I guess for me what it comes down to is the government was left, more by accident than anything else, certain assets to manage that make the worlds communication system work.

So, certain insiders able to game the process convince the government that they have some special insight and a beatified administrator and need to mange these assets for the government they couldn't possibly do it.

So now we have the FCC managing things like the frequencies ambulances, paramedics, NASA, police tv and radio use, but we have to have a group of "special" people to manage the really scary delicate and mysterious Internet... so that twitter and porn sites work.

After 10 years the FCC might have been able to pick up these special skills. Actually Twitter could probably do it, as there aren't actually any special skills. And the Internet that was designed to withstand nuclear attack by routing around damage is not as delicate as has been stated.

In 1998 the US Department of Commerce/NTIA told the Internet "you have to self organize to run this. If you don't the government will take over this administration. You have one chance to get it right".

But the proposals from the Internet were not considered and a board selected by the Executive branch was installed with veto power by the Department of commerce.

It is perhaps at best disingenuous to say "ok try, go ahead, get it right" and then prevent that attempt by taking over anyway. And now - today the tendancy is to suggest "well, maybe the US govermnet SHOULD run this stuff, at least the much lacking due process and accountability is built in there and automatic."

Isn't this a self fulfilling prophesy? "Go ahead try - oops, fooled ya, we're in charge, go ahead make it work - oops, cant, ok we're taking over". This was encouraged by some insiders with crys abating taxation of the Internet by the Government, and now those same people tax the Internet as a "society" - resembling the operation of the non government organization known as the Federal Reserve. And how has THAT worked out?

If you want to hand control of the Internet to a government agency that spends most of its time talking to lobbyists and lawyers, then this is how you'd do it.

The US will assert rights of creation, and of a national security blah blah something or other to which I say: so?

I don't see a distinction between somebody in Mombassa using PayPal and somebody in DC "tweeting" - the system must work (is that even in dispute) - and it's not one of those grey areas - either it works or it doesn't - and it's easy to check and test. No right thinking person in charge of a computer wants less than 100% perfect operation of the Internet and mistakes and errors are simply not tolerated. and it doesn't matter if you're the US government or a company or an individual. As Internet engineers we work towards the nontrivial goal of utter perfection and nothing anybody says really changes anything.

This doesn't mean there's a stubborn "my way" process going in, not at all. Good ideas are always welcome, from anywhere surface to the top, and become "the way it is".

So, DNS security it important to everybody. There's no "more secure" DNS that the Government gets to use. It's all the same.

You know when go buy something online, there's a secure server involved, and the URL changes from http to https ? Well, some poeple have been trying to get that functionality into the DNS now for about 15 years and it's not going well, lots of things still break.

Ten years ago somebody facetiously pointed out you could use secure web servers to transfer sensitive DNS data. Haha! Funny guy.

Thing is though: you can. It works.