Is Obama About To Cede Control of the Internet to Foreign Governments? Here's Everything You Need To Knowhttp://www.dailywire.com/news/8483/obama-about-take-over-internet-heres-everything-aaron-bandler#President Barack Obama's Commerce Department has agreed to shift the country's Internet domain system over to a nonprofit organization called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) starting October 1. Defenders of the move argue that it's a necessary symbolic move, while others argue (correctly) that it would give control to foreign governments like Russia and China which frown upon free speech. Here's everything you need to know about it.
What exactly is ICANN? According to The Atlantic and The Washington Examiner, ICANN is a "multistakeholder" organization featuring countries like China and Russia. ICANN "helps assign domain names and top-level domains"?such as ".com" and ".org"?and is working toward adding even more domain names. Up until October 1, the U.S. had control over ICANN to ensure that the organization would not fall under international control and allow authoritarian regimes to engage in censorship. That all changes when the U.S. government's contract with ICANN expires.
The lobbying for the end of U.S. control of the Internet intensified due to Edward Snowden. After Snowden's leaks of the National Security Agency's government surveillance emerged, ICANN and other foreign governments used the U.S.'s use of surveillance in other countries as reason to end U.S. control of Internet governance.
Net neutrality regulations also paved the way for the ceding of U.S. Internet control. As Arnold Ahlert explains in FrontPageMag, one of the main reasons the U.S. has argued to keep the Internet out of the hands of the United Nations's International Telecommunications Unit (ITU) is that the Internet does not classify as a "telecommunication service" and is therefore not in the ITU's purview. However, the net neutrality regulations specifically designate the Internet as a telecommunication service, hamstringing the country in arguing for the Internet to remain out of the ITU's control.