There are a bunch of open source programmers and idealists out there that complain that the US Government is bad because they don't want to release control of the Internet domain name databases. The attitude is that the US is terrible because we don't cooperate with the world...
OK I don't like a closed nation kind of thought process and have many friends in other countries that I communicate with regularly and clients in other countries, but there are some serious security issues related to that DNS database. Basically that database identifies the true (in theory) identities and locations of computer users around the world. It's not that the US is saying "we created it and we're keeping it!" It is a matter of national defense.
For instance let's say we give up these databases to countries that are obviously harboring hackers and spammers or don't particularly like the United States.
Let's say we just hand over control of these databases to these other countries. Now what happens...the logical progression is that the countries that are harboring spammers and hackers change the records. They can point people to alternate IP addresses for domain names that are not legitimate and send back false information for a particular IP range.
The Internet Protocol (IP) was developed by the US Military as a fault tolerant means of sending traffic over the Internet. The reality is that the next form of warfare is information technology.
Having our enemies control our mechanism for communication, if we continue to use the Internet as a source of routing messages when we don't control the routing, is game over.