John Levine wrote:
It's always been entirely clear that, whether or not one believes that it is a good idea, the US Government will never, ever give up its control over ICANN. Since the USG directly runs three of the root servers and indirectly controls or influences at least five more, there is equally no possiblity that ICANN could win a fight with the USG, if they were so foolish as to get into one.
This isn't news. Why do people think that it is?
To me the concern is not whether the USG will ever divest of ICANN, it's whether the rest of the world will come to dislike the arrangement enough to devise a method to circumvent it. By that point, the goal will not be to sever ICANN's tie to the USG so much as to render it either redundant or irrelevant.
- Evan