Obama’s actions giving away ICANN without Congressional approval are illegal. President Trump’s first action should be to end this transfer immediately.
ICANN is a rather flawed organization already, putting it in any sort of alliance with China or the United Nations (or global Islam) will quickly turn it into an extremely flawed organization.
I hope that the Congressional forces seeking to keep ICANN under the auspices of the U.S. government succeed; almost any other alternative would likely be worse.
On the other hand, one also wonders if “the internet” will survive much longer or if some entirely different arrangement will come out of the blue to replace it. Just as nobody really foresaw the existence of the modern internet in the 1970s or early 1980s, nobody today can really foresee what might exist to provide communication in ten or twenty years, or who might oversee that.
We have been very fortunate to retain as much internet freedom as we have done for as long as possible. There are a dozen different ways this could all go wrong, ranging from censorship-style oversight to predatory pricing to case by case telecom withdrawal of service.
In the future, it might be necessary to have an encrypted internet for contentious subject matter and the site owners would then sell decryption technology so that willing parties (users) could participate. I’m not saying this would be a good thing, but it might become a necessary thing to keep discussion sites alive.
Right. He’s flying in the face of properly legistlated federal law. They already defunded this transition and then in mid-August Strickling [his guy on this] proudly confesses that they broke federal law.