In a letter to ICANN Board chairman Peter Dengate-Thrush Meredith A. Baker, Acting Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information in the Commerce Department's NTIA (National Telecommunications and Information Administration) has declared that the US government has no plans to yield the control it now has over changes to the Internet's DNS root zone file. ICANN manages the DNS root zone, but according to terms of an agreement between it and the NTIA. The distribution of changes in the zone file to the various root servers across the world is performed by VeriSign. ICANN's authority to administer various aspects of the Internet DNS derives from agreements with the Commerce Department. The current agreement for that authority, the JPA or Joint Project Agreement, is set to expire in September 2009. ICANN has been gearing up for what comes next with preparations for taking more complete control. The Baker letter pulls the rug out from under some of those plans. I'm not surprised at the letter and it wouldn't surprise me if even an Obama administration were to retain such control, but observers in Europe and Asia will probably be disappointed.