The United States has transferred control of the domains to the world community: what does it mean

/ photo by Veni CC

On October 1, the contract between ICANN and the US government expired . As a result, ICANN, which oversees the management of a key Internet infrastructure, has gained complete control over the management of the Internet’s address space.
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ICANN controlled the Internet address space through a specially created structure called IANA (“Internet Address Space Administration”), which was subordinate to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). From October 1, it will be replaced by the internal structure of ICANN - the non-profit public interest corporation (PTI).

The new structure will include representatives from all countries that are members of the ICANN government committee, as well as Internet industry workers and Internet users.

A bit of history

ICANN was founded in 1998, and then it was planned that the organization’s contract with NTIA would last one or two years, and the organization itself would become fully independent in 2000. However, subsequently, the importance of the Internet for the United States increased significantly, and the transfer of control no longer fit into the plans of the state.

Representatives of various countries, the European Union and the UN have periodically declared the need to transfer control over the management of domain zones to the world community. However, no active movements in this direction were undertaken until the expositions of Edward Snowden were published.

In September 2013, several months later, the publication of secret documents about surveillance by the US special services, technical organizations around the world intensified. At a meeting in Montevideo, a statement was made stating that “recent exposures of comprehensive surveillance” have undermined the trust of Internet users all over the world. The time has come to “globalize IANA”.

Brazilian President Dilma Russef, whose phone was also tapped by the US National Security Agency, agreed with ICAN CEO Fadi Chehade to hold a global meeting to work out new Internet governance rules. However, a few weeks before this event, it was announced that the US government was ready to give up control of ICANN and IANA. However, this required the fulfillment of a number of conditions.

In particular, the management model had to be developed by the global Internet community without the participation of other governments. At the same time, whether the new system meets all the requirements the US government had to decide. According to The Guardian, it took about two years to agree and develop a plan for the transfer of power (in the process, the contract with ICANN had to be extended once again), the discussions stretched to 32,000 emails and 600 meetings and meetings.

Not everyone in the US was pleased with the impending loss of “control over the Internet” - about the inadmissibility of such a development of events, said for example Republican Party Senator Ted Cruz, who said that “this will strengthen control over the network by foreign governments.”

Nevertheless, the decision to terminate the contract between ICANN and NTIA was made - thus, despite the difficult international situation, the agreements reached many years ago were implemented. Began a kind of "privatization" of the Internet by the world community.

Conclusion: only the first step

As in an interview with TJournal, Andrei Vorobyov, Director of the Coordination Center for the National Domain, stated that this is only the first step towards transferring control over the Internet to the world community. In particular, the expert noted that ICANN and the new structure, which will serve as the IANA, are still in US jurisdiction and created according to the laws of the state of California.

One thing remains - if there is any controversial situation, it will be a US court, not an international one.

What will the “decentralization” of Internet security in the field of security lead to? While it is difficult to make distant predictions, it is possible that increasing the independence of individual segments will mean that “saving the drowning is the work of the drowning”. In fact, even now, the security of many users depends heavily on how well their local ISP or individual mass web services manage the threats (and not some centralized authority to control the address space).

The development of this trend, obviously, will require more active use of new protective equipment on the side of competing service providers - including application level firewalls (WAF) and other advanced systems for detecting and repelling network attacks.