Slashdot Mirror
ICANN Troubles At UN Summit On Internet
Internet Ninja writes "The UN/ITU-organized World Summit on the Information Society currently happening in Geneva, and in attendance is Paul Twomey from ICANN, who has been ejected from a preparatory meeting, along with all other non-governmental observers. Obviously Twomey wasn't happy about that, saying: 'At ICANN, anybody can attend meetings, appeal decisions or go to ombudsmen. And here I am outside a UN meeting room where diplomats, most of whom know little about the technical aspects, are deciding in a closed forum how 750 million people should reach the Internet. I am not amused.'" We've previously reported on this meeting, which may help decide governance of the Internet, albeit in the longer-term.
Unlike ICANN, who of course, have members of the internet at large on their board. Oh, wait a minute...
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
Politicians, no matter which country they come from, are only concerned with their adgendas. Why would they want actual technical advice on this sort of topic? Look at it this way: if they come up with good ideas now, how are they supposed to claim success later on when they come up with better ones? But if they screw things up right off the bat, they can all point fingers and blame one another, then propose ways to "fix" things.
It's funny, I don't often feel sorry for ICANN. Along with the bulk of /.'ers I've found them heavy handed and only occasionally democratic. Mind you, they're better than some... but that's another story altogether.
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That said, they don't deserve this. They are an NGO with an expertise. Not being interested in their opinion, or even giving them a glimpse of how and why decisions are made is worrying to the extreme.
On the positive side, this UN conference seems pretty unlikely to do anything. Mugabe (the "elected" President of Zimbabwe) has already used it to rail against such horrible (liberal, Western, bourgeois) things such as a free press. (http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=te
Let us not forget either; it's probably more important to bring clean drinking water and telephones to developing nations than Google and Slashdot.
--- My dad's political betting
The UN lacks the authority to regulate the Internet. It is a non-democratic organization comprised of unelected diplomatic representatives, a number of whom do the bidding of unfree regimes that want to block and censor the Internet. They claim to do this in the interest of preventing pollution of their culture by outsiders, but, in reaity, they are merely seeking to all possible means of internal dissent. (For examples, Iran and China.)
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Would you be pissed?
:-)
Or would you be pissed if you were not an American? and if you are not an American, you should have been pissed already in which can being peed upon twice makes no sense.
Before you take arms in the typical slashdot manner, consider the key lines from the article:
The move underscores the wrath of countries that for years have been unhappy with what they perceive as their voicelessness over how the Internet is run and over U.S. ownership of key Internet resources. It also foretells the level of criticism that both the U.S. government and the Internet Corporation, or ICANN, may face at the UN meeting, one of the largest gatherings ever of high-level government officials, business leaders and nonprofit organizations to discuss the Internet's future. .
I understand the concerns of other nations about their having a say in the way the Internet as we know today is going to shape into. I also understand how a lot of the work went into the original ARPANET and DARPA from the US and the universities. I guess we need an UIO (United Internet Organisation!)...something like that. Can't we frag each other in peace?
"diplomats, most of whom know little about the technical aspects, are deciding in a closed forum how 750 million people should reach the Internet."
Doesn't this pretty much describe just about every IT department known to man? PHBs and suits making uneducated decisions on how things will run based on buzzwords, corporate kickbacks, and their own job security while those who DO know what they're doing get ignored or brushed aside.
Welcome to IT, dude.
Incidentally what factors are making the UN look at taking over from ICANN?
Verisign has a monopoly on root servers. Where does that come from?
MIT has more public IP addresses than China. Where does that come from?
ICANN is chartered as a non-profit California-based corporation. Why should it be so? Why California, why not Peru or Japan or Spain? Is there something fundamentally Californian about today's Internet?
It's about time that the public resource constituted by Internet addresses and DNS servers be handled by a truly international standards body, just like it's the case for telephone numbering.
Thanks to the US for creating many of the technologies that make the Internet possible. But as is the case with the phone numbering plan, it's time for the Public International Internet to be managed more openly and cooperatively.
And Americans wonder why they have such a rotten reputation worldwide...
Goodbye karma!
Forget people they will govern. At least get input from the people who know how it works. Try and put someone there that has any idea what the internet does. Someone that knows the boundaries of the technology. Not someone that knows the best way to tax people.
Stop the Slashdot effect! Don't read the articles!
The UN can hold all the meetings it wants about taking control of the internet, but in the end, this will probably occur:
UN: The communities of the world have decided that it's best we run the internet. We demand control.
USA: Demand? How bout this, you go fuck yourself, and maybe we'll allow the UN to exist for a few more years.
What are they gonna do, take it by force?
I'm no fan of ICANN, but ICANN is better than the UN. Last thing we need is the chinese fire wall on a global scale.
Fuck 'em. The End.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Where but the UN can countries with tons of human rights violations be on and chair commities to end human rights violations? (Iraq was going to be on it or chair it soon before we removed Saddam from power). Maybe the US should follow their leadership and put serial killers incharge of the courts and molesters in charge of counseling sex-abuse victims.
And I won't go into how the members of the UN aren't elected and are appointed and aren't out to better the world but (usually) to their country. This has already been pointed out by other posters.
Really we shouldn't even WORRY about the UN taking over the internet. If how they handeled Iraq is any indication, then we can just ignore whatever rules they invent forever and unless another country decides to enforce things, nothing will every happen to us.
The League of Nations (doesn't that sound like it's from a comic book?) was destroyed becaused it didn't prevent Hitler from taking power and causing things like WWII (which it was supposed to). The UN failed to stop Saddam from all the things he did to his people and others, and with the rest of their oddball rules and complaints of useless things and hipocritical actions, I don't think they'll be around for long either (or at least they will lose what little power they have left). Instead they charge us dues and tons of money to do next to nothing but waste it on burocracy. And then what happenes when their building is old and needs to be replaced or fixed? They demand that the US builds them a new one FOR FREE, because all that money they collect is needed to swim in (or something). Personally, I hope the UN building is declared unfit for occupancy and they are forced to move to some other country (France, Germany, you guys have any openings?).
PS: I'm sure you get it by now, but I'm a bit of a critic of the UN.
PPS: If by some miracle the UN DOES take over the 'net, I would support building a NEW internet that was controlled by someone else (private institutions like Universities or even the US Government) so the UN can't decide to take it over and we can do things like we do now (or better! Ham radio type licenses to use the new 'net or at least to post to it).
PPPS: I'm out of PSes. :)
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
And why should we hand over what control we have on the internet to others? Nothing is stoping them from building their own TCP/IP internetwork.
The US has the most liberal speech laws in the world and the rest of the world can not allow that.
This is not ture at all.. you should travel a little.. What if you try to show something as dangerous as a picture of a woman's chest in the US.. or even worst.. an actually woman's chest!! You might get thrown in jail... Hey kids might be hurt by female anatomy! The US has just different rules than the others... Some are afraid of Coca-Cola&friends taking over the world, other are afraid of being hurt by seing breasts, frankly it just a matter of finding who is more ridiculous!
And Americans wonder why they have such a rotten reputation worldwide...
The internet was created by the US, in the US. The UN now wants to take control of something they did nothing to create. Now you understand why the UN (and Europe) has such a rotten reputation in the US.
Goodbye karma!
It's very interesting to see how mods go based on the time of day. Right now, about 5pm PST, most of Europe is asleep and the mods on this thread are distinctly anti-UN. Were this story posted a few hours later - when most of the US is asleep and Europeans have just woken up, the moderation would be decidedly anti-American.
Mmmm.. Donuts
So, the UN guys decide whatever they want to decide, and we still use BIND and connect to whatever root servers we want to use.
All the bureacrats in the world can't change what we actually run on our machines.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
For example, where but in the UN security counsel is 1 person out of 9 a majority that can stop ANYTHING that's going on?
How about letting Libya hold the chairmanship of the human rights commission?
The UN has been a joke for a very long time.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
It shouldn't be. There's a 10-ton clue that this kind of crap was going to be the order of the day: I-T-U.
The ITU as an organization exists to promote the interests of state-owned telecommunications monopolies, which today are the province of repressive and dysfunctional governments. It is directly opposed to democracy, to open standards, and to anything that allows the internet to grow organically or in response to interests and technological developments that come from the ground up.
I know of ordinarily-intelligent people with good net cred who are involved in this expense-account-blather-fest, and their crotches are so extravagantly tumescent at being taken seriously by people wearing expensive suits who ride black limos with diplomatic plates that they've totally lost the plot, signing their souls away to the devil. For Pete's sake, how low have we sunk when ICANN stands on the hilltop as our shining paragon of openness?
The ITU has been trying to take over the internet ever since it hit the bigtime around 1994 (up intil then, they just dissed it). Just wait - once they take over, they'll close the standards process, charge huge licensing fees for anyone who talks TCP/IP, and do whatever they have to in order to ensure that "disruptive" technologies like tunneling no longer work.
And then we'll have to start all over again and build a new internet, leaving them behind again, mark my words. What a huge flerkin waste of time.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black; subsitute US for UN and it that sentence still makes perfect sense. At least the UN works (ignoring the security council here) by the concensus of the majority, unlike the nation who has the guy who almost got a concensus of those who can be bothered voting that make up an only just majority of in charge.
Wake up, inspite of the wishes of its people the US is not an enlightened beacon for democracy and civil rights. The way that many Americans believe that they are puts me in mind of the fanatical support the Chinese government gets from its people. Its all a bit boring really.
The meeting will address four topics: Internet governance, the use of excess bandwidth to help development, connecting more people to communications networks and finding the appropriate technologies. At the heart of each of the four discussions will be the question of what role government and intragovernmental agencies should play.
So they're trying to facilitate all these aspects. I now everyone is a bit worried about issue 1, governance. Fair enough. But every other issue they are discussing is good. And if they can address them in a global manner they may well improve the digital world.
Back to issue 1, just forget for a minute any preconceptions you have about how crap you think the UN is, or how lame dipomats are and read and think about what the meeting is for:
1) The fact that ICANN runs the Internet's address system is not necessarily good. They are a private company, why should they be in charge of all the addresses? Should MIT *really* have more IP addresses than China?
2) If you're talking about human rights violations, why isn't having the UN excerting some pressure on nations where connections are firewalled to *not* monitor Internet connections good? (they may not be out to impose chinese firewalls on the rest of the world, perhaps they don't want china to run the firewall they do)
3) Of all the people who are supposedly at the meeting (including Tim B-L, Nicholas Negroponte, Esther Dyson) don't you think it's a bit weird that there's such a fuss because they kicked out the ICANN guy. I don't think this is a major conspiracy, it's just a conflict of interest having them there.
The UN might be spineless, and this whole meeting will probably amount to nothing, but I don't think everyone should be rubbishing it so much. The UN isn't out to make life tough for everyone, and they do have some admirable goals.
is available at his blog on O'Reilly. It points out that there is supposed to be no organization with power over the internet and that ICANN has always claimed just to be a sort of "technical facilitator". It mentions the Open Root Server Coalition and although it doesn't mention the OpenNIC guys, it's worth having a look at their more serious project.
I notice a lot of fighting in the comments about whether the UN sucks or not and whether they're worse than ICANN. Simple fact of the matter is that neither of these bodies (or any body that isn't truly democratic) should have any control over OUR internet. Fighting over which master we bow to is a bit ridiculous.
The problem here is that ICANN has no real authority either. People only listen to them because it's more convenient to listen to them and agree on a standard than it is to go with some other system. IANA still controls IP addresses, and they only did that at the whim of the RIRs, so your argument is invalid.
Abiding by decisions made by ICANN (Or IETF or IEEE for that matter) is completely voluntary. But then again, so is being connected to the Internet in the first place. The Internet has always worked on the system of "We'll all get together and agree on a standard. If you don't like the standard, convince others that your idea is better. If you don't agree, we don't have to route your packets." And it should remain that way. Does that mean people in the nations that worked on making the Internet what it is today get more say than nations being hooked up currently do? Of course! But then again, with nigh on forty years of experience in making this thing work, they should!
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
Ok, here goes my short rant; before all I should warn you that I'm what people tend to call "communist".
So, about the War in Iraq, the US and the UN, and the existance of a resolution allowing intervention. Who cares? Why should it be important? I find it amusing that people say it would be OK for the USA to invade Iraq under a UN mandate, but if they go solo it's "not democratic". Laughable. The Security Council *is* the UN as far as this matters are concern. Saying that having the blessing of 9 countries in the world, all there because they either won WW2 and/or have mass destruction weapons, constitutes a wordly mandate that bestows dignity on the receiver is absurd. The members of the Security Council are there because of military power. The US as that, and plenty of it. Ergo, the US does what the US wants, period. At this point I don't even care if it was right or wrong: if it was in the interest of the USA, well, why the hell not? Having a UN resolution means *nothing*. The UN itself, based as it is on a dictatorship of countries, means very, very little. All countries act on their self-interest first, the exception is that the USA actually takes actions.
In the end, the power remains in the hand of who has the means to use the weapons they have (be it warheads or multinationals). It hasn't change a bit from the same rules we had 1000 years ago, and sometimes I think that the UN only exists as a mean to make this fact less visible by hiding it with words like "rights", "law" and "democracy".
Uhm, we already have copied your internet (you don't think we borrowed all the equipment from you, do you?). We then connected all our internets together and called the joint creation the Internet.
You (U.S.A) don't run the Internet, you don't decide the rules, and you don't own it. You share all those responsibilities with all the other users.
This isn't about everyone else in the world ganging up to steal something from the U.S., it's about governments trying to define common rules and approaches for the Internet.
The world has changed and we all have become metal men.