“By forcibly undermining the global Internet community’s ability to make decisions about ICANN, the United States would stoop to the level of Russia, China and other authoritarian regimes that believe in the use of force to limit freedom online”, Weitzner and Berners-Lee wrote in their op-ed.
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Alternatives to ICANN’s role include turning over control to a U.N agency, the International Telecommunication Union, where countries with less regard for freedom of speech would have a greater say and the private groups have little influence.
The Trump campaign Wednesday slammed President Barack Obama’s move to give up US oversight of domain names to worldwide supervision – siding with primary rival Ted Cruz in his effort to “preserving Internet freedom for the American people and citizens all over the world”.
But Mr Trump says that the the American people need to give “all the help” they can to the Republicans in Congress who are working to “save the internet”.
Texas Senator Cruz, Trump’s former rival for the Republican presidential nomination, is leading in effort to block the handover that is scheduled to happen on October 1 by including language in a must-pass temporary federal spending bill that has a September 30 deadline. USA oversight has kept the Internet free and open without government censorship – a fundamental American value rooted in our Constitution’s Free Speech clause.
Technical experts have said those claims are baseless, and that a delay will backfire by undermining US credibility in future global negotiations over internet standards and security.
The announcement by Trump’s campaign injects a relatively obscure technical issue, which has broad support among internet policy and technical experts, into the presidential campaign with 47 days to go before the election.
The DNS converts alphabetic names into numeric IP addresses, so you can type URLs like “pcmag.com” or “google.com” instead of a series of numbers and dots.
Senator Ted Cruz previously caused a government shutdown over President Obama’s healthcare law.
“Internet freedom is now at risk with the president’s intent to cede control to global interests, including countries like China and Russian Federation, which have a long track record of trying to impose online censorship”.
Unless Congress acts now, Internet freedom will be permanently lost, Miller ominously added.
Some Democrats, however, have held firm, in saying that they don’t want Congress slowing the transition.
North Korea is the prime example, where all websites are under government control and only around 4 percent of the population has internet. The US has had oversight of the DNS for the past two decades. Cruz recently warned Congress of an Internet run “like many Middle Eastern countries, that punish what they deem to be blasphemy”, or “like China or Russian Federation, that punish and incarcerate those that engage in political dissent”.
“ICANN, in fact, has no power whatsoever over individual speech online”.
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The call from the Trump campaign to “preserve Internet freedom” is the latest chapter in the ICANN story, but marks a shift in strategy for the Republican candidate.
