This past week, on August 16, the US National Telecommunications & Information Administration (NTIA) announced it was ready to relinquish control over the Internet domain name system (DNS) infrastructure to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a nonprofit organization.
Few people know that the Internet was developed in the US, as part of a military research project funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), currently known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
Across the years, as the Internet became more popular, the US kept control over a key part of the entire ecosystem, the domain naming system, which is the infrastructure translating the easy-to-remember domains such as "softpedia.com" into an IP address of the server where the actual website was stored.
The transitioning process started 18 years ago
In 1998, the US decided to give some of the control over the DNS system to the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), a department of a newly formed private nonprofit organization ICANN, based in Los Angeles.
