[d215]

On of the main reasons is political:

"It will signal that the U.S. has changed its position and no longer believes in a private-sector led internet and that governments will play a primary role in making the final decision. Russia, China, and others will welcome such a decision."

(https://www.icann.org/iana-stewardship-questions)

ICANN and others are afraid that certain, mostly authoritarian governments will want to break away from the global DNS and/or IP allocation system to form alternative, walled systems under the pretext that the US government 'controls the internet'.

So ICANN and others want to take away any argument, however feeble, that supports this position.

[jakebasile]

I don't understand why we should want to placate censorious governments, let alone by giving them even a modicum of power over something this important. Furthermore, if the transition of ICANN won't be a cause for censorship, then why would it placate those governments? If the threat is that they're going to break away and make their own systems, wouldn't that be in order to more strongly stifle free speech? If that is their reason for breaking away, the only way that giving them partial control would prevent that is if the system we already have is made to be more controlled instead.

I really don't see any upside to this, as a US citizen strongly in favor of free speech. There very well may be no downside, but I've seen no strong case for this that doesn't come down to global politics to appease other nations with far less stringent free speech protections.