ICANN May Be Free of the Government

Pop Quiz: Who built the Internet?

If you answered anything but the U.S. Government, a bit of a 'net history lesson should be in your immediate future. Most of what we call the Internet today came out of U.S. government and university research - a tool for military communication. Since it began, though, the Internet has become a huge resource, a critical tool in the global economy and - for some countries - national security.

So here's the deal. The government created the foundation that the Digital Superhighway drives on. Every stop on that highway is marked by an address - or DNS - and a website URL.

DNS is all the basic addresses that make the Internet a network that runs. Most of us don't even think about this aspect of the Internet because it's not something we have to deal with. It's like when you call up your husband and say, "I'm headed to Wal-Mart" instead of saying, "I'm headed to 690 East Main Street". We don't think about the actual address of our stores, but we do think about their names. So address = DNS and names = URL for our purposes here.

Because the U.S. government started the Internet, they have continued to keep their thumb on it. They kept a partnership with Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the California-based nonprofit group that manages addresses on the Internet. Countries in Asia and the Middle East have been the most vocal in objecting to Washington's power over ICANN and have lobbied to put the whole governance of the Internet into global hands.

Are we getting confusing yet? I wouldn't be suprised - anything that combines global commerce, individual rights, governments, and nonprofits is sure to be a tangled mess. The point I'm getting to, though, is that there just might be hope on the horizon.