U.S. Won't Cede Control of the Internet

The United States runs the World Wide Web - and despite some international complaints, it has no plans to relinquish control.

In the late 1990s, the U.S. established the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), and promised that the American government would slowly give up control of the servers that underlie the Internet.

"That hasn't happened, and in June the U.S. Department of Commerce announced that it won't," the Atlantic Monthly reported.

Some developing countries, including China, India, South Africa and Brazil, want control out of the hands of ICANN and instead placed with an intergovernmental group, possibly under the United Nations.

Several nations with tightly controlled media, such as Iran and Saudi Arabia, also want to see the U.S. give up control.

Now critics of the ICANN's dominance have begun efforts to dislodge the U.S. as the sole keeper of Web addresses and give other governments control over their country-code domain names - such as .ca for Canada.

The issue will be discussed at the UN's World Summit on the Information Society, which begins in Tunisia in mid-November.

But the U.S. has made it clear that it will fight any attempt to put the UN or another international body in charge of the Internet.

As NewsMax reported in September, ICANN's president Paul Twomey said his organization doesn't want to see "the Internet's technological future politicized."