image credit: salon.com
Internet
management EXPIRED
Bad
news. I might have thought it would be a banner headline, but if you scrolled
down, Drudge linked to this Yahoo.com report:
The US government on Saturday
ended its formal oversight role over the internet, handing over management of
the online address system to a global non-profit entity.
The US Commerce Department
announced that its contract had expired with the Internet Corporation for
Assigned Names and Numbers, which manages the internet's so-called "root
zone."
That leaves ICANN as a
self-regulating organization that will be operated by the internet's
"stakeholders" -- engineers, academics, businesses, non-government
and government groups.
The move is part of a
decades-old plan by the US to "privatize" the internet, and backers
have said it would help maintain its integrity around the world.
US and ICANN officials have
said the contract had given Washington a symbolic role as overseer or the internet's
"root zone" where new online domains and addresses are created.
But critics, including some US
lawmakers, argued that this was a "giveaway" by Washington that could
allow authoritarian regimes to seize control.
A last-ditch effort by critics
to block the plan -- a lawsuit filed by four US states -- failed when a Texas
federal judge refused to issue an injunction to stop the transition.
Read
the rest here. No good can come of this.
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