Who controls the Internet?

ICANN seems to be. International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers are a non-profit organization that operates under a federal contract to administer the domain database.

In these days of the Interent acquiring much credit for the extant "unrest," it is not surprising that many countries are waking up to the actual administration of the Internet. [See Washington Post for an informative and excellent article.]

The US physical location of ICANN headquarters and its apparent US government control, i.e., federal contract, of ICANN is disturbing to many nations. So much that they are even willing to have the UN be in control.

"Calamitous" and "disaster" - the effects of governments running the Web. That from chairman of an ICANN internal group. A basis for concern - "China, Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia and number of others have said in meetings they believe ICANN shouldn't be in existence, or be replaced by some U.N. body."

But this may be also the cause of the concern: ICANN has plans for "the biggest expansion ever of Web suffixes - including .gay, .muslim and .nazi."