article: It's a move being breathlessly described by some as the US "giving up the internet" to the likes of China, Russia and the Middle East. It’s the weekend, so if you’re keen to save yourself several hundred words and get on with whatever you like to do with your free time, then here we go: No, the US hasn’t given away the internet. Don’t be absurd. The long answer, naturally, is more complicated than that - and one mired in mistrust of one of the internet’s key organisations, the detail of which I’ll dig into in a moment. Let’s start with the basics. For starters, while they can take the credit for inventing the underlying technology, the US never “had the internet” to begin with. Nobody did. It’s a, duh, network. Decentralised. That’s what makes it so powerful. But there are bits of internet infrastructure that some people and governments do have control over, and that’s what this row is all about. One of them is the DNS - Domain Name System. This is the system for looking after web addresses. Thanks to the DNS, when you type bbc.com, you’re taken to the correct servers for the BBC website. It saves you the grief of having to remember a string of numbers. That pairing of names and numbers is kept in one great big master file, the land registry of the web. The only organisation that can make changes is Icann, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. As of Saturday 1 October 2016, Icann will no longer be under US government oversight. Instead, it’s now a fully “multi-stakeholder” non-profit that will take on board the views of companies, experts, academics and, yes, nation states, in how the naming system of the web is run. Here’s a crucial bit: as a user of the internet, you won’t notice any difference whatsoever. And that’s because Icann isn’t a new entity. It’s been doing precisely this job since 1998 before the vast majority of us were even online. The switch ends a transition that has essentially been in the works for around two decades, removing a dominate power the US had by circumstance rather than intention, and one which was causing friction in the international community. Back when there were only a handful of websites, a man named Jon Postel - nicknamed “god of the internet” - was in control of DNS. His task was assigning the easy-to-remember names to those bothersome numbers. It was a crucial step in accelerating the popularity of the world wide web. When it became clear this was clearly not a job for one man, however godly, a new body was set up to take over the task. They called it the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, IANA. In 1998, control of IANA was given to the newly-formed Icann. It was given the power over internet naming globally. Experts saw Icann as a good blend of interests and expertise. One which they felt would keep the internet as open and useful as possible. One quirk of this set-up, though,
summary: A judge in Texas has put the kibosh on a last-minute legal attempt to block the controversial decision for the US to give up control of one of the key systems that powers the internet.