The United States hands over the reins of domain management to ICANN

The U.S. Department of Commerce announced on March 14, 2014, its decision to hand over governance of the Internet to the governments of the United Nations member states in 2015, a request that has been made for at least 11 years. The International Commission on Assigned Names and Numbers applauded the decision and said that the technical community is ready to take on the role of leader. For now, nothing will change in the governance of the Internet.

The topic that has been discussed for years at international Internet conferences - especially when it was held in countries that have even been characterized as "enemies of the Internet", such as Tunisia in 2013 - was the notorious "governance" of the Internet or rather, the removal of the United States' power over the computers that support the entire Internet and its transfer to a committee of governments of the UN member countries. The management of the name-number association system, the maintenance of the address register and other powers had remained in the hands of the non-profit ICANN committee - which was under the US Department of Commerce - since 1998, and many governments from the member countries of the United Nations were opposed. These countries called for the establishment of an independent committee in which members of governments would participate under the supervision of the UN. ICANN's role is considered purely technical and the assignment of this role to an American company is explained historically (the precursor to the Internet, ARPAnet, began there). However, many governments and users believed that this should now change, to avoid extreme phenomena such as cutting off an entire country from the Internet due to confusion in the system of assigning names and numbers (e.g. by blocking addresses with its national suffix or removing its "name" from the list so that it would be impossible to locate it, that is, it could effectively "throw it out"). However, the United States did not do this, nor did it threaten to do so. Internet suffixes may seem useless weapons for the exercise of politics. In 2003, ICANN backed down on an already controversial issue, which was a sign of the opposite. The committee had then decided not to introduce the .xxx extension for pornographic websites after protests within the US and after the reaction from the (then) Bush administration. The event damaged ICANN's image as independent and reminded observers everywhere that ICANN is an American company.