ICANN almost came up in a presidential debate — That time
Russia, China, inventing the internet, losing control…but Trump leaves it there.
Last night’s presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton certainly was spirited. And there was a brief moment where it looked like the ICANN/IANA transition might be mentioned, at least at a high level.
My ears perked up when moderator Lester Holt asked this question:
Our next segment is called “Securing America.” We want to start with a 21st century war happening every day in this country. Our institutions are under cyber attack, and our secrets are being stolen. So my question is, who’s behind it? And how do we fight it?
This would be the time for a candidate to interject with something regarding the IANA transition, and the most likely person to mention it would be Trump given that his campaign has released a statement regarding it.
And for a second, it looked like Trump might go there. He mentioned the trigger words Russia and China, the U.S. creating the internet, and losing control. Referring to the DNC hacking, he stated:
Now, whether that was Russia, whether that was China, whether it was another country, we don’t know, since the truth is, under President Obama we’ve lost control of things that we used to have control over.
We came in with the Internet, we came up with the Internet, and I think Secretary Clinton and myself would agree very much, when you look at what ISIS is doing with the Internet, they’re beating us at our own game. ISIS.
But he didn’t end up going there. He concluded:
So we have to get very, very tough on cyber and cyber warfare. It is — it is a huge problem. I have a son. He’s 10 years old. He has computers. He is so good with these computers, it’s unbelievable. The security aspect of cyber is very, very tough. And maybe it’s hardly doable.
But I will say, we are not doing the job we ought to be doing. But that’s true throughout our whole governmental society. We have so many things that we have to do better, Lester, and certainly cyber is one of them.
