British founder of the World Wide Web Vint Cerf is among a slew of backers of the new agreement signed between ICANN and the US government.

For the past 11 years, the US had oversight of the Internet but also worked with the nonprofit group ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) to oversee the Internet Domain Name System (DNS) under The Joint Project Agreement.

The reason it had this right was because the Americans have claimed they invented the Internet, even if its Internet has all the similarities to today's model as 1940's adding machine has to an IBM supercomputer. Under the new agreement, the US Department of Commerce will still participate in Internet reviews, but ICANN will now take over the majority of Internet governance decisions. Stakeholders from 100 countries also now have a say.

Cerf said in a statement that the new agreement fulfills a long-standing objective of the original formation of ICANN: to create an organization that can serve the world's interest in a robust, reliable and interoperable Internet. The US government has been involved in some pretty stupid decisions in regards to the world wide wibble. One of them was the banning of a porn domain by the Bush administration on the grounds that Jesus didn't want it.