French Government Denounces DNS Transition Plan

The French government has criticized the plan to move control of the Internet's domain name system from the US government to the non-profit ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). French officials told the leading French newspaper Le Monde that the move will lead to the “privatization of ICANN, not its internationalization.”

The US government has been in the process of passing Internet control to ICANN for some time. Interestingly, American observers tend to think a non-profit would be a fairer and more neutral guardian for the Internet's naming system than a sovereign government would be, but the French authorities appear to believe they (and other international governments) would be on a better footing to negotiate directly with the Washington than with a California-based autonomous non-profit corporation, which, they believe is under the influence of multi-national giants like Google, Facebook, and Amazon.

See the story at the Register for more on French position regarding the transition plan.