Palo Alto, California (CNN) — The Internet doesn’t have a flag or a national anthem, but it does have a government.
For the most part that would be the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers , which faces near-constant scrutiny from countries, corporations and netizens. Think of ICANN as the head referee of a heated sporting event, under fire from all sides and rarely able to please everyone.
Last week, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission wrote a lettersaying ICANN has long failed to provide safeguards that protect consumers from online swindlers and help cybersecurity officials catch such crooks. In the letter, the FTC also criticized a major ICANN initiative that would let Internet users run their own domain-name extensions, to accompany .com, .org and others.