So this past weekend the US government's contract with ICANN over the IANA functions expired, right on schedule, at 12:01am Eastern on October 1st. If you don't follow this stuff closely (and honestly, why would you), the short version is that the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration used to hold a contract giving it oversight of the technical body that manages the DNS root zone, basically the address book that tells your browser where google.com actually lives. That contract ran out over the weekend and wasn't renewed. Now ICANN runs the whole thing under what everyone calls a "multistakeholder" model instead of a US government contract.
I bring this up mostly because of my uncle Ray.
Ray posted something on Facebook last week about how "Obama is giving away the internet to the UN" and picked up something like forty likes from people who, I'd bet real money, had never heard the word ICANN before this month. This wasn't just Ray being Ray either. Ted Cruz spent the back half of September trying to attach a rider to a spending bill that would've blocked the transition outright, going on Fox News to warn that Russia and China and Iran would suddenly get to decide what Americans see online. It didn't work. The rider died, the contract lapsed anyway, and as of Monday morning the internet was doing exactly what it was doing on Friday.
Here's the part that never made it into Ray's newsfeed: ICANN has been doing this job operationally for basically two decades already. The IANA functions themselves, assigning IP address blocks, managing the DNS root zone, keeping the protocol parameter registries straight, those were being run day to day by ICANN staff in Los Angeles the whole time, contract or no contract. What expired this weekend wasn't America's control of the internet. It was the Commerce Department's contractual veto over decisions ICANN was already making on its own. No other government gets that seat either, not Russia's, not China's, nobody's. That's kind of the entire point of the exercise: no single country gets to be the one holding the leash going forward.
I've spent enough years doing IT support for small businesses to have opinions about how badly this stuff gets explained to normal people, and this might be the worst case I've personally watched happen. Somebody decided "hand over control of the internet" was a punchier headline than "a contract wasn't renewed and a nonprofit keeps doing the job it already had," and that framing just ran and ran through August and September until half of Facebook believed something that isn't really true.
None of this is to say the ICANN setup is some clean, elegant system worth defending on its own merits. It's a strange patchwork of a nonprofit, government advisory committees, technical working groups and business interests, and getting anything changed inside it takes forever. I sat in on part of a new-gTLD policy call two years ago for a client project and nearly fell asleep at my desk by minute twenty. But "slow and bureaucratic" is a different complaint than "a foreign government now controls DNS," and mixing those two up is how you end up with your uncle sharing conspiracy theories before he's finished his coffee.
What actually changes for you, reading this on a Monday: nothing, really. Domain registration works the same way it did last week. Your ISP resolves names the same way. If a new top-level domain gets approved someday it goes through the same ICANN process it went through last Tuesday. The oversight change mostly matters as a hedge against some future administration threatening to yank a country's domain as leverage in a dispute, which is the actual scenario the people who study this stuff worry about. Nobody serious was worried about Vladimir Putin getting a master password to the internet, whatever Ray's Facebook feed suggested.
Part of why this bugs me is pretty petty, honestly: I like being the annoying person in the comments who actually explains what a root zone file is. Ray hasn't replied to my comment yet. I'm not holding my breath on that one.