Does ICANN have the technical ability to revoke IP address block delegation?

Question

Domain Name System

Question of the humanities.

Increasingly, in articles about the information security of the state, I find statements about the dependence of modern states on ICANN. Since the implementation of many functions of the state (in the field of governance, defense and economy, etc.) now takes place via the Internet, then ICANN, "governing the Internet", can theoretically paralyze the performance of a number of state functions.

It is clear that ICANN, which controls the routing at the top level of the DNS, could theoretically not pass traffic to national domains. It is also clear that this problem is easily solved by installing a single gateway between devices in the country and the DNS root servers. Well, yes, citizens who are abroad will not be able to receive public services, but the state will not lose sovereignty over information flows within its territory.

However, ICANN also distributes blocks of IP addresses. In this regard, the question arises: can it select blocks of IP addresses issued to a particular provider? Specifically, does ICANN have the technical ability to select the IP address where our public services portal is currently running and transfer it to someone else?

Do I understand correctly that even if ICANN did this, then as long as the server of public services is present on the network, the new legal owner of the IP address would not be able to register on the network? And as soon as due to some kind of failure our server would be disconnected, again it would not be able to get this IP address? Or is this system not working properly?

Answer 1

Select technically IP - can not. Formally, giving your pool to someone else is possible. In the global network, there can be many servers with the same IP, but which server the user gets to depends on the routing of packets.