Originally posted by Bobboau
because they're an incompetent money pit of coruption. at least we have a good track recod.
.. and we made it... and payed for it...and own it now... and won't get anything from giveing it to someone else.
now, why doesn't the UN or who ever thinks they are worthy of running the internet build there own? it's not like were going to stop you
That's somewhat debatable in it's own right; whereas you can credit (for example) the US with packet switching technology ARPANET, on the other hand the concept of the world wide web - accessibility hypertext/data/etc, including the definitions for a URL, HTML and HTTP - was developed by a British man (Tim Berners Lee) working at CERN in Switzerland.
Also, the existing standards body (the W33 and ISO) are international standards bodies, not US; the former is jointly administered by offices in the US, Japan and France, and the latter is centred in Switzerland (being a network comprised of members representing standards organizations in 153 countries).
So it strikes me as being far from the case that the US 'owns' anything beyond the physical DNS servers (especially as the fundamental principles are now well known & publicly available), and the main case for keeping them in the US is simply because...well, because they were originally put there. If it was the case that, say, China was the one controlling the DNS servers due to historical precedence, would the US not complain?