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 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.
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