The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is a non-governmental organization which controls most of the technical decisions related to internet management. ICANN for short, was first established in 1998 in California. The current president and CEO of ICANN is Fadi Chehade. ICANN is responsible for the performance of servers such as DNS, IP, Gtld and ccTLD. (3)
The internet has become a global phenomenon and any controversy pertaining to it garners it a lot of public attention. ICANN became a big controversial issue in the political climate. The “political implications of the management of the internet” was the major issue and still is to this day (2). It is controlled by the American government and other governments such as the Chinese government had a problem with this. One side of the debate is that the US government should continue on governing the organization. But the other side says that other governments should be included because they do not want a western organization to influence controversial issues such as language and culture. ICANN is allowing top level domains (TLD) to be purchased. This decision is a controversial issue because ICANN is allowing a one in a life time opportunity for these top level domains to be purchased. There will be more and more IP address which can make it difficult for the regular users of the internet and competition for consumers. Many private companies and institutions are opposed to this concept. ANA short for the Association of National Advertisers, for example, are opposed to ICANN’s decision. They argue that it will cause “consumer confusion and cybersquatting and that the program offers no countervailing benefits” (1).There is no real predicting whether this idea of TLD will be successful but many believe that either way it will have a negative impact on the internet and lead to corporate control (2). Another controversial decision this company had made was that “it approved six of the seven "constituencies" ranging from intellectual property interests to Internet service providers that will make up the Domain Name Supporting Organization, DNSO. (2) This decisions is leading to suspicion and begs the question that ICANN is being influenced by corporate leaders. The internet is composed of many different agencies. There isn’t a single person or one company that controls the entire internet; it is a mixture of many kinds of companies and corporations. Many factors could play a role as to why we don’t know the answer. Perhaps people are simply not interested, or care for it isn’t an exciting topic; perhaps powerful officials may not want us to know because it could possible create an epidemic. The task of controlling just one website is difficult enough, imagine the entire web. So it is understandable why many people do not know who controls the internet. However since the internet is used by billions of people, billions of people should know the answer to it. Because in the nearby future if anything dramatic was to happen to the internet it will affect the lives of those billions.