WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A long-planned transfer of the internet’s technical management from the U.S. government to a global community of stakeholders is expected to take place on Saturday despite last-minute attempts by conservative politicians and officials to delay the changeover.

The U.S. Department of Commerce is due to cede stewardship of ICANN, or the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, as scheduled after a lawsuit seeking to halt the transition was denied by a federal judge in Texas on Friday.

The U.S. government has been the primary manager of the internet’s address book since 1988 largely because it was invented in the country. Critics of the handover have attempted to block or delay it on grounds it could jeopardize free speech online, claims that the Obama administration and technology companies have said lack merit.

The lawsuit filed on Wednesday against the federal government by the Republican states of Arizona, Texas, Nevada and Oklahoma argued the handover was unconstitutional and required congressional approval.

ICANN, a California-based nonprofit, manages the database for top-level domain names such as .com and .net and their corresponding numeric addresses that allow computers to connect.

After the transfer, ICANN will be governed by a collection of academics, technical experts, private industry and government representatives, public interest advocates and individual users around the world, in what it calls a “multi-stakeholder process.”

Federal officials began discussing a plan to move ICANN under international oversight in the 1990s, and rolled out a formal plan in March 2014.

Conservatives in the U.S. Congress, led by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, sought to prevent the handover earlier in September by attaching an amendment to an unrelated stop-gap funding bill for the U.S. government.

Cruz called the transfer a “giveaway to Russia” and other governments, but his effort failed to gain traction.

A delay would have backfired by undermining U.S. credibility in international negotiations over internet standards and security, the Obama administration and technical experts have said.

Asked whether the four states which had sued the administration would appeal Friday’s court ruling, Monica Moazez, a spokeswoman for Nevada’s attorney general, responded in an email that they were weighing options.

The other states could not be immediately reached.

The transfer is “a symbolic, but important step in preserving the stability and openness of the Internet, which impacts free speech, our economy and our national security,” Ed Black, chief executive of the Computer & Communications Industry Association, said in a statement.</s>The US government has ceded control of the technical management of the internet, in what has been called the “most significant change in the internet's functioning for a generation”.

Following a long legal battle, the California-based NGO Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will gain control over the organisation of unique online identifiers.

The change will not affect ordinary internet users but is a reflection of the rapidly shifting online landscape and attitudes to it.

ICANN manages the database for top-level domain names such as .com and .net and the corresponding numeric addresses that allow computers to connect.

The group’s work will be governed by a collection of academics, technical experts, private industry and government representatives, public interest advocates and individual users around the world.

“This transition was envisioned 18 years ago, yet it was the tireless work of the global internet community, which drafted the final proposal, that made this a reality,” said ICANN Board Chair Stephen D Crocker.

“This community validated the multi stakeholder model of internet governance. It has shown that a governance model defined by the inclusion of all voices, including business, academics, technical experts, civil society, governments and many others is the best way to assure that the internet of tomorrow remains as free, open and accessible as the internet of today.”

IT journal The Register said it was a “historic moment” and the “most significant change in the internet's functioning for a generation”.

Ed Black, chief executive of the Computer & Communications Industry Association, said the transfer was "a symbolic, but important step in preserving the stability and openness of the internet, which impacts free speech, our economy and our national security."

The US government has been the primary manager of the internet's address book since 1988 largely because it was invented in the country.

Critics of the handover have attempted to block or delay it on grounds it could jeopardize free speech online, claims that the Obama administration and technology companies have said lack merit.

Federal officials began discussing a plan to move ICANN under international oversight in the 1990s, and rolled out a formal plan in March 2014.

But conservative politicians, including former Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz, tried to stop the move, saying it was unconstitutional and required congressional approval.

Mr Cruz called the transfer a "giveaway to Russia" and other governments, but his effort failed to gain traction.

A delay would have backfired by undermining US credibility in international negotiations over internet standards and security, the Obama administration and technical experts have said.</s>It's been a couple of weeks. That means it's time for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to sue the federal government again. This time, he's picking up his fellow Texan Ted Cruz' fight against what they both claim is the Obama administration's turning over control of the internet to a mysterious foreign entity.

Cruz has railed against the Obama administration's plan to halt U.S. oversight of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) on Oct. 1, turning supervision of the organization over to private organizations and businesses. All of this raises a few obvious questions.

1. What is ICANN? — ICANN is, effectively, the internet's traffic cop. It manages IP addresses across the world, ensuring that when you type dallasobserver.com into your web browser, the browser actually pulls down and displays dallasobserver.com. It coordinates how IP addresses are assigned, making sure no two websites have the same address. ICANN describes what it does as providing “universal resolvability,” which means, according to ICANN, "that wherever you are on the network – and hence the world – that you receive the same predictable results when you access the network. Without this, you could end up with an internet that worked entirely differently depending on your location on the globe." ICANN also regulates things like USB ports, making sure your peripheral devices work across the world.

2. Why is it run by the U.S. government? — The U.S. was one of the first countries to develop significant internet infrastructure. ICANN was created in 1998 to ensure communication across the burgeoning internet structures and placed under the authority of the U.S. Commerce Department.

3. Why kick ICANN from federal oversight? — Since ICANN's formation, the plan has always been to turn it over to the private entities that help create and shape the internet. President Obama announced plans to finalize the process this year in 2014. ICANN is already run by a 21-member board of directors — 15 nominated by an independent nominating and six chosen from the support organizations that help ICANN do what it does. The federal government is ending its oversight of ICANN.

4. Why is Paxton so upset about what's happening? — Cruz says that the Obama administration is turning over the internet to foreign powers. Because some of the private organizations that already help run ICANN are based in China, Russia and Iran, Paxton believes that free speech on the internet will be threatened, despite the fact that the internet is already censored in those countries and the fact that ICANN has — so far — never had anything to do with the internet's content.

"When ICANN escapes from government authority, ICANN escapes from having to worry about the First Amendment, having to worry about protecting your rights or my rights," Cruz told Congress in September.

5. What grounds is Paxton suing on? — Paxton says that Obama is giving away U.S. property without congressional approval, violating the Constitution's property clause. Obama is also violating the First Amendment, Paxton says, by chilling free speech.

“Trusting authoritarian regimes to ensure the continued freedom of the internet is lunacy,” Paxton said. “The president does not have the authority to simply give away America’s pioneering role in ensuring that the internet remains a place where free expression can flourish.”

ICANN is not commenting on the impending takeover, but the White House has claimed the Cruz arguments don't make sense.

“Cruz' argument doesn’t withstand scrutiny,” one spokesman said at a press conference earlier this month. “It also strikes me as a curious position for a self-described small government conservative to shut down the government to ensure that the federal government can continue to control the internet. It doesn’t make any sense.”</s>CARSON CITY — Nevada has joined three other states to file a lawsuit to prevent the federal government from transferring internet oversight from U.S. control to an international organization.

Attorney General Adam Laxalt said the transfer to the unregulated, nongovernmental body could jeopardize free speech and invite censorship.

The complaint was filed in U.S. District Court on Thursday in Texas by Nevada, Oklahoma, Texas and Arizona.

Since its founding, the U.S. Commerce Department has overseen the operations of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. However, the federal government plans to allow ICANN to become fully independent once its contract expires Friday.

ICANN, the nonprofit organization running the database, will then become autonomous and be accountable to international stakeholders.

The lawsuit says the change would allow for private parties to control the internet and could seriously undermine free speech on the internet domain. The lawsuit argues that the decision violates the First Amendment, the Property Clause and the Administrative Procedure Act. The parties are asking for an injunction to stop the transfer.

“By relinquishing its oversight of the internet to a nongovernmental and unregulated international organization, the Commerce Department is seriously jeopardizing free speech and inviting censorship on the internet where there should be a free exchange of ideas,” Laxalt said. “In asking for an injunction, if successful, we hope to halt this transfer in order to give policy makers time to evaluate the possible consequences of this decision.”

Contact Sean Whaley at swhaley@reviewjournal.com or 775-461-3820. Follow @seanw801 on Twitter.</s>Forty-seven years of U.S. government authority over the Internet's most basic functions is slated to end Saturday, not with a celebration or a wake but with the quiet expiration of a contract.

The agreement essentially gives a California-based nonprofit group the sole authority to organize cyberspace's address book. And though this entity, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), has played this vital role for years, the retreat of U.S. control has sparked charges that President Barack Obama's administration is abandoning the final vestiges of a crucial - if rarely exercised - oversight position.

The complaints have had a decidedly partisan cast. The campaign of GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump has bashed the idea. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, has sought to halt the move through legislation. Four Republican state attorneys general on Friday unsuccessfully sought a restraining order from a federal judge.

"President Obama intends to give increased control of the Internet to authoritarian regimes like China, Russia, and Iran," Cruz said in a statement this week, after he tried and failed to add legislation to a congressional funding measure. "Like Jimmy Carter gave away the Panama Canal, Obama is giving away the Internet."

The Internet, as technical experts have pointed out, is not owned by the United States and can't be given away. Yet the symbolism of the moment is powerful. The network began as a Pentagon program during the Cold War, just months after the first moon landing in 1969. The United States is now retreating at a time when concerns over online crime and cyberwarfare are growing, and critics worry that rival nations such as China and Russia are posing a greater online threat to American national security interests.

ICANN's executives and board of directors, who oversee the organization day to day, will now report to what the group calls the Internet's "stakeholder community" - a lightly defined mix of corporate interests, government officials, activists and experts spread across four international bodies.

The United States, for example, will have one seat on the 164-member Governmental Advisory Committee, theoretically equal in power to Barbados or Luxembourg.

While the Internet itself was designed to function without a central authority, ICANN has played a small but crucial role since its founding in 1998 at the urging of the Clinton administration, replacing a program run under the authority of the Defense Department. ICANN oversees the process of assigning domain names and the underlying Internet Protocol, or IP, addresses, allowing users and anyone on the Internet to navigate to sites such as Washingtonpost.com. Private companies called registrars and approved by ICANN - such as GoDaddy.com or Name.com - sell the domain names to companies or individuals.

The role played by the U.S. Commerce Department in recent years largely has been perfunctory, approving technical updates to the domain-name system.

The oversight exerted by the U.S. government "was more symbolic than practical," said Christopher Mondini, an ICANN vice president. "The U.S. government and every administration since 1998 always intended for this contract to lapse."

Yet even though the oversight activity was modest, the U.S. government asserted a degree of control simply by extending the contract to ICANN. U.S. officials had the authority, if they wanted, to rescind the contract and offer it to another group. This arrangement long has had some international critics - more than 90 percent of the world's 3.6 billion Internet users live in other countries - but complaints sharpened in 2013, after Edward Snowden's revelations about the extent of U.S. spying on global Internet traffic.

Even among those who favored U.S. oversight, ICANN's actions have sometimes sparked controversy.

The rapid expansion of what are called top-level domain names - such as .com and .org - has frustrated critics, who question decisions to designate .sex or .navy to private companies to manage.

"Somebody has to be responsible for this. This is a common space," said Garth Bruen, a Boston-based cybersecurity expert who sits on an ICANN advisory board and is worried about the withdrawal of U.S. government authority. "There's no checks and balances anymore. . . . Before, there was a threat of accountability."

Supporters of ending the U.S. government's role speak of the oversight potential of the "stakeholder community," which while diffuse has gained more official powers in recent years in anticipation of its expanded authority over ICANN.

Though this community theoretically has the power to fire ICANN's board of directors or revoke its authority altogether, all actions are supposed to be done by consensus.

Advocates of this approach say that the many interests will work together to keep the Internet stable and free. Most major technology and telecommunications companies have endorsed the transition. They say that fears of other nations taking control of the Internet are overblown.

"There is absolutely no way that this is going to imperil freedoms. There is absolutely no way that this is going to allow Russia or Iran or anybody to take control of the Internet. This has nothing to do with that," said Matthew Shears, director of Global Internet Policy for the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington-based advocacy group largely supported by the tech industry.

Yet even Shears and other supporters of this model say it is without precedent. Critics, meanwhile, say it is unworkable, potentially allowing ICANN's own staff and corporate interests to run amok with no feasible mechanism for reigning it.

The effort by the four attorneys general - from Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma and Nevada - probably was the last stand for those resisting the relinquishing of U.S. authority. The request for a temporary restraining order, which was heard in a federal court in Galveston, Texas, Friday afternoon, alleged that the action overstepped U.S. government authority and would harm users of .gov domains, including the states that filed the lawsuit. The judge ruled against the request.

ICANN will remain subject to state law in its home of California — at least as long as the international group keeps its headquarters there.</s>A judge in Texas has put the kibosh on a last-minute legal attempt to block the controversial decision for the US to give up control of one of the key systems that powers the internet.

It’s a move being breathlessly described by some as the US “giving up the internet” to the likes of China, Russia and the Middle East.

It’s the weekend, so if you’re keen to save yourself several hundred words and get on with whatever you like to do with your free time, then here we go: No, the US hasn’t given away the internet. Don’t be absurd.

The long answer, naturally, is more complicated than that – and one mired in mistrust of one of the internet’s key organisations, the detail of which I’ll dig into in a moment.

For starters, while they can take the credit for inventing the underlying technology, the US never “had the internet” to begin with. Nobody did. It’s a, duh, network. Decentralised. That’s what makes it so powerful.

But there are bits of internet infrastructure that some people and governments do have control over, and that’s what this row is all about.

One of them is the DNS – Domain Name System. This is the system for looking after web addresses. Thanks to the DNS, when you type bbc.com, you’re taken to the correct servers for the BBC website. It saves you the grief of having to remember a string of numbers.

That pairing of names and numbers is kept in one great big master file, the land registry of the web. The only organisation that can make changes is Icann, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

As of Saturday 1 October 2016, Icann will no longer be under US government oversight.

Instead, it’s now a fully “multi-stakeholder” non-profit that will take on board the views of companies, experts, academics and, yes, nation states, in how the naming system of the web is run.

Here’s a crucial bit: as a user of the internet, you won’t notice any difference whatsoever. And that’s because Icann isn’t a new entity. It’s been doing precisely this job since 1998 before the vast majority of us were even online.

The switch ends a transition that has essentially been in the works for around two decades, removing a dominate power the US had by circumstance rather than intention, and one which was causing friction in the international community.

Back when there were only a handful of websites, a man named Jon Postel – nicknamed “god of the internet” – was in control of DNS.

His task was assigning the easy-to-remember names to those bothersome numbers. It was a crucial step in accelerating the popularity of the world wide web.

When it became clear this was clearly not a job for one man, however godly, a new body was set up to take over the task. They called it the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, IANA.

In 1998, control of IANA was given to the newly-formed Icann. It was given the power over internet naming globally. Experts saw Icann as a good blend of interests and expertise. One which they felt would keep the internet as open and useful as possible.

One quirk of this set-up, though, was that all the while the US’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), part of the Department of Commerce, kept its final say over what the IANA did.

In short, if Icann did something the US government didn’t like, it could step in and knock it on the head.

With the handover, that power is lost – though it was very sparingly used.

As with most political tussles in the US, both sides say they are fighting for freedom.

Opponents of the plan, the likes of which include presidential candidate Donald Trump and his former rival Ted Cruz, say giving up the power amounts to handing it over to countries like China and Russia.

In one hearing, Senator Cruz asked if Icann – an international organisation – was bound by the First Amendment to the US constitution defending freedom of speech. No, came the reply from Icann’s chief executive, Goran Marby.

Evidence enough, the senator argued, that by giving Icann complete complete control over the internet’s naming system, it could use that power to disrupt and censor communications online.

And so this week, at the eleventh hour, district attorneys representing four US states filed a legal challenge in Texas.

They had hoped to argue that the root file, the big directory of domain names and their associated servers, was US government property – and therefore required congressional approval before being “given away”.

In court documents filed on Thursday, they also argued that without US control, well established domains like .gov and .mil (for government and military-related websites, respectively) could be tampered with.

In other words, a fully independent Icann could not be trusted and may act unpredictably once free of US oversight.

But others, including some of the web’s founding fathers, believe blocking the handover is a far bigger risk to the internet’s long term well-being.

Because if the US didn’t handover its power to Icann, it may have been cornered into doing something far riskier.

Unnerved by US power, many countries, particularly Russia and China, have pushed for the DNS to be looked after by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), which is part of the UN.

This came to a vote in 2012, but failed. The US, UK, Canada and Australia were the dissenters, refusing to back a new treaty on the grounds it could be abused to affect internet governance, and by extension, content.

In other words, the four countries were worried by sharing out ownership of the internet’s core systems, more states could act like China and clamp down on internet use on their own countries - and all would be fair under the UN.

The US opposition drew heavy criticism – as it was essentially saying no countries can be trusted to look after the internet. Except the US. That didn’t go down well.

That said, given the US was responsible for creating the internet, it did have a valid argument in taking its time in handing over DNS. But it knew time was running out – ownership of the internet’s naming system was fast becoming a diplomatic headache the US needed to solve sooner rather than later.

The handover to Icann is a compromise that appears to suit the country very nicely, and not just because Icann will remain in Los Angeles.

It has the backing of many influential experts who, to counter the likes of Senator Cruz and Mr Trump, argue those opposed to it simply have no clue what they’re talking about.

On Friday, an amicus brief was filed to the Texas court by the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI), a group which represents the tech industry en masse. Its president, Dean Garfield, said: “This effort by a small number of attorneys general is misguided and inconsistent with the founding values of the Internet.

“It is an ironic endeavor because the transition will actually keep the internet an open and flourishing engine of innovation and open global communication.”

So when it comes to domain names, it’s true. The US no longer has the keys to the kingdom.

But the important thing to remember is: neither does anyone else. –bbc.com
The Obama administration through the United States Department of Commerce transfers oversight of the technical management of the Internet by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to an international consortium of stakeholders.