Paxton files suit in web domain case
He seeks to stop U.S. from ceding control of addressing system.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has filed suit with three other states’ attorneys general in a last-minute bid to stop the federal government from ceding its stewardship of the internet’s addressing system to an intentional organization as of Saturday, a transition that has been contemplated since the late 1990s and wasn’t particularly controversial until U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, roused conservative ire about it in the months since he ended his presidential campaign.
Cruz was unable to insert language into the stop-gap spending bill Congress passed Wednes- day, which keeps the government operating into December, to stop the Commerce Department from relinquishing authority over the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, a California nonprofit. That led Paxton — joined by Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt and Nevada Attorney General Adam Paul Laxalt — to file suit late Wednesday in federal court in Galveston.
In announcing the suit Thursday, Paxton offered the same dire
warnings as Cruz that the internet corporation might now feel pressure from other nations, such as Russia and China, represented on its advisory board.
“Trusting authoritarian regimes to ensure the continued freedom of the internet is lunacy,” Paxton said Thursday.
A hearing on the suit’s request for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction is scheduled for 1:30 p.m. Friday.
In the suit, the attorneys general also raised the specter that the internet corporation “could simply shut down ‘.gov,’ preventing public access to state websites.”
But the Obama administration and most of the organized tech community — including Google, Twitter, Facebook and Amazon — support the transition as essential to a smoothly running global Internet, free of government intrusions. The effort by Cruz, now joined by Paxton, has been widely panned as an ill-informed and misbegotten endeavor.
“The No. 1 thing is it has absolutely nothing to do with free speech,” said Andrew Allemann of Austin, where he is the editor of Domain Name Wire, a source of information for the domain name industry written by industry experts.
Allemann said the transition would end what he described as the government’s largely clerical operational role in the technical functioning of the top-level domain system — top-level domains being those with suffixes to the right of an internet address’ dot, such as .com, .gov, .edu, .mil and .info — and in adding new top-level domains. But, he said, it has nothing to do with the content on those websites.
“ICANN has zero authority over speech. ICANN doesn’t have the authority to do the things they are worried about,” said Daniel Weitzner, founding director of the MIT Internet Policy Research Initiative, who served as White House deputy chief technology officer for internet policy in 2011 and 2012.
Weitzner said the whole point of the government handing over its limited responsibilities on Saturday is to build global trust and keep such countries as Russia and China from using U.S. governmental involvement as a pretext for exercising more control over the internet or seeking “to place the internet under U.N. control, which really would be a concern.”
Cruz has made the issue his personal crusade in recent months, and, in a statement after Congress passed the continuing resolution spending bill Wednesday, Cruz said that “glaringly absent from this legislation is any action by Congress to stop President Obama’s internet giveaway.
“As a result of congressional inaction, on Oct. 1 President Obama intends to give increased control of the internet to authoritarian regimes like China, Russia, and Iran,” Cruz said. “Like Jimmy Carter gave away the Panama Canal, Obama is giving away the internet.”
The internet corporation’s governmental advisory board includes members from more than 100 nations.
The group has also promised the U.S. government that it wouldn’t do away with the .gov or .mil domains without explicit U.S. government approval.
Last week, Donald Trump backed Cruz’s effort, ahead of Cruz’s decision to endorse Trump for president.
The group has promised the U.S. government that it wouldn’t do away with the .gov or .mil domains without explicit U.S. government approval.