“The first sentence is true. I don’t think the second sentence follows. They collect the fee and do basically nothing.”
The fees require a database of all domain names.
And the Swedish plan assumes that individual domain names are affected.
Secondly, I can’t imagine Sessions and Grassley and Gohmert being overly concerned about a minor shift in domain names:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3394704/posts
They plan on ICANN specifically being used to ‘oversee’ the internet. For example, a fine for ‘hate speech’. Collecting a fee? Well, that fee could be a million dollars a month or more.
Please note the testimony of Paul Rosenzweig — I wrote summaries of it and link to it directly.
Final point — ICANN has multiple branches. One such branch processes the IP address — the number code of each domain name.
IANA (part of ICANN) does top level domains and they delegate the rest. Basically it is flat out impossible to have one database with all names and DNS assignments. Further, the majority of domains have no unique IP address, the DNS points to a shared IP.
The bottom line is when I alter my DNS setting at godaddy the setting goes into their DNS server which propagates to others. If ICANN / IANA wanted to cut off godaddy they would have to convince the 13 different root servers to go along. That won't happen.
So ICANN cannot stop people from lookup up my domain and getting to my shared or unique IP. Nor can they stop godaddy from providing that service to me. What they can do is collude with google or any other unscrupulous company to limit traffic to my site in various ways. They probably have many ways to promote spam sites over real sites for profit, but outright censorship is just not feasible.