Pat replied to me,
No, Jon Postel really did run the Internet, on federal contract. When he was alive, it (naming and numbering) was his baby (via USC ISI, his employer), and AFAIK nobody had a problem with him. He was a government-funded academic, a holdover from the good old pre-commercial days when the net was run by network engineers rather than financial engineers, and he had no personal pecuniary interests. He just took pride in a job well done. So nobody talked about a succession plan. Had he lived to a planned retirement, something could have been planned. But he died suddenly.
The "alleged" scam began with Joe Sims, who quickly came out of the woodwork with ICANN, which nobody had heard of when Jon was alive. Sims, per some reports, claimed to be following Jon's will. It seemed like a pretty obvious bluff, but since all that matters is whose root servers the big ISPs point at, Joe managed to get critical mass behind himself. This was during the boom, when money flowed freely, and Joe got a lot of high-rate billable hours for his law firm out of the deal. That was probably what he was after! (You can get rich off of a non-profit organization.)
Well, no -- the Commerce Department can't order ISPs to point their root servers at ICANN's roots. That's voluntary. Commerce can thrown money at them though, so they can find ever-more-exotic locations for old-fashioned big meetings. Heaven forbid they try to conduct more business across that unreliable, newfangled Internet thingie!
I suspect they're quite happy.
If you mean spam and phishing, no. That's simply not part of their claimed area of authority, which is names (DNS) and numbers (mostly IP addresses). They don't deal directly with most ISPs, just with registrars and registries. They've tried to impose some "intellectual property" rules onto the national registrars (the two-letter ISO country-code TLDs) but that has met with limited success -- they haven't (that I know of) had a real big stare-down over a major country domain's ownership. A few spats with tinhorn governments, perhaps, but they've exercised some restraint.
I think I've also answered Steve Sobol's questions at least indirectly.
Fred Goldstein k1io fgoldstein "at" ionary.com ionary Consulting