> <i>"The US government has never, and has never had the ability to, set the direction of the (ICANN) community’s policy development work based on First Amendment ideas," ICANN said in a statement. "Yet that is exactly what Senator Cruz is suggesting. The US government has no decreased role. Other governments have no increased role. There is simply no change to governmental involvement in policy development work in ICANN."</i>[0]<p>This is the primary issue I have with every single one of ICANN's rebuttals[1]: nothing will change (so they say), and yet, here we are, <i>making a change</i>.<p>Okay, then, here's a stupid question: why is a change being made? Ted Cruz may be an ass, but that doesn't make ICANN's position correct.<p>If nothing will change, they guess what? No change is necessary. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.<p>If something <i>will</i> change, then ICANN should be entirely up front about what that change exactly is. Instead, we get a bunch of denials that nothing will change, the US has no current role anyway, yadda yadda yadda, but serious you guys, <i>we have to change this right now</i>.<p>We're talking about managing the DNS system here, that's not an "insignificant" thing, as other commenters have suggested.<p>Yes, existing ASes can already block specific domains today. Fine. But ICANN could <i>easily</i> become a Title IX-type situation, where ASes are <i>forced</i> to block specific domain names in order to remain part of the global Internet system.[2]<p>It's true it doesn't police ASes that direction <i>today</i>, under the <i>existing</i> ICANN governance model, but there's (to my knowledge) no reason why that <i>couldn't</i> be true today (under US control), and I see no reason why adding "more stakeholders" will make the situation any less likely in the future. If anything, it makes it <i>more</i> likely: look at the UN. Certainly ICANN itself doesn't think it's any less likely, but here's what they don't say: with this change, it'll be <i>extremely</i> hard for US citizens to fix if it does come about. That's not "insignificant" to me.<p>[0] <a href="http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/09/y2k-2-0-is-the-us-government-set-to-give-away-the-internet-saturday/" rel="nofollow">http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/09/y2k-2-0-is-the-us...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.icann.org/iana-stewardship-questions" rel="nofollow">https://www.icann.org/iana-stewardship-questions</a><p>[2] For instance, consider how the US Justice Dept. is using "Dear Colleague" letters in 2016 to force schools to adopt a less-rigorous sexual assault policy or face loss of federal funding. ICANN could apply similar pressure to ASes in the future (not funding, but zone updates or whatever).