Blog Post 5: U.S. Turns Over Internet Responsibilites To the World

Recently, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration or NTIA, a U.S. Commerce Department agency that manages and oversees a large portion of the internet, claimed that they are transferring their internet management responsibilities and duties to the "global internet community." The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers or ICANN, which is a non-profit organization based in Los Angeles and is under contract with the U.S. Commerce Department is responsible for managing .com and other domain names since 2000. ICANN's contract with the United States will expire or get canned in 2015, which is why the U.S. is deciding to end their overseeing management function, because they CAN, but some U.S. officials and businesses are worried about the idea of letting the United Nations, Russia, or China having control over the internet. Some officials like Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, yes the descendant of the great John D. Rockefeller himself, supports the idea of the United States transferring oversight responsibilities of the internet to another organization mentioning that it resembles "other efforts the U.S. and our allies are making to promote a free and open internet, and to preserve and advance the current multi-stakeholder model of global internet governance."

I found this event related to the Kevin Michael DeLuna and Jennifer Peeples "From Public Sphere to Public Screen: Democracy, Activism, and the "Violence" of Seattle" reading because according to them through Jurgen Habermas, "the public sphere denotes a social space wherein private citizens gather as a public body with the rights of assembly association, and expression in order to form public opinion" (128). The internet is an area of the public sphere or it is the public sphere because there are several ideas floating around in the free marketplace of ideas for everyone and anyone to see. By turning over oversight responsibilities to the "global internet community," I think that the United States is promoting the idea of ultimate internet freedom and it makes them look like they are not the extreme watchdogs that monitor everyone's online accounts that several people see them as. Also by doing this, it opens up more views and perspectives to the world that may not have been exposed yet, building on the idea of imagery as discourse. I also find this story related to the cause of the World Trade Organization protests themselves because by the U.S. turning over oversight functions of the internet to someone else seems as if some large unannounced corporations are working a scheme in union to monitor the entire global scale, just because ICANN did it means they CAN do it too.