CircleID

"In my view, the US government's power over the Internet has been to a large extent a theoretical concern."

Largely theoretical, yes. But let us not forget the practical concern known as "SiteFinder". Regardless of its intrinsic merits or evils, it was foisted upon the Internet at large in a manner contemptuous of the vast majority of stakeholders. If root-level DNS management were even slightly representative of the will of the stakeholders, I think VeriSign would have been summarily banned from DNS management shortly after making the change.

I'm not suggesting that VeriSign is the subject of favouritism from the US government (although there may be something in that theory); I simply wish to suggest that there is a serious disconnect between the will of the major stakeholders and the actions of those in control. If this alleged disconnect exists because US contract law makes it so, or some similar institutionally unavoidable reason, then the US government's power over the DNS is an immensely practical concern. If it exists solely because those in control lack the courage to represent the will of the stakeholders, then the US government ought to fix that before the rest of the world judges their failure to do so a systematic flaw.