The U.S. will no longer have the final say on internet domain names

The National Telecommunications Information Admistration (NTIA) announced via blog post on Tuesday that it will hand over the internet domain naming system, or DNS, to a non-U.S. entity: the multi-stakeholder nonprofit organization based in Los Angeles called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

Essentially, the DNS, which links web addresses to a site's servers via an IP address, will become privatized. The system will remain the same; it's just changing hands. The average Internet user will likely be unaffected. 

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The NTIA said that the decision will "maintain the security, stability, and resiliency" of the DNS, meet the demands of a global market, and maintain the "openness" of the Internet. They also emphasize the importance of the "multi-stakeholder" model, which combines a variety of voices — from business, from tech, from government, and so on — to collaborate on Internet governance. 

Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information and NTIA Administrator Lawrence E. Strickling, who authored the post, explained that the deal had been 18 years in the making, and that  the federal government's position in regulating the DNS was always intended to be temporary. 

"For the last 18 years, the United States has been working with the global Internet multi-stakeholder community to establish a stable and secure multi-stakeholder model of Internet governance that ensures that the private sector, not governments, takes the lead in setting the future direction of the Internet’s domain name system," Strickling wrote.

The deal is not without critics, however. The think tank TechFreedom published a post on Medium detailing their concerns with how the switch is taking place.

“We’re not against the Transition [sic] in principle,” TechFreedom President Berin Szóka said, “but we are against rushing it before key questions have been resolved."

Szóka said he wanted to see measures that would ensure future accountability of ICANN CEOs. 

Over on Capitol Hill, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) sent a letter with Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) and Rep. Sean Duffy (R-WI), that read, "American businesses, consumers, and all those who rely upon a .com domain for communication and commerce will be ill-served" by the transition.

Since then, Cruz has tweeted several times about his opposition to the news. 

But it seems that the deal is final the way it is. "We appreciate the hard work and dedication of all the stakeholders involved in this effort and look forward to their continuing engagement," Strickling wrote.