Today there was a major attack on a part of the Internet that few people pay any attention to. It’s critically important though, and any disruption threatens both our prosperity as Americans, but also our freedom to communicate with each other.

This is a great reminder of why President Obama’s Internet handover plans are so threatening to our way of life.

Probable foreign attackers effectively took thousands of companies off of the Internet today by attacking a major Domain Name Service (DNS) provider: Dyn. This two-hour outage surely cost many people, very much money.

What is DNS, and why is it so important? Put simply, DNS is the system that tells people how to find you online. It converts the names of servers and sites, into numbers that the Internet Protocol can find. It’s an essential service of the commercial Internet.

And yet Barack Obama is trying to hand control of DNS over to the Chinese and the Russians. Ted Cruz has been warning people about this, and so have I. People tend to tune it out, because it sounds like a very technical, obscure issue that isn’t very important.

But DNS is one of the most important things on the Internet. Right now, the US Government has the final say, but Obama and the global left want to take control and give it to a “multistakeholder” model. That model will allow Russia and China to exert greater influence over American companies online.

Obama must be stopped from giving ICANN over to our global competitors.