NSA Spying Prompts Concerns About US Control of Internet Infrastructure

Call for more countries to participate

The leaders who run the internet's technical global infrastructure say the time has come to end U.S. dominance over it.

In response to leaks by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, Fadi Chehadé, who heads the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and others have called for "an environment, in which all stakeholders, including all governments, participate on equal footing."

Among other things, they were concerned "over the undermining of the trust and confidence of internet users globally due to recent revelations of pervasive monitoring and surveillance."

ICANN, a non-profit established by the U.S., has never awarded a contract to manage the .com, .net, .cc, .tv and .name space to a company outside the United States — in fact VeriSign of Virginia has always held the immensely economically valuable .com handle. The Public Interest Registry, also based in Virginia, manages the .org domain.