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The US is often thought of as “controlling” the internet, because of the physical and legal access it has to fundamental infrastructure. Snowden’s revelations proved some of these more conspiratorial theories to be well-founded, but one oft-cited source of American authority has always been publicly admitted: ICANN, the body that oversees various fundamental internet databases, was still subject to partial oversight by the US government. Now, under direction from the US commerce department, ICANN will end that oversight and transition to a model accountable only to its private sector “stakeholders.”

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is an odd little entity. It was created in 1998 to administrate various standardization issues on the internet, primarily the introduction of new Top Level Domains (TLDs, like .com and .biz) and the Domain Name System (DNS) of website identification. It was officially run by the US government up until 2009, when it became a totally independent organization. Some of its contracted responsibilities remained under US “oversight,” however — specifically the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which tracks top level domain names and the numerical machine addresses that go with them.

ICANN headquarters in Playa Vista, California.

ICANN has now released a report detailing how it plans to administrate the IANA without a government overseer, molding its “multi-stakeholder” model into a strong enough consensus to move forward as an organization. It would remain headquartered in California, but no longer submit to oversight from the US government, essentially removing the last bit of (official) control the US has over the internet as a whole.

The upside to this proposition is, obviously, the distancing of government power from a potential legal avenue of restricting internet freedom. This brings the reality and rhetoric of the internet into better alignment, and increases international trust in the vibrancy and fairness of the online ecosystem.

ICANN recently let Top Level Domain registration off the leash.

However, anyone who has ever had contact with an organization that makes decisions according to a “consensus based” model will know how incredibly bad such systems are at actually producing consensus. It’s a method of governance mostly used by student groups and other highly ideological organizations, usually in the hopes of ending the tyranny of strong personalities in small groups of people.

In the case of ICANN, however, you have a group of passionate academics and high-powered representatives from industry and government — which means things are likely to be even less productive. That said, ICANN does have a system for actual conflict-breaking: its board can ultimately reject a bottom-up consensus from its stakeholders, but those stakeholders can then veto that decision.

Many politicians have expressed worry that without US oversight, other governments might be able to abuse internet regulation to their own advantage. ICANN hopes to head this off by giving broad power to the community, which represents many different interests, from Netflix to NASA to the government of Nicaragua. Heading the transition is Alyssa Cooper, who told Reuters that “the proposal roots the accountability responsibility in the various stakeholder communities, that is one of the defenses against capture by any single constituency.”

And what sort of abuses might such a “capture” of IANA allow? It could possibly make it more and more difficult, or at least expensive, to buy your way into relevancy on the internet. More likely than increasing fees or throwing up barriers, existing stakeholders would simply favor the status quo over improvements that might make competition easier, blocking advancement of a system they’ve already mastered.

It’s not all that unlikely. Many have already accused ICANN of allowing anti-internet practices, like mass-purchasing of Top Level Domains by large corporations such as Amazon and Google. It’s possible that the new community-based oversight could exercise even better control than the US commerce department before it — or it could be the next step in corporatization of the internet.