U.S. Plan to Hand Over Control of Internet Draws Fire

摘要

The U.S. Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) announced in March that it intended to transition coordination of the Internet's domain name system (DNS) to "the global multi-stakeholder community." NTIA administers the database that matches Internet domain names to IP addresses — that is, the series of numbers that are the true "addresses" of devices connected to the Internet. Since 1999, NTIA has managed this responsibility through a contract with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), along with a co-sponsorship agreement with VeriSign.