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. 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”. 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. 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.
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.