Originally posted by: JEDIYoda
According to this article it was Pentagon as a Pentagon Funded project....
With all respect to the inventors, the development of the Internet has turned into an international effort. The World Wide Web was developed at CERN, which in the meantime has 20 European member states.
Ok some comments on the status quo... ICANN is a private organisation but the US can intervene anytime if they want. Clinton really made fools out of the European negotiators when the proposed "privatised" solution turned out to be not that private at all :laugh:
In the past the Commerce Department let ICANN shut down the top level domains and IP address spaces of Afghanistan and Iraq. So it's not like the US had never used their power over the Internet.
The US has some laws like the DMCA with no match in other countries and like elsewhere they want the world to adapt their own copyright law (some may remember the law firm who sent a letter to a
Swedish P2P-Site, taking for granted they're affected by the DMCA... a rather harmless but maybe not the last incident). The US may be tempted to pull the plug to "rogue" websites/hosters/nations with different laws in the future.
But if not ICANN, who else should or wants to manage the Internet? Interested people (and aren't we all Internet junkies? ) can read some info about the competitors and the weakness of this bodies against lobbying groups
here (I recommend at least the first 3 pages).
It's a tricky question with a wayyy too privileged US on one end (often working together with the EU, but this two bullies don't let the others join the club). On the other end are autoritharian regimes like China and some African nations whose delegations don't even get the technical principles of the Internet* but complain about "Internet imperialism".
I don't know a good solution but I think that we could spread the risk of Internet abuse a bit if we separate the IP and the DNS distribution which at the moment both are in ICANN's hands.
(*An assistant on my university who was an observer for an NGO at various Internet conferences told me this)