. . .he could give Alaska back to Russia."

Jeez, do they have to give Obama any ideas?

He just might try that - then some folks could trash-talk about that crazy foreigner, Palin.

Well this is like Obama wanting to ratify the U.N. arms trade treaty.

The U.N. is a worthless waste of time and money for the U.S.

The ICANN is what "controls" the internet (and it can't take down sites so China could not order a takedown of FreeTibet.org and Russia could not threaten to take down Twitter - they'd have to talk to the FBI or Comcast about that). It's not a US government entity. It's already an international entity and is made up of more than a hundred representatives of international, commercial, and non-commercial groups. The ICANN has had a contract with the US Department of Commerce. That contract is going to expire lat next year.

The US was always going to "lose control" of the internet. Obama had nothing to do with that.

China and Russia would certainly *like* more influence over ICANN, but that doesn't necessarily mean they are going to get it. ICANN stakeholders are probably very uninterested in giving away that kind of power. And the Dept of Commerce has set guidelines that the new system must meet, which most definitely includes not simply handing over "the internet" to another government.

http://www.businessinsider.com/ntia-icann-and-us-control-of-the-internet-2014-3

Here are some more specifics on why this is bothersome: The proposal is basically to turn ICANN (sorry, it's an acronym so it should be spelled all upper case) over to the UN's International Telecommunications Union, the body that is responsible for coordinating internationl standards for electronic communications, things like frequency allocation and how phone numbers are managed.

The U.S. already has an uneasy relationship with the ITU. Part of the problem stems from the fact that the U.S. is one of the few countries in the world that has a telephone system that is not administered by the government. AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon can't join or be represented in the ITU because they aren't government agencies. The Commerce Department has long been fronting for the U.S. telecommunications industry in the ITU, but it's always been a small, understaffed office that realies heavily on the companies for supporting materials and information. There's been several occasions in which U.S. interests lost out in ITU regulations because the Commerce people got bulldozed and didn't have the resources or knowledge to fight back.

Addtionally, there's the fact that telephone numbers in the North America are allocated in a completly different fashion than in other countries. In most nations, the country and region codes are assigned by the ITU and then the government PTT (post, telephone, and telegraph) assigns local numbers. Our numbers are planned by something called the North American Numbering Plan, or NANP. The phone companies pay a small amount to a third party (last I checked, it was Lockheed Martin) to administer the NANP. The NANP is what hands out area codes and prefixes (the first three digits of your phone number), and keeps the master copy of the database that telephone switching equipment uses to route calls. The NANP is, to an extent, in competition witht the ITU; it has long permitted Carribean and Pacific Island nations to ask to join the NANP. When they do this, they give up their ITU-assigned country codes and are assigned an area code by the NANP, and then become dialable as a '1' + ten-digit number worldwide. There are business advantages to belonging to the NANP, which is whey they do it. But this really irks the ITU.

The ITU members have long complained that the U.S. has too much control over the Internet, which is another area where the Commerce Department has to front for U.S. private interests. The problem is, the Internet is about to reach a critical crossroads: the IPv4 to IPv6 transition. The Internet Protocol, or IP, is the basic underlying protocol responsible for moving data around the networks. The current version, Internet Protocol version 4 or IPv4, has been in use since the mid-1980s. It has a certain specification for IP addresses, the "dot notation" addresses that identify every endpoint on the Internet, that look like e.g. 130.68.212.49. The problem is that the Internet has grown to be so much bigger than was envisioned in 1983 that the IP is running out of addresses. Over the years a lot of tricks have been done to extend the address space, but that well is now dry. Once the address space runs out, it will no longer be possible to add new endpoints to the Internet without removing existing ones.

To fix that, the Internet is going to have to transition to Internet Protocol Version 6, or IPv6, which contains a more expansive standard for how addresses are numbered. But it's going to be a huge job, and a lot of things about how IPv6 addresses should be divvied up are not yet settled. If ICANN loses control of this, there's the possibility of a food fight in the ITU for carving up the address space, in which some entities might lose the possibiliity of being able to joint the Internet, and others might be confined to "backwater" address ranges which could easily be filtered out by governments. The Internet today acts as a de facto Radio Free Europe in totalitarian countries; control over the IPv6 addressing could give these nations the tools they need to shut that down. It could also be used to favor national industries over suppliers from other countries, by making those other suppliers difficult to access.

Nicely done, Cousin Dave!

The problem is that the Internet has grown to be so much bigger than was envisioned in 1983 that the IP is running out of addresses. -- Cousin Dave at March 24, 2014 7:27 AM

IANA handed out the last unreserved blocks Feb. 1, 2011. I think the last unreserved ones were bought last year. I think there are some that are freeing up because of the current world economics.

But a very nice summary of the problem.

The shortage of addresses is an unrelated problem, and is what the switch to IPv6 is being done to address. That process has been ongoing for years (and will last years more, as millions of pieces of hardware will have to be replaced to get the last IPv6-incapable nodes out of the Internet). Fortunately most hardware built since about 1998 is capable of handling the new address scheme, though software upgrades will be required.

This transfer of ICANN is all about controlling how you and I use the Internet. In particular, it's about ensuring that censorship regimes like those of China and Arabia, and eavesdroppers like you-know-who, have the legal power to prevent themselves from being defeated by technology.

But you know, I don't think it will work.

The NSA scandal has shown even the "free" world that the Internet needs an addressing scheme no government can break -- a peer-to-peer protocol to replace DNS. And I'm convinced it will happen.

In the meantime, let's all redouble our efforts to route our traffic around bad guys.