This is incredibly interesting to me.
I have been aware of the implications of DNS providers and routing for a while, but I never knew about there being 7 or 14 actual people responsible. If anything these articles make me a bit happier because it's far more secure than I had originally thought.
One side story about DNS and the power that domain providers and hosts have... This isn't specifically about ICANN, but it definitely relates!
I came across a cryptocurrency called PlexCoin that promised extremely high returns. It didn't seem realistic, even with crypto trends going up and down. They were guaranteeing certain returns, advertising Visa cards for their coin, and a lot more. I did a bunch of research and found out that Visa had no clue who they were / they weren't a registered bank so they couldn't offer legitimate Visa cards online like they were pretending to do. I also discovered their white papers were nowhere to be found and even when they were finally released, they did little to calm my suspicions. Long story short, after a day or two of research I decided to take action.
I was able to talk to their registrar, NameCheap, and provide them all of the information I had. I basically said "this site is a scam, here's the proof - you should take down their website to save hundreds of thousands of potential victims from this." They did in fact revoke the domain name and pointed it at their suspended page. Of course a cache was in place, so some people were still redirected to the actual website. So, I contacted their hosting provider with the same proof and had their hosting suspended.
About a week later the SEC launched an investigation and a lot of the reasons for their interest in PlexCoin lined up to the proof I had sent them the same night I spoke with NameCheap. So, I believe I did help get Plex shut down. The point is this though - even though the SEC took a week to launch an official investigation, and even though it was months before Plex had their assets frozen, it was the domain registrar and host that effectively shut them down. The people who control the nameservers and domains are in power. They
can make any website address go anywhere they want, and they
can use that for malicious purposes. In my case, they used that power to shut down a scam cryptocurrency, but any unchecked power should be questioned. For that reason, I am in support of the 7 keys - because could you imagine if there was 1 key holder? Or no security protocol?
As you can see here, the SEC investigation was a success, although they did manage to get away with millions of dollars in the short time they were launching.
The defendants misstated the amount raised via the PlexCoin initial coin offering and kept misappropriating investor funds long after the start of the SEC action.
financefeeds.com
Most markets do not support PlexCoin (PLX), but unfortunately there was a lot of ongoing support for the coin even with the investgations - Or maybe that's good, so that scammed investors had an option to get out of PLX by trading it on certain marketplaces. I may be wrong, but I think it's completely gone now - can't be traded or mined. So yeah, that my friends is how I shut down a $10 million-ish scam cryptocurrency from my home computer