The United States and the United Nations are currently debating who should control the internet. The United States has rejected calls that it, as the primary creator of the internet, should give up control to a U.N. body whose purpose is to ensure fair distribution of internet addresses. ICAAN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) is the U.S.-based private corporation that currently controls the distribution of DNS addresses. DNS addresses are domain names, such as www.plymouth.edu. They also create new internet suffixes, such as: .edu, .org, .museum, and .biz. This is in order to expand the internet highway. Although ICAAN’s website (http://www.icann.org) says it is an internationally organized corporation, many disagree with it answering only to the United States. Among these critics are developing nations, who only have a limited number of domain names to connect to. According to a September 30 CNN report on the issue, the United States further hardened its stance by rejecting a resolution crafted Wednesday by the European Union that seemed to support taking control of the internet from ICAAN and assigning it to another intergovernmental group. EU spokesman Martin Selmayr stated, “We are looking for a new cooperation model, a model that allows Internet governance and the laying down of public policy principles in coordination by all countries which are interested in the governance of the Internet because the Internet is a global resource.” And despite the United State’s rejection, he insisted, “That doesn’t mean there won’t be a result in the end, we are very close with the United States on a number of important principles. It is not for governments to control the Internet. We need more private sector involvement and the current working methods of ICAAN are very efficient.”The kind of power ICAAN controls is a little alarming, the CNN report says, “ICANN now controls the Internet’s master directories, which tell Web browsers and e-mail programs how to direct traffic. Net surfers worldwide use them daily but policy decisions could, at a stroke, make all Web sites ending in a specific suffix essentially unreachable.”For net surfers, it means that there is a possibility tomorrow – after a random policy shift — .com, or .edu addresses may be shut down for good.
(All information compiled from CNN.com and the ICAAN website, http://www.icann.org/).