I hate it when the media talks so generally about a subject ("control over the internet"). Are they talking about control over the '.com' root?
And ".net" and so on.
Each country has its own suffix ( eg Canada is ".ca" ), and the country's govt can make its own rules as to how names get assigned in its suffix.
But everybody wants a ".com" name
The way naming works is the root servers point to what servers handle ".com", ".net", ".ca", etc, and the subsidiary servers may in turn point to lower level servers. So ibm.com may have its own name servers to resolve what the IP address for "magoo.ibm.com" happens to be.
So the world can do as it pleases, but we have the means to ignore them if our side chooses not to bend over. China may designate its own name server that chooses to say that "freerepublic.com" points to a machine in the basement of their secret police headquarters, but that won't affect somebody who uses the US name servers