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Former NSI CTO Calls ICANN A "World Government"
phr1 writes: "David Holtzman, Chairman and CEO of Opion Inc. and former Chief Technology Officer at Network Solutions Inc, has written
this
interesting ICB editorial titled
'If we're going to have a world government, I want a revolution first." He argues that 'ICANN has the potential to turn into the first world regulatory body. By beginning to associate top level domains with content usage, they are putting themselves into the position of being the defacto arbiter of content,'
and concludes 'I never felt paranoia before. I do now.'
It's worth a read."
In 1832, the insightful Alexis DeToqueville prophetically warned:
"[If I were] to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the [Unites States]. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest - his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind; as for the rest of his fellow-citizens, he is close to them, but he sees them not - he touches them, but he feels them not; he exists but in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.
"Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of float happiness: it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances - what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?
"Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range, and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things: it has predisposed men to endure them, and oftentimes to look on them as benefits.
"After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp, and fashioned them at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd.
"The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided: men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting: such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till [this] nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."
Down with the Technocrats, Socialist,Economists, Therapists, Egalitarians, Hedonists and Nihilists!
Long live Patriarchy!
Long live Private Property!
Long Live Tradition!
Alternate roots are a reality and a necessity. We just gotta figure out how to gain support.
My Freakin Blog
"The first world regulatory body"?
Don't we already have the UN?
Also, since this *is* the Internet we're talking about, shouldn't we be just as worried as everyone else who sets policy for it?
I mean, really, damn those standards boards, making us all do things the same way! It's a plot, I tell you!
I'd take ICANN over NSI any day...
Oh wait. "Former NSI CTO". I Have Been Trolled.
Damn you, Slashdot!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Groups like the ITU (International Telegraphy Union) control the world phone system. You need one group to say this country gets this prefix and that one gets that prefix etc. They also control radio stuff.
Because of things like this I can pick up the phone here on my desk and call just about every country in the world (With a few exceptions). There does need be a global standard for root domains so that no mater where where you are in the world when you enter a domain name everyone gets the same domain name.
Of course it should be accountable and have minimal authority, but it needs to be there.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
And no, Natalie Portman doesn't count....
What about organizations like:
If I have to have a centralized body ruling something, then make one ruling the Domain hierarchy. Who cares. As if whether someone is allowed to host naked pictures at http://goat.sex or at http://sexy.kids is going to cause me to lose sleep at night.
And what's wrong with a little content control in the DNS Hierarchy? Move all the porn to .xxx or .sex. Anyone allowed to get to it can, and kids that log on will have their resolvers deny access to them. There's your filter, huzzah. Technically, there is supposed to be content control in the heirarchy right now, except NSI sucked at enforcing anything but the .edu rules. .org was supposed to be only got Non-profits, and .net only for backbone, redistribution providers. If ICANN wants to have the various TLD admins police their domains, then I'm all for it.
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
I'm no fan of ICANN, but anything is better than NSI.
ICANN may be a pain in my ass, and stupid when it comes to policy, but when it comes to world government, it's not the first, and it's certainly not *that* bad. It's DNS, fer chrissakes. If I have to pay $1500 for rossrules.biz, I'll have a little cry, but I'll recover.
Consider, on the other hand, the World Trade Organization. Now that's unelected world government. They basically have the power to legislate trade law to any country in the world, lest that country face severe trade restrictions or fines. Appeals go to a board of trade attorneys (and you thought IP lawyers were bad.) Nobody's elected, non-trade-encouraging behavior is discouraged.
I agree that ICANN sucks, but c'mon people, have a little perspective.
This guy is blowin wind. He desribes ICANN as a world government with little justification. Treaties? Please.
The article sounds much more like right wing paranoia than a reasoned article. Next thing we all hear from this guy is that ICANN has jurisdiction over America's national parks, because they are using them to train foreign soldiers to be used during the UN occupation of North America.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Yeah, I read that paragraph a couple times trying to make sense of it. The first two sentences make sense together. Then after that it can best be described as incoherent.
Maybe his pet monkey got to his computer while he was taking a coffee break...
I think a lot of the /. blase response to this article may come from a lack of familiarity with whatever the author is privy to. What exactly kind of dealings are going on? What are the implications?
Most importantly, what can we do about it? Is an alternate to ICANN (new.net?) the answer?
W
Off to icannwatch to read more... There are some FAQs and stuff there.
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This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
It's just about a particular naming scheme that we all choose to voluntarily use. I think we really ought to drop it and pick a different one that doesn't lend itself to such centralized control.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and you haven't seen absolute power until you've seen a centralized system you HAVE to use.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
-- Some things are to be believed, though not susceptible to rational proof.
Or perhaps it was a coup.
NSI used to have a monopoly on making policy for the TLDs. They still control the root servers. The Commerce Department seperated policy from administration. Were we better off before? I don't think so.
NSI should either provide the root servers or they should be a registrar.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Lesson for today ... just as in the past, the market gorillas (AOL-Time/MSNBC/Yahoo) are defining gated communities (cough*portals*cough) and declaring they "own" the customer (actually the life-time stream of transactions of which they hope to gain a not-so-insignificant slice) and will legislate/lobby/lock-out anyone who says otherwise. Reality of life ... the world is not a closed domain and anyone who thinks that declaring a domainname/map/portal is then in the automatic position of granting titles (and not-so-coincidentally levying a tax) is going to be sadly mistaken. Yes, there is a vapor-rush as all the clueless dweebs (dot-cons) try to capture a slice of the perceived pie by staking out a trademark/site/authority. My observation is that people should think like privaters and ignore the silly rules when they make no logical, technical or practical sense. Domain names are *NOT* a scarce resource except for those with limited memories, afterall, if all non-persistent pages are generated by databases+scripts, does it really matter if you link to nfs://130.205.10.50/inode5397935#0x80.txt;uid=2314 ;access=456sdg rather than an easy to recall memnomic? Given a world of near infinite possiblities (noosphere), why should existing entities claim all the action?
However what is needed is recognition of the basic fact in that if you spend time, love and energy on a site (whether open-source or otherwise), it should be protected from misappropriation, misdirection or misuse (whoever writes the code/API/page gets to choose the license). Unfortunately, the juristidctions out there which are not under the thumb of big corporate lobbies interested in the status-quo yet are advanced enough to grant defensive legal protection/arbitration to entering new players not as yet established. There are some intriguing possiblities though, technically if you register a ship under a country and abide by those rules, you should be able to anchor offshore and provide a cache/proxy server that offers the services without being subject to silly restrictions (I believe some people are thinking of using this for the Dutch euthenasia law). Yes, the established commercial interests may consider this "piracy" but if you can demonstrate a need, and offer lower-cost alternatives (cough*Napster = not overpriced CDs*cough) then people will respond.
As someone once said, its easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission. There used to be several alternative root domains (AURSC?) ... whatever happened to that concept? If you belive in something strongly enough and are wiling to stick to your priciples (RMS and GPL) then you will always find a way to ultimately voyage to a brave GNU world.
LL
Yeah, but these providers are not supported by default on normal systems. Joe average user wants to sit down at his computer and type www.hotgrits.com, he doesn't want to first go to www.newdomainnameregistrar.com and download a plugin first. The only way things like this would catch on would be internet-wide support of the DNS servers in a big revolt. Not too likely if you ask me.
that does make a difference... but not a significant one...
once AOL supports them, I will be convinced. As much as AOL irks me, to the common (l)user aol==internet
from my original post...
The only way things like this would catch on would be internet-wide support of the DNS servers in a big revolt.
So, I agree with you completely. It's gonna take support at the ISP level. As another poster pointed out, @home and earthlink are already supporting some of the new TLD registrars. IF and When AOL and MSN and verizon and a few of the other big players jump on the wagon I can definitely see this taking off. The question is, will the others get on the wagon. For some reason I don't see aol being really quick to accept using the new TLD providers, and without AOL it's gonna be hard to get the unwashed masses to start using those new TLD's
Paragraph from article:
I have no problem with authority over critical infrastructure, but there has to be accountability. When I was running the Internic, I was accountable to everyone; investors, my seniors and pretty much anyone who had a domain name and could get through to me. The people involved in this mess by and large seem to have an unhealthily low score on the six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon game. There's an old adage about only giving power to those who don't want it. By that standard, many of the ICANN participants should be acting like the cymbal monkey that got the stuffing kicked out of him by the Eveready bunny.
I've seen better writing from Turing test rejects. Obviously this man has already been "Taken care of." and replaced by a robot. A cheap one.
ErikZ
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Well, we put all porn into .xxx, cause thats where all sex goes.
.notfrench, to please the france language purists.
.nazi
.burn-the-infidels, cause that's where it belongs.
.imperialistic-nasty-american-culture
.human-rights-in-china
.contraception.
.inconvenient-facts.
We put all everything not french into
We put everything related to nazi's or WW2 (can't have WW2 without nazi's) into
We put everything not islamic in
We put all the popular US brands (coke, nike, joe camel, micheal Jordan, baywatch) in
We put all the info on human rights abuses in china in
We put all info about contraception into
We put all inconvenient facts into
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And so forth... After all, for every one of these, someone's made it illegal, and we gotta organize it right into the heirarchial DNS system.. Now, if you can't classify it into one catagory, you can't post it.
Congratulations: We've now given the internet exactly one valid domain: www.internet.sucks
There is something to be said for the difficulty a person would have to stop using the DNS system as organized or arranged or overseen (or whatever) by ICANN. It may not be as difficult as travelling to another world to set up a new habitat, but it seems to be on the same order of magnitude.
I would love to hear, however, how we could more appropriately manage the DNS system that the vast majority of Internet users know and love. (yeah, I love it; it could probably be better, but I would hate to not have DNS at all). If there were a reasonable plan proposed, I would advocate it because the current system does make me a bit concerned. (I was already paranoid.)
- daniel
Despite all the companies' attempts to make it look like the Internet is a clean orderly environment, it is ultimately still composed and controlled by people who are mutually agreeing to use proposed standards. If you don't like the Icann, set up your own root servers. Or write up your own name resolution systems. There are several groups out there who are doing just that. So what if wall off most of the rest of the Internet in the process? Most of it's crap these days anyway. A commerical-free private collaborative VPN built on top of it would be much more useful anyway.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
2) The objection that is always brought up when the possibility of alternative root systems is mentioned is that nobody supports them. As someone said a few comments above, "when AOL supports it, then I'll buy it". But I want to make several points. First, for many purposes one does not need every joe sixpack out there to be able to access one's domain. Community sites like /. or k5 have a dedicated, stable body of readers. All they need is for THOSE READERS to be able to resolve their alt domain name. This is very different from ecommerce sites, like amazon, who need universal resolution. Many applications get by fine without universal resolution. Second, it is very easy to operate sites on two domain names at the same time. An example: the JEdit project, and open source programmer's editor, can be seen at both www.jedit.oss (.oss is the OpenNIC TLD for open source software projects) and at jedit.sourceforge.net. It makes no difference. There are many more examples, including the Linux Dreamcast Project, LAngband, TODD, dj in a box, and more. And since .oss domain names are FREE, why not use both?
In short, for all of you who don't like ICANN, and who don't think new.net is any better, support and use the OpenNIC.
Claim your namespace.
Is it just me, or does this sound like a little kid whining about his toy being taken away?
...should be backed up with a little substance. Does anyone have this stuff on record, or is it just a lot of hot air?
/. reader, but, to me anyway, the evidence is what makes it fun.
Statements like:
These people are enacting policy, cutting deals with large technology companies and signing things that look suspiciously like treaties with governments and quasi government groups (some of dubious legitimacy).
I like to get paranoid and call everything a conspiracy just as much as the next
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Need ecommerce that doesn't suck? FoxyCart is for you.
'I never felt paranoia before. I do now.'
This guy has never played Deus Ex. The Illuminati everywhere determining how your existance will play in their little game of life. They are watching you...
FNORD!!!
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
> I've seen better writing from Turing test
> rejects.
Why do you say that I've seen better wriring from Turing test rejects?
While that may sound pretty extreme, think about it for a moment: Do we really still need domain names? Ten or even five years ago, domain names were the only way to access most Internet resources outside of IP addresses, but now:
- Nearly every Web page is linked from some index or list or other.
- Web browsers have bookmark lists for a user's frequently visited sites.
- Non-WWW client programs (FTP, SSH, IRC) have "site lists" that let you select a site without having to enter its full address.
- Keyboardless browsing devices (Dreamcasts, cell phones, etc.) are gaining popularity.
So while getting rid of domain names may seem anathema to those of us who have been using the Internet for a while--I know it would take me a while to get used to it--I can't see that it would really cause any significant problems in the long run.On the contrary, it would solve the myriad problems that have been cropping up recently regarding ownership of domain names and registries. As it is now, this is really not a solvable problem; take the case of, for example, a hypothetical "Jim's Software" in Minnesota and another hypothetical "Jim's Software" in Dallas, both of which want to do business nationwide/worldwide. Which one should get jims-software.com? There is no fair solution to this in the context of domain names, because whatever you do, one of them is going to get a "more visible" name than the other (unless, say, you make them both take jims-software-{1,2}.com, but I won't even try to get into the complexities of that).
Let's take a look at the telephone system for a moment. Just like the Internet, the telephone system can be used for communication between two or more parties anywhere in the world. But the telephone system doesn't have any sort of "domain name"-like system in it. At best, the telephone company will let you pick a number that's easier to remember than others, and even that's only within that particular geographic region; one could see a bit of unfairness here as well, but unlike domain names, telephone numbers are not as closely linked to their owners' identities as domain names are. (A hypothetical 1-800-JIM-SOFT could also be 1-800-LIMP-NET, for example, and if I were Jim I'm not sure I'd be too fond of that phone number in the first place.) And in any case, the advent of speed dial has at least reduced, if not eliminated, the necessity to remember commonly used phone numbers.
So why not do the same thing with the Internet? Scrap domain names, which almost certainly were not designed with an Internet of the size it is today in mind, and use IP addresses as the basic method of contacting a host; let links, bookmarks, site lists, and the like handle the name->address translation, and take domain name registries out of the loop entirely. I seem to recall IPv6 has an address block for geographically-based addresses, so appropriate blocks can be delegated out to countries, which can then assign them individually without having to worry about dealing with ICANN and friends. Moving a host would of course mean its IP address would change, but even that could be dealt with through "forwarding" services such as telephone companies currently provide for phone numbers.
This does leave the problem of how to communicate a host address from one person to another. Personal communcations are easily solved using electronic means: E-mail, IrDA, and such. Advertisements are a bit more difficult, but I can see a couple of solutions to that offhand:
Flames calling me a hypocrite because I have my own domain name will be ignored. (I'd happily go without it if the rest of the domain-name-less system were in place.)
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BACKNEXTFINISHCANCEL
The 'revolution' you've been waiting for has gone on all around us in the last 10 years and is still in the waging. It's not been fought with guns in the streets and fields, but in the hearts and minds of the entire world.
It's being fought in AOL chatrooms where poor lusers who can't get any other service fight against greed and stupidity. It's going on in the courtrooms where Microsoft is fighting to become one of the largest barons in the new global kingdom and where Napster is fighting for their right to exist at all.
You fire a shot in the 'revolution' every time you write an op-ed piece for an online magazine. It happens every time a Joe Sixpack gets a new computer and discovers that he can get news online from a variety of sources instead of waiting for the Five-o'clock Skews from the Big 4.
Every MP3 and Warez file that is downloaded irrevocably wears away at the existing powerbase of information and publishing that has been built up over four centuries of publishing and information control.
The revolution started without you, Dave. It's a shame, because we could have used you.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
DNS wouldn't be all that hard to replace. It's just a matter of propagating the upgrade.
ICANN's power is being usurped by alternative TLD systems that are doing just that.
So ICANN is going to be nobody's new world government. Though I bet they love being referred to that way.
--Blair
What about the smaller alternative DNS root servers?? Sure they can be a pain to use, and there is alot of infighting among them, but the DO provide a less strictly regulated alternative. I wonder, if ICANN gets more power as backed by several large governments, could they shut down these alternative roots?? Would there really be any legal basis for doing so??
Where's my lobbyist? Right here.