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."

Comments

Slashdot Socialism

[Anonymous Coward]

..Sucks.

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!

Huh?

[pb]

"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!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Re:Huh?

[TheWhiteOtaku]

Don't we already have the UN?

Yes, however the UN has no real "power" of its own. All of its influence comes from the voluntary cooperation from its member nations. This is unlike ICANN, which has concrete power of an element of world affairs, able to do as it pleases without need for cooperation from national governments. Hope this clears things up.

What about the ITU

[Zachary Kessin]

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.

World Bodies

[TBone]

And no, Natalie Portman doesn't count....

What about organizations like:

• The UN, who have the power to essentially allow and deny a country governmental access to the rest of the world. How many non-UN countries are there that the rest of the world deals with on a regular basis?
• The World Court in The Hague. Anyone up for a little centralized Crime and Punishment?
• The WTO, who can set trade policy for any country involved with it. And, by association, cut off non-member countries from trading with member countries

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.

Pfft

[Ross C. Brackett]

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 article really needed specifics...

[VValdo]

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.
-------------------

Consider the source

[st. augustine]

Yes, ICANN has been behaving very badly. But is it any worse than NSI? I don't think so. Remember these stories?

NSI Claims whois Database is Proprietary

NSI Modifies whois Agreement

Dyson says: 'NSI is stalling'

NSI Accused of Cybersquatting

...just to name a few. Now, maybe Mr. Holtzman had nothing to do with all that -- heck, maybe he left out of principle when NSI stopped acting like a government contractor and started acting like a would-be monopolist. But if that is the case, there ought to have been a disclaimer somewhere in his comments. And if it isn't, it's the pot calling the kettle black.

The Revolution Has Already Happened

[Royster]

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.

Seeing top exec's write like this gives me hope.

[ErikZ]

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

Content-based filtering?

[Convergence]

Well, we put all porn into .xxx, cause thats where all sex goes.

We put all everything not french into .notfrench, to please the france language purists.

We put everything related to nazi's or WW2 (can't have WW2 without nazi's) into .nazi

We put everything not islamic in .burn-the-infidels, cause that's where it belongs.

We put all the popular US brands (coke, nike, joe camel, micheal Jordan, baywatch) in .imperialistic-nasty-american-culture

We put all the info on human rights abuses in china in .human-rights-in-china

We put all info about contraception into .contraception.

We put all inconvenient facts into .inconvenient-facts.

--

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

This guy does have a point.

[po_boy]

I have read a lot of posts here discussing alternative TLD's or alternative root nameservers or other similar plans. To me that's about as useful as saying "If you don't like this New World Order, go live on another world."

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.)

there are other tld providers

[daniell]

There are other tld providers out there of course; there's no 100% control until by some mishap the aforementioned are illegalized. There's new.net for example.

- daniel

Two things...

[Inti]

1) new.net is old.hat. Why should we prefer it to ICANN? What the hell's the difference? New.net might bring the prices of SLDs down a bit from competition, if it succeeds, (though it is now charging about the same as NSI) but it is fundamentally an inferior solution to the problem than is ICANN. I mean, at least ICANN is to some degree publically accountable (though to a small degree). New.net is ruled by corporate fiat. It could fold at any moment, and feels itself under no obligation to respect existing claims apart from its own. What we really need is democratic namespace governance, where the inclusive namespace is treated not a cash cow to milk, but rather as a global resource to be managed. ICANN made a gesture in this direction by allowing some elected board members. They failed miserably in this attempt, though, by stacking the board with appointees and board-nominated candidates. ICANN now has zero legitimacy as a democratically-governed body, and it would take more humility and faith in the democratic model than Vint Cerf and his cronies can muster to reverse its current trajectory. In short, ICANN has killed itself by arrogance and mismanagement. It is toast. At present, the only democratic alternative is the OpenNIC. Check it out.

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.

Re:Seeing top exec's write like this gives me hope

[poot_rootbeer]

> I've seen better writing from Turing test
> rejects.

Why do you say that I've seen better wriring from Turing test rejects?

Weren't you watching, Dave?

[Bonker]

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.