A Pennsylvania Republican and some outside groups want the House GOP to sue President Obama to prevent the transition of the Internet away from U.S. government oversight.
Rep. Mike Kelly filed a resolution Friday that, if adopted, would allow Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., to ask a judge to block the Obama administration from proceeding with the Internet transition, which is supposed to take place at the end of the month. Conservative groups and activists asked House and Senate leaders to consider such a lawsuit last month, citing provisions in recent appropriations bills that banned the Commerce Department from spending taxpayer money on the transition.
“The American people’s Congress has prohibited this hasty surrender in law and the administration must follow it,” Kelly, a three-term Republican, said Friday.
Congressional Republicans have been increasingly frustrated with President Obama’s decision to relinquish federal control over ICANN, the California-based nonprofit that manages the databases that underpin the Internet. Kelly has previously warned that the transition might allow foreign governments to take over the .gov and .mil domains used by the federal government, while several Senate Republicans worry that the proposed alternative would allow authoritarian regimes to censor Internet websites in the United States and around the world.
“Such a rushed transition puts the Internet at serious risk of falling under the influence of bad actors abroad who despise the free flow of information,” Kelly said.
The idea of a transition has been popular in some quarters of the tech community for years, but it didn’t become U.S. policy until President Obama’s team decided to endorse the proposal in the wake of the Edward Snowden leaks. Foreign governments were outraged to learn the extent of the National Security Agency’s surveillance apparatus and the decision helped mollify some of that anger.
“The trust in the global Internet has been punctured,” Fadi Chehade, then-CEO of ICANN, said following a 2014 meeting with then-Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. “Now it’s time to restore this trust through leadership and institutions that can make that happen.”
Senate Republicans fear that the handoff will allow other countries to dominate, and even censor, the functioning of the Internet.
“The proposal will significantly increase the power of foreign governments over the Internet, expand ICANN’s historical core mission by creating a gateway to content regulation, and embolden [its] leadership to act without any real accountability,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, wrote in a letter to the Commerce Department last month. “We have uncovered that ICANN’s Beijing office is actually located within the same building as the Cyberspace Administration of China, which is the central agency within the Chinese government’s censorship regime.”
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., wants at a minimum to delay the transition, to allow for further testing, but proponents of the transition say that’s not possible.
“We can’t test extreme emergency measures such as we’ve built over any period of a few months or even a few years,” Netchoice executive director Steve DelBianco argued in a Senate hearing in May. “The notion of a delay simply sends the signal that the U.S. believes that the role we hold is so valuable that we’re not giving it up, and we’ve reiterated to China, Russia and the United Nations that they want to step into those shoes. And that’s the biggest danger of the delay.”
