I read in a military strategic discussion forum that ceding control of the internet to ICANN was a mistake. How does ICANN control the internet?
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ICANN is the organisation responsible of issuing names and numbers used on the Internet. Or rather they are responsible for delegating this task to other organisations. So for example in order to communicate with the other computers on the Internet you need an IP address assigned to you. That IP address assignment at some point came from ICANN. In order to host a web site you need a domain name that is unique to you. That domain name assignment eventually came from ICANN. Simply put ICANN is responsible for making sure no two different entities are legally using the same address or name.
However saying that ICANN controls the Internet is a bit misleading. ICANN have no legal mandate and can not enforce the names and numbers it assigns. They are basically ruling by consensus as all the ISPs, DNS servers, end users, etc. can chose to follow their assigned numbers or not. There are several examples of people just using an unused name or block of addresses without getting it assigned by ICANN and this becoming so popular that they can not assign it to others without huge technical issues. And we do see several more closed countries liberally violating ICANN assignments in the version of Internet they provide their citizens.
ICANN was initially founded by the US government and were therefore legally controlled by the US. However it shifted its funding model from government funding to being funded by the ISPs and other customers. Some of the fee when buying a domain name goes to ICANN. In practice ICANN was not only funded this way but also controlled by these members, although the US government was still technically in charge. What changed was that the US government withdrew from the ownership of ICANN and instead converted it to a non-for-profit organisation. In practice this meant that the ISPs were not officially on the board of executives and not just giving recommendations to the US government which were always followed.
From a military strategy point of view this sounds like quite a mistake but that does not take into account the power balance between ICANN, ISPs and various countries. By being in control of ICANN you might technically have some legal control over the Internet. But all the technical implementations are done on a lower level so it is enforced on a lower level. So ICANN might potentially withdraw some assigned names and numbers but there is no guarantee that the ISPs would comply with this. So the amount of control the owner of ICANN have over the Internet is very minimal and of almost no military strategic importance.
ICANN is responsible for mapping domain names (like reddit.com) to the IP addresses of Reddit’s servers. Essentially, ICANN is the one that tells your browser which servers to go to. In theory, ICANN could do things like “take” domains and direct them to other IPs. Essentially, the concern is that this gives ICANN a lot of control over something pretty much everyone on the internet relies on to work.
That said, ICANN doesn’t control all of the internet. ICANN is just the largest, most popular way to connect to find out where to go for a given website. So, it could really mess with nations by for example redirecting all traffic to a malicious actor. But that would be really easy to find if they did and properly implemented security measures will block most users from being redirected without their knowledge.
So, it’s more about the disruption to the economy more than anything. It can disrupt military/government operations and cause chaos. But there are contingencies that can be used to keep things working in such a scenario. ICANN doesn’t really have world-ending levels of control over the internet.
ICANN controls the phonebook. When you try to go to [reddit.com](https://reddit.com) your computer has to lookup the IP address of the reddit server. So your computer go to a known server that acts as a phonebook and converts [reddit.com](https://reddit.com) to [151.101.193.140](https://151.101.193.140). ICANN could divert reddit to another server like the one for [google.com](https://google.com).
The power is that the phonebook can push traffic wherever, even to servers that look exactly like what they should be but are controlled by someone else. Or shutdown traffic to servers if desired.
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