According to https://finance.yahoo.com/news/u-government-no-longer-contro... from October 2, 2016

> As of Saturday, October 1, the federal National Telecommunications and Information Administration no longer exercises control over the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)

> Instead, as an autonomous not for profit organization, ICANN will now answer to international stakeholders across the internet community, including a governmental advisory committee, a technical committee, industry committee, internet users, and telecommunications experts.

According to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICANN

> From its founding to the present, ICANN has been formally organized as a nonprofit corporation "for charitable and public purposes" under the California Nonprofit Public Benefit Corporation Law. It is managed by a 16-member board of directors composed of eight members selected by a nominating committee on which all the constituencies of ICANN are represented; six representatives of its Supporting Organizations, sub-groups that deal with specific sections of the policies under ICANN's purview; an at-large seat filled by an at-large organization; and the President / CEO, appointed by the board

> There are currently three supporting organizations: the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) deals with policy making on generic top-level domains (gTLDs); the Country Code Names Supporting Organization (ccNSO) deals with policy making on country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs); the Address Supporting Organization (ASO) deals with policy making on IP addresses.

So yes, the State Of California has jurisdiction but no control. AFAIK California has no power to intervene in the internal affairs of any corporation if they keep the law and while this whole thing stinks, I doubt it broke any laws.

I remember when this happened people were raving about how great it was that ICANN was no longer under U.S control.

It's likely to only get worse, until an alternative DNS-like system arises.

There was a very brief attempt by early ICANN to pretend like it was an internet user's organization and would respond to general votes from just about all users of the internet through representative proxies. Unfortunately that scheme seemed to have just been marketing and they very quickly dropped it. It bought a lot of nerd favor for the early ICANN, but yet they've never really fulfilled any of the original promises.

See also AHC stealing from Medicare to fight housing projects that would block the CEO's view.

There are several indications that there could have been laws broken. There is certainly enough for several agencies to start investigations over and at least block the sale until the investigations are completed

> There are several indications that there could have been laws broken

which ones you think of

Searched about it because it might matter and came up with this article: https://www.internetgovernance.org/2017/11/07/jurisdiction-i...

Apparently it is under Californian State law so US law.