US government set to remove last elements of Internet control after decades

The US government has reportedly announced this week that it is loosening its grip over the Internet after incubating and overseeing it for decades.

The Department of Commerce gradually resigned from those duties through a contract with a nonprofit organization called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

The Department of Commerce has tasked ICANN last weak with convening involved parties to formalize a 'multistakeholder' approach to Internet governance, which involves running the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS), managing the root servers that hold these DNS records for use by all other machines on the Internet and overseeing the current explosive growth of new top-level domain names such as .berlin, .social and .cleaning, Cnet reported.

The privatization of domain names began under President Bill Cinton in 1997, but now the time is ripe for ICANN to take over and the organization has already set up a meeting on Internet governance in Brazil next month, the report added.

The stakeholders, who oversee the distribution of IP addresses to those registering new domain names, include the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), the Internet Society (ISOC), and Regional Internet Registries and these organizations have welcomed the Commerce Department's move, the report added.