effective Oct. 1, Assistant Secretary Lawrence Strickling wrote on Tuesday, barring what he called "any significant impediment."
The move means the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, which is responsible for interpreting numerical addresses on the Web to a readable language, will move from U.S. control to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a multistakeholder body based in Los Angeles that includes countries such as China and Russia.
The move is not without its critics. In a letter to Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker penned last week and signed by Republican senators Ted Cruz of Texas, James Lankford of Oklahoma, and Mike Lee of Utah, they stated:
"The proposal will significantly increase the power of foreign governments over the Internet, expand ICANN's historical core mission by creating a gateway to content regulation, and embolden [its] leadership to act without any real accountability."
[...] "We have uncovered that ICANN's Beijing office is actually located within the same building as the Cyberspace Administration of China, which is the central agency within the Chinese government's censorship regime," the trio wrote, noting that some of the American companies involved with the transition process had already "shown a willingness to acquiesce" to Chinese demands that they assist with blocking content in the country.
(Score: 4, Informative) by NCommander on Thursday August 18 2016, @07:35PM
This is how it's done today. Every UN registered country can register a top level domain based on their ISO country code. Our link minifier, sylnt.us is in the US zone. blt.ly is in Libera's. For example, China only allows Chinese businesses to register a .cn name.
The problem comes from two points, management of generic TLDs (.com, .net, etc.) and the root servers themselves. For DNS to more or less work, you need to have all sites on the internet work from a common set of root servers (in DNS terms these are "."). Those root servers have records for each TLD which points to the organization that controls said root. So in the case of .com, the root servers have a pointer to Verisign's .com DNS servers, which then point to second level domains. Any country today could override their users DNS roots by rerouting the IP addresses that point to the root. To give you an idea of how easy this is, here at SN, we have a pseudo top-level domain (li694-22) for all our machines which resolve against a private root.
The issue at hand is who controls the root servers which has the list of pointers. Right now its IANA who operates it under lease/contract to the US government. There have been at times movements to try and create new DNS root zones not controlled by IANA but they never got very much traction. OpenNIC [wikipedia.org] is probably the largest of them, but it rather moot. Unless there becomes a pressing need to replace the roots, I doubt we'll ever see any alternate DNS roots gain a significant amount of marketshare. If you're really paranoid, there are decentralized roots if you don't want to work off a central authority. Namecoin is an implementation of decentralized DNS based on bitcoin, and Tor and I2P have pseudo *.onio and *.i2p roots which work against their protocols and not against the public DNS system.
Still always moving