One More Sellout: Barack Obama and the ICANN Part 1

Obama want[ed] to hand over ICANN to the rest of the world. This is the organization that regulates and protects the Internet. It holds all domain names and has the ability to control what can and can’t be on the Internet. Potentially letting the United Nations and [Communist] China control it would be a disaster for free speech.

https://zenith.news/one-more-sellout-barack-obama-and-the-icann-part-1/

By Richard J. Quitliano
Editorialist & NewsHawk
ZENITH NEWS®

A History of Treason

WASHINGTON, DC (@ZENINEWS) — Barack Obama’s entire political career consists of nothing more than selling out the country that elected him to any anti-American interest that supports globalism and diminishes our own national interest. Obama, as it turns out, was a Manchurian Candidate chosen by globalists for his ability to read a teleprompter along with his hatred for America… those were his qualifications for president, discounting the fact that he was likely born in Kenya and ineligible for the office in the first place.
His many acts of treason and selling out America’s interests were already covered in depth in the Zenith News series Who are America’s Greatest Traitors, Ever?

His giving away of the internet to foreign interests, in addition to being unsurprising, is just one more in a long list of anti-American acts. Handing the internet over to some of his left-wing friends is just one in a long line of treasonous acts. He spent eight years giving away as much of America’s sovereignty as he could.

Giving Away the Internet

“Often we hear the left clamoring about a “free ” Internet and “net neutrality” and what they really mean is that they don’t want the Internet controlled by “evil” corporations aka consumers, producers, and the free market. So it should be no surprise that Obama and his leftist cronies have handed over control of the Internet to the UN and other countries that don’t have American interests in mind. This can’t stand!”1

For decades, since its inception really, the UN, the brainchild of the Rockefellers and other globalists, have supported dictatorial regimes such as the old USSR and China rather than democratic-minded countries. Under the facade of “world peace” the UN has served the interests of globalists — the ones that created the institution. Having control of the internet would necessarily give them control of the flow of information worldwide. However, it wasn’t the UN per se that Obama handed the control of the internet over to but some of his left-wing cronies in California… part of the “hidden hand” that pulls the strings of institutions like the UN from behind the scenes.

“Obama wants to hand over ICANN to the rest of the world. This is the organization that regulates and protects the Internet. It holds all domain names and has the ability to control what can and can’t be on the Internet. Potentially letting the United Nations and China control it would be a disaster for free speech.”2

The ICANN is a non-profit organization that oversees the distribution of domain names such as .com, .org, etc.

“The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN /ˈaɪkæn/ eye-kan) is a nonprofit organization that is responsible for coordinating the maintenance and procedures of several databases related to the namespaces of the Internet – thereby ensuring the network’s stable and secure operation.”3

By ceding this authority to this group, it gives them control of who can (or more specifically cannot) have a domain name… in other words it would allow them, both through the UN, and independently, to censor the internet. Moreover, as will become painfully evident in Part 2, this “non-profit organization” is generating an immense amount of profit for someone.

“Yet ICANN and its independence are still controversial. Some—notably Ted Cruz, a Republican senator from Texas, and four state attorneys general who have sued to block the handover—argue that the handover amounts to giving away the internet. He says that it would allow governments in autocratic countries such as China, Iran, and Russia to have greater control over what is available online.”4

Sen. Cruz’s concerns are valid but perhaps misplaced. ICANN (the people that Obama gave ICANN to) operates independently of the UN while at the same time has the option of using them either as cover or as an enforcement mechanism. One of the methods available to ICANN to control the flow of information is to designate anyone they want to censor as “spam.”

Although not the primary purpose of ICANN, it is certainly an option, one used by the EU and their rigorous online censorship (and likely the intent of the Obama administration in handing it over). Also, indirectly controlling the price of domain names by granting rights to sell, gives them an inordinate amount of power over who has access to these integral parts of the internet. By raising the price of domain names for organizations or individuals with whom they disagree they can price them out of existence.

Who is WHOIS

Not to get too far off track, this is how the censorship by regimes wishing to censor certain information works.

“WHOIS is a lookup service administered by various domain-name registrars who must provide free access (via a website and programmatically) to domain name registration data. In theory, the WHOIS protocol exposes a standard interface for retrieving information associated with a particular domain name. For instance, if you want to purchase allaboutfrogs.org from its owner, your first step would probably involve pulling up the relevant WHOIS record. Or if you thought you owned a copyright involving allaboutfrogs, the WHOIS record is the first legal point of contact.”

“The WHOIS system itself dates back to at least the 1980s (back to even the pre-Internet ARAPNET days) when there existed a perhaps quaint notion that any user connecting to a WHOIS-like system could be trusted. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (or ICANN, a SoCal-based non-profit which effectively administers the “bones” of the public Internet) currently has a toothless — and accordingly useless — WHOIS usage policy wherein users”5

Using the “allaboutfrogs.org” example. The censors would just designate that domain name as spam and down the rabbit hole into oblivion, it goes. Why is this important? The answer should be obvious — it would give regimes an opportunity to block anything outside the prevailing narrative. Or they have the ultimate power to arbitrarily raise the annual renewal rate making certain domains cost-prohibitive.

Who Owns the Internet?

ICANN was created by the US Commerce Dept. in 1998 and as a part of the US government must abide by the Constitution — including the First Amendment guarantee of free speech. According to ICANN:

“The U.S. government has never, and has never had the ability to, set the direction of the community’s policy development work based on First Amendment ideas,” said ICANN in a statement. “Yet that is exactly what Senator Cruz is suggesting. The U.S. 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.”6

But what happens when ICANN is no longer subject to US laws? According to the ICANN organization, nothing. But how can they hold rogue regimes to adhere to US laws? The simple answer is, they can’t. Obama knew this when he handed ICANN over to his friends in California — by using the UN as a front they can seek avoid US statutes.

Propaganda

There’s another element that needs to be factored in here as well, and it has to do with state-sponsored propaganda… and Obama. Since 1948 Americans have been protected from state-sponsored propaganda by the Smith-Mundt Act — up until 2012 that is.

“Lawmakers buried the “Smith-Mundt Modernization Act” in the National Defense Authorization Act, which passed and was signed by Obama in 2013. “Modernization” meant they dropped the propaganda protections and allowed government agencies and bureaucrats to create media “news” and opinion to feed to the American public. It is written in typically convoluted legalese, but it nonetheless creates a huge loophole for the State Department and the Board of Broadcast Governors to create and disseminate all the propaganda they want toward Americans using taxpayer funding.”7

You read that right — under the Obama administration’s reversal of Smith-Mundt, Americans are paying to be propagandized by their own government, and foreign governments after the ICANN handover. Trump, after a large amount of bluster about handing over ICANN, has signed an extension of the NDAA.

The internet is probably the main source of information for the vast amount of Americans. People already know that they can’t depend on the mainstream media for the truth, so they turn to the internet. If control of the internet — and the flow of information — is controlled by the UN, along with the regimes controlling them, where do we turn to for the truth?

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown how the WHO (a UN subsidiary) typically parrots Communist Chinese propaganda. This has likely cost tens of thousands of lives. In times of crisis, people need credible information, not the propaganda being dispensed, thanks in large part to the treason of Barack Obama.

Part 2: It’s All About the Benjamins