The US government will renounce the control of DNS, leaving that entire task in the hands of a private organization, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) from 1st of October, 2016. The decision was announced by the National Telecommunications & Information Administration (NTIA) on Tuesday (16/08). ICANN, established in 1998, is already responsible for DNS management through a contract with the US Department of Commerce. But the US government – which funded largely the early days of the Internet, originally a military project – kept its supervisory power. NTIA chief Lawrence Strickland said that “The IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) stewardship transition represents the final step in the US government’s long-standing commitment, supported by three Administrations, to privatize the Internet’s domain name system”. NTIA chief Lawrence Strickland also added that “For the last 18 years, the United States has been working to establish a stable and secure multi-stakeholder model of Internet governance that ensures that the private sector, not governments, take the lead in setting the future direction of the Internet’s domain name system”. Although, in practice, the role played by the US have been minimal, many foreign governments claimed that the World Wide Web would never truly international if the US supervisory power was maintained. There was an attempt to shift responsibility ICANN to an intergovernmental body such as the International Telecommunication Union, the UN. But businesses and civil and academic societies were against, fearing that UN involvement could threaten the freedom that characterizes the internet. However, the companies like Facebook, Google, and Microsoft support the decision of the American government, some politicians of the Republican Party oppose the end of US supervision. Senators like Ted Cruz, as well as Mike Lee, and Rep. Sean Duffy states that the power of other governments will increase significantly and that without the last word of the United States, the internet will be less free.
