As The Hill reported on September 22, the Senate passed Resolution 50 early Saturday morning, prior to adjourning for a recess ahead of the presidential elections. S.Con.Res.50 is “a concurrent resolution expressing the sense of Congress regarding actions to preserve and advance the multi-stakeholder governance model under which the Internet has thrived.”

In passing Resolution 50, U.S. lawmakers are taking a bi-partisan stand against what they perceive to be threats to the survival of the current privatized, multi-stakeholder Internet governance model. Competing government-control models put forward in the United Nations’ International Telecommunications Union and other international venues, they argue, will undermine freedom on the Internet and result in a partitioned Internet, which would give some countries freedom of expression and trade and deny other nations these freedoms, or worse, attempt to impose anti-democratic regulations on the United States.

On August 2, the House of Representatives unanimously approved its own resolution aimed at preventing the United Nations from claiming more power to oversee the Internet. The resolution, introduced by Representative Mary Bono Mack (R-CA), cleared the House Energy and Commerce Committee in a unanimous vote in June.

CADNA will continue to express its support for the U.S. Government’s commitment to the multi-stakeholder model of Internet governance and to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). As CADNA has stated in the past, ICANN is not perfect, and there remains much work to be done. However, CADNA fundamentally supports ICANN’s mission and role in overseeing the Domain Name System.