The blogosphere is all ablaze with chatter over the announcement that the U.S. government will relinquish its Internet administrative duties to a global coalition comprised of private companies, "civil society, and other Internet organizations from the whole world," according to Fadi Chehadé, ICANN's president and CEO.
The news has prompted overwrought, histrionic blogs and online comments about the end of free speech on the Internet as we know it. But that assumption is dead wrong.
Furthermore, it demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of not only the functions of ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) but of the DNS (Domain Name System) in general. Surveillance, content control, and government censorship of the Web are controversial and unsettling, but they have zip to do with Internet DNS.
There are two primary duties the government has in administering DNS. One includes making edits to the database of all top level domains (TLDs) on the Internet— called the authoritative root zone file. Some TLDs include .com, .org, .edu, and so on. This file contains all of the name and IP addresses of all of the authoritative DNS servers for these TLDs. These DNS servers essentially direct traffic properly on the Internet, allowing us to use a familiar name like "facebook.com" in a search engine, instead of having to know the unique IP address of the Facebook server we want to contact.
