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
Yet again, the people who use the technology have no control over the technology... a prime example of the folly of Mr. Moore's 'Stupid White Men'. Everyone at the conference should be tested before entering- they should all be able to figure out how to turn on a computer. Ick.
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.
Unfortunately, the UN is about as anti-US as they come. The move to take control of the Internet goes along with the rest of the UN's practices - to break down boundaries of countries and slowly form a single world government. While that sounds like a good idea, the UN is a little too socialist for my likes. They openly state in their charter that all humans have certain rights, like freedom of speech, as long as using that right doesn't interfere with a stated goal of the UN. This will mean censorship of the Internet and probably will cause coutries to isolate themselves from the rest of the world to avoid the negative effects of a UN run Internet.
I found this interesting
Top biggest delegates in the World Summit on the Information Society:
1. Malaysia 137
2. Romania 116
3. France 108
4. Canada 101
5. Cuba 88
6. Japan 85
7. Russia 80
8. Iran 79
9. Nigeria 69
10. Gabon 66
They should just make their own internet if they want exclusive control. Ther nothing prohibiting them from doing this.
I don't remember where I read it, but MIT actually has more IP's than the whole of China... If you still don't catch the drift, well, then I don't really know...
Seems futile anyways, weren't they(UN) going to only appoint some group that was going to watch ICANN, and their motives? (:
falxx
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
If they make a decision you don't like, you ignore it.
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"
from the kofi-and-elmo-presiding dept.
Personally, I'd prefer it if Elmo was presiding. Elmo makes more sense than all the diplomats put together.
Pot... Kettle.... "Black!"
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
We need to pull another Iraq on the UN.
./er know more about how the internet is run and works than all the dipomats combined.
UN: "Hand over control of the internet to us (the un), and take it away from icann."
Bush (or whoever's president at the time) needs to say "Screw you. No."
We've done it before, no reason why we can't do it again. I'll bet that almost every
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.
Finally there are a few EU countries (France) that really like the idea as well. They want to protect their innocent youngsters from "American Culture which is so pervasive on the Internet". The gentleman from ICANN wasn't a native French speaker, he definitely shouldn't be allowed to participate.
The Internet is a wonderful experiment, but it is almost entirely dominated by the US, and the english language. That rubs many the wrong way. I'd am VERY suspicious of such meetings, the motives behind them dont seem very "egalitarian". They are self serving, and mostly trying to prevent the free exchange of ideas IMHO.
Angry People Rule
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
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.
In the articles I've read, I haven't seen mention of how the UN expects to have its claimed governance of the internet acknowledged by current authorities.
If the UN claimed governance of the airwaves, wouldn't the FCC simply laugh? I realize that the FCC is a national body and ICANN is international, but unless the UN plans to set up its own root servers and coerce everyone to use them, how will this be enforced?
Can anyone comment on this?
someone that at least represents the people that they are going to 'govern'?? So send some middle school nerd with acne.
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.
To the stupid posts above mentioning that "diplomats" are not competent to handle the technical issues: diplomats are there to focus on the process, not the specifics.
ITU (this is a UN-ITU joint summit, isn't it?) is perfectly competent to handle the technical issues linked with numbering and naming. They do it very well already for the phone and for a portion of the OID tree.
Are you talking about ICANN or the UN. This is just ICANN getting a taste of what they've been dishing out to the rest of us. Yes it stinks but so does the way ICANN has behaved in the past.
Used to work for a company and new the lead tech for internet connectivity... Everytime we aquired a company she would look down the IANA list and go Damned - no class A.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
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!
we'll all be talking about this old network called "The Internet". We'll talk about how cool it was before the UN and an bunch of delegates came in and screwed it up. Historians will look back and trace why exactly the Internet fell. It will look something like this:
2005: Having survived the bad press, the RIAA and the MPAA split off into their own countries, gained admission to the UN, and outlawed the use of any digital music or video across a network.
2007: The world, angry at the U.S.A. for their 3rd war with Iraq, put sanctions on the U.S.'s use of the world wide web.
2008: After a year of web sanctions, the U.S. launches a military campaign on Malaysia since they had the most votes for the U.S. sanctions. This brings the number of current U.S. military campaigns to 10.
2010: The countries of RIA and MPA (remember, they dropped that last "A" back in 2005) successfully defeat the U.S. whose military was spread really thin due to their most recent war with England.
2012: The RIA, now the most powerful member of the U.N., indefinitely bans all world-wide Internet use since they are still complaining that artists are not getting paid for their work.
2014: The Open Source community, fresh off a victory against SCO, start building their own network called "Linet". It goes live with 30 million users connecting to it within the first 24 hours.
2015: "Linet" achieves self-awareness and launches an attack against the humans... the end.
"Oh dear, she's stuck in an infinite loop and he's an idiot" -Prof. Farnsworth (Futurama)
It's an agreement, it's not a thing.
What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else. - Must read for any person that cares about technology.
If they don't like the DNS system, they don't have to use it. Same for HTTP. Same for TCP. Whatever.
ICANN can continue to define the standards and American companies will continue to implement them. Do you think people in France will be thrilled when France decides to do something different? That they can no longer access all the other sites.
Who needs global standards when you have defacto standards.
A speech...
When are these people going to realize that they need to get the input of someone that at least represents the people that they are going to 'govern'??
Oh they realize it all right, they even have a model for it - the International Labor Organization. It was formed as part of a burst of post WWI Wilsonian idealism and has a unique structure for an official internationla organization (and now forms part of the UN system). In addition to the government representatives, each country sends representatives from their business and union organizations - and these folks have full voting rights in the meetings and so can't be thrown out as "observers" can. Of course having set up one organization with a structure like this, the governments of this world have made sure never to do it again - why should the people who are actually involved in an issue area have any say when there is government to government horse trading to do. Much more convenient to have "observers" that they can lock out - which, of course is par for the course considering the track records on free speech and openness of most of the governments doing the talking.
I've finally got around to changing my sig
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."
The thought of the UN trying to 'govern' the internet gives me the shivers. The delegates obviously do not understand the internet is not a single 'thing', it isn't something they can control. Can you imagine the UN trying to enforce its 'powers' over U.S. based ISPs? And you know they would try just to justify the UN's slipping significance. Can you imagine a conglomerate of government departments/staff from a multitude of countries, with DMV-style attitudes, sub-par technical skills, and differing political agendas establishing policies over the internet? We'd probably end up having to submit hard copy HTTP requests in triplicate, plus a $15 processing fee, 2-4 weeks in advance, to visit /.
*gets out the tinfoil hat*
Interesting. There are only 3 or so countries there that form a appreciable online presence. France, Canada, and Japan. Of those, Japan has the most right to speak on the internet: they do the most out of all three. In raw numbers, the US, Japan, Britain, Germany and perhaps Canada are the people who should run the Internet. Sorry, but thats how democracy works. Definatly Africa and the South Pacific Islands are not large presences online. Why should Iran dictate internet protocol? Their track record for technology alone is excrable, not to mention their extremly democratic society. *hem hem* Anyway, the pols will always win any fight that they are allowed to get a foothold into. Thats the nature of beauracrats; they want power. So the best thing is not to let it get into political hands(slimy things that they are).
/b
|f(x)dx = F(b) - F(a)
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
Well, the UN has just ruled that "hateful words" are the equivilent of genocide.8 17-3449r.htm
Read it here:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20031203-113
The men who spoke the "hateful words" will spend the rest of thier lives in prison for speaking "hateful words"..
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.