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BBC News. Net Body Issues Plea for Liberty. Jan. 24, 2008. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names & Numbers (ICANN) likely is the most important quasi-government agency about which most Web users know nothing. It is, however, a critically important organization whose core mission — coordinating the Internet’s domain name system — essentially runs the Web. ICANN operates as a private-public partnership with the U.S. government. (ICANN receives oversight from the U.S. Department of Commerce.)

Over the last few years, this arrangement has become more problematic to foreign countries, which claim that an like ICANN should not be so intimately tied to the government of any single country because that gives such a country an unusual amount of influence over what is an international network. As a result, ICANN’s request (.pdf) to separate itself from such close contact with the American government is a significant development.

(Editor’s Note: Copycense editors originally commented on this article in the Jan. 29, 2008, edition of Copycense Clippings.)

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