The United States has no intention of giving up control of the Internet's Domain Nam

[yanni]

<<...That's the bottom line in an interesting article posted by Monika Ermert at the Intellectual Property Watch website today. Ermert wrote "In a letter to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the Department of Commerce National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) clearly knocked down plans presented by the ICANN President’s Strategy Committee at the organisation’s June meeting in Paris for a full privatisation of ICANN." ...>>

From DnJournal The Lowdown

[Rubber Duck]

Yes, and what what a lot of deluded horse-shit that is.

The US has sovereignty over the US. That is about it.

The vast majority of the Internet Infrastructure is actually outside the US and could be soon rigged to run independently if the Yanks decide to go it alone.

It is all about critical mass and who is essential to the operations. If an independent ICANN operating from Geneva told Bush to go hang, frankly there is stuff all he could do about it whether he controlled IANA or not. The power behind the Internet really is still Verisign. They control a very substantial part of the hardware and the only gTLDs that really matter in terms of strategic importance.

ICANN and Verisign between them could implement an alternate root in days if they had to. ICANN cannot do anything without Verisign, but they certainly are not hostage to Washington. Everyone wants a smooth transition to a global internet but US dictating what actually can and cannot be put into the Root simply is not acceptable and just not an option, and frankly it doesn't matter who has got what on which bits of paper.