This past week, on August 16, the US National Telecommunications & Information Administration (NTIA) announced it was ready to relinquish control over the Internet domain name system (DNS) infrastructure to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a nonprofit organization.
Few people know that the Internet was developed in the US, as part of a military research project funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), currently known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
Across the years, as the Internet became more popular, the US kept control over a key part of the entire ecosystem, the domain naming system, which is the infrastructure translating the easy-to-remember domains such as “softpedia.com” into an IP address of the server where the actual website was stored.
The transitioning process started 18 years ago
In 1998, the US decided to give some of the control over the DNS system to the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), a department of a newly formed private nonprofit organization ICANN, based in Los Angeles.
ICANN assumed the part of the public face of the DNS system, but NTIA, which is part of the US Department of Commerce, kept a major role in the decisions being taken at ICANN and IANA.
When it decided to give some of the original control over to IANA, US officials, at the pressure of other states, said they would eventually allow ICANN full control over the Internet domain name system. Other countries and private companies can join ICANN, based on their role in the Internet infrastructure, and be part of the decisions it makes.
Other nations pressured the US to step down from its role of DNS watchdog
After 14 years, seeing that the US was dragging its feet, in 2012, several nations wanted to form a UN-managed agency and force the US to hand over control over the DNS infrastructure to it.
Two years later, in 2014, the US officially announced it would be handing over the DNS system to ICANN, but not to the UN commission. That same year, the US also asked ICANN for a detailed proposal on how to transition stewardship from NTIA.
This past week, the NTIA approved that transition plan, and starting October 1, 2016, ICANN will be the sole organization with a decisional role over the global DNS infrastructure.
