The Obama administration is reportedly pressuring The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to give foreign nations more say over the Web's operations. The California nonprofit, which,
as The Washington Post puts it, "operates the Internet's levers," has long faced pressure from world powers to put the United Nations in charge of the Web.
Commerce Department
officials, according to WaPo, "prefer a nimble private-sector organization to run the Web's addressing system, but the government doesn't believe ICANN is listening enough to the international
community." As a result, Commerce "worries that other countries might soon lobby en masse for the U.N. to take over instead."
This month, ICANN is meeting with foreign governments to
coordinate a massive expansion of Web suffixes from .gay to .muslim. This fall, meanwhile, ICANN will fight hold on to its federal contract to oversee the Web's master database of addresses.
Read the whole story at The Washington Post »