NSA Spying Leads Five Major Internet Institutions to Abandon US Government

A number of the Internet’s core institutions are abandoning the United States government. How they’re doing it and why, however, is multi-fold.

The directors of the five most major Internet institutions, that being the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Architecture Board, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3c), and the Internet Society, all came to an agreement that a severe deterioration of the U.S.’ influence and power over their organizations was necessary.

One can assume that the recent government shut down and the swath of NSA-related privacy issues as of late are potential sparks for the decision.

In addition to “accelerating the globalization of ICANN and IANA functions, towards an environment in which all stakeholders, including all governments, participate on equal footing,” the group also released the statement from which this news is based on in multiple languages: English, Spanish, French, Arabic, Russian, and Chinese, further pushing for global equalization of these intuitions and their practices.

In short, these groups are pushing to make the U.S.’ monitoring and control over these groups less substantial than it’s been in past years. But there’s more to their plan.

A day after this agreement was made, the president and CEO of ICANN, Fadi Chehadé, who was coincidentally vetted by the US government to lead ICANN, met with Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff. Chehadé asked Rousseff to “elevate her [the president’s] leadership to a new level, to ensure that we can all get together around a new model of governance in which all are equal.”

Rousseff sent out a press release through the Brazilian government, in which she mentioned her interest in holding such an event in April of next year in Rio de Janeiro. No further details regarding the event have been released.

How the decisions made by these institutions will affect the decisions made from here on out by the United States government remains to be seen, but it’s clear that they (among others) are very, very unhappy with the current state of affairs.