Slashdot Mirror
Moving Net Control From ICANN to Governments?
a whoabot writes "The BBC has a piece by Bill Thompson suggesting that "control" of the internet should move away from corporate groups(ICANN and the Web Consortium) and to governments. We previously had an article on ICANN and the UN World Summit on the Information Society. One quote: "We allow images of consensual sex in our cinemas, but not images of bestiality or child abuse. Why should the net be any different?" My personal answer: because the internet should not be another TV or cinema, it should be a free, user-as-peer and user-controllable media; a "reversible" media, as Baudrillard would put it; not user-as-consumer."
Even Adam Smith 200 years ago realised that companies control important objects of society was a poor idea; the incentive for profit and exploiting the system for the benifit of the companies and their shareholders is just too much.
If it were up to me, i'd give it to a UN body. The last people i'd want to give it to is the US government, not because i'm anti US, but because i don't think one country should have control of such a multi-national object. The arguement that "we made it" doesn't hold any water.
Sealand would be a better choice methinks.
Just great... Let's give the government more power.... Let see our free speech, and digital civil liberties erode when/if the government takes over control of the net (which is futile anyways)..
Governments cannot be trusted because their is too much corruption (aka lobbyism).
If we had a United Digital Nations, then maybe it wouldnt be as bad, however it would still give the U.S. power to bully other nations because the U.S. "is always right", you know, just like the war with Iraq was 100% right...
The Net should be controlled purely by the people that use it. That means everyone, every slashdot user, every joe blow internet user, not by corps (like it is now), or worse even government. This medium has the ability to continue to change the world for the better (hopefully). Atleast it would have the ability to unite us closer, and IMHO that is what its going to take to solve a lot of these problems in the world we have today, not by being repressed by some corporation or lobbied government...
It may be fucked up now, but how much do you want to bet that Gov't can fuck it up even more? At least business and industry consortiums have a profit motive; governments only have a power motive.
C|N>K
btw, Baudrillard's audience is rapidly shrinking to lit-crit departments, and those who find the Matrix to be philosophical. His chief use to scholarship is to provide the muddle-headed with clever sounding catchphrases that can be bandied about with abandon.
...For a news organisation that's becoming government controlled in itself.
Get rid of that so called "geek" and bring back the bastions of independance of the BBC - namely Greg Dyke and Gavyn Davies before Britian slides into a New Labour totalitarian tate, with the BBC as its lapdog.
Bill Thompson's BBC articles epitomise what is wrong with the BBC's current attitude to journalism.
For months they were running one of his articles every week or so, and most times the feedback section would fill up with comments from people disagreeing with him, pointing out the flaws in his arguments, explaining how/what he had misunderstood, detailing factual errors, etc. In my mind, and I'm sure in the minds of others, his articles were becoming a joke and must have been causing some embarrassment at the BBC.
So how did the BBC react?
Did they insist on him doing better research and presenting more sensible arguments? Did they cut back on the number of ill-conceived, subjective crusades he was allowed to go on? Did they decide to drop him entirely?
No.
They dropped the comments section.
Dear Mr Thompson Should we see the BBC article http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3465383.stm as Blair, Birt, the 'new BBC' (post Hutton. Dyke) floating an idea using Bill Thompson as mouthpiece? This an unquestionable piece of rubbish, filled with sensationalism, specious argument and alarmism. Let's take something rather simple. The Metropolitain Police clear-up rate is about 10%, so government 'policing' of the internet is going to have no good effect anyway. Let's take something specious: Malcolm Sentence, her partner, spoke for many when he said: "Jane would still be here if it wasn't for the internet." You know this, presumably, a priori or have you been conducting opinion polls specifically for this article? Let's take something vague AND specious: If we don't like the fact that the net allows traffic to cross national borders without any controls, then we can build a new network that does allow monitoring. Yes? Monitoring of what? Fleshy jpg packets? Anything encrypted? Anything from dodgy states which may have thought about WMD at some stage (thoughtcrime, but I don't suppose you have read THAT book, you're a 'journalism' lecturer). Still, I suppose that you and the BBC are pleased that you have been 'controversial' and 'contemporary', simply based on the fact that you've made a few people angry. Best regards Hugh Barnard
On y va, qui mal y pense!
Here in Finland, and in other contries in Europe (don't know if all, but at least in the ones where I lived) the gov't is the one who assigns domains. THAT SUCKS because only if you are a company/corporation can get a .fi domain.
.fi domain for whatever the teck they want it. Want to put your software or hardware projects online? Want to make a family website? A club website? In Finland you can't!
.com domain.
.fi. Well, just go ahead and control it.
So, normal folks do not have the option to get a
So you see, this system is much more biased against the citizen and in favor of corporations.
So, what I did was, I found a cheap registrar in the US (godaddy.com seems to be rock bottom cheapest) and registered my own
Yeah, my money went to the US, because the fscking government wants to keep control of
Sigged!
I agree. What I would like too see is a totally decetralized internet. The internet protocol should should force that decentralization. No computer should be of central importance on the internet. I wonder if it would be possible to implement it like that?
IANANE (network engineer) but from what I can see the internet is already partially decentralized. The important gateways are scattered around the world. What I don't understand is how they decede who gets the ip adresses. Class A B C. And how they force all the gateways and routers to point a the right networks.
Is it just a general agreement between the owners of the gateway that they will follow a certain rules set by a group??
What if an owner of a lot of important high level gateways decided it wanted to redirect traffic to the wrong adresses. That is give some adresses to a group that was not agreed to by everyone. Would your connection depend on the fact that you go through these gateways or not? Would there be like a conflicting internet were there would be two adresses for one computer??? And since packets can take different routes, would some packets go to one machine and some to the other? Is the internet vulnerable to such an attack by owners of high level gateways? Or does the internet protocol contain something that prevent that kind of chaos by one organization? Is there something in the protocol itself that makes sure that 1 ip asdress = 1 computer??
Just wondering how robust the internet is to an organisation that would try to take it over.
We must fight this before the internet becomes as regulated as television. We need to form a group of people who can be trusted to host the root name servers. I know it won't be easy, but if we don't do it, we will end up with an internet where many controvertial web sites go the way of goatse.
Remember, the root name servers can only be abused if we choose to use them. There is no reason we can't set the rules ourselves, and if the domain registrars disagree, we just use our own servers and pretend they don't exist.
P.S. The Slashdot editors should be embarrased for not covering the goatse.cx domain removal in the Your Rights Online section! This is such a huge story, with censorship of a site so central to slashdot culture (troll culture admittedly, but the importance can't be ignored).
First they came for goatse.cx, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a slashdot troll. (Google "Martin Niemoller")
Why is everyone so gung ho to privatize things nowadays? The only thing we as a people have any control over is the preserve of government. Corporations are accountable only to their shareholders...a handful of wealthy men who care little or or nothing for the welfare of the rest of us. Corporations have the rights of citizens, but not the responsibilities. They exist only to make money. They give nothing to anyone. The government is...in democratic nations, at least...elected by the people, and accountable to their wishes. They do not unexpectedly go bankrupt (usually), merge with other companies, or sell your private information to the highest bidder. We all enjoy the fruits of their labors (roads, schools, new technologies) equally. When the phone companies were privatized, a phone call was a dime. Now they are fifty cents, and we have enjoyed such new innovations as slamming and telemarketer harassment. Can you imagine Microsoft's "Driver Certification Program"...a three-day, 1000-dollar now-you-can-drive, too, seminar? How about Adobe awarding and revoking copyrights? (Dang, they got bought out...guess all my copyrights are worthless now!) What if your water supply was dependent upon the whims of Verisign? (No, I don't want to hold, I've had no water for two weeks...hello?) Thanks, anyway, but I prefer the red tape and innefficancy of MY government to the greed and calousness of THEIR corporation any day of the week.
Whether it's the UN, the US government, certain companies, or even the Slashdot membership controlling the Internet, there is always the possibility of abuse. That's why we need a constitution of sorts. Just as with the constitutions of nations, if there is a clear set of rules about what those in power can do and especially what they cannot do, then I for one would have a lot less issues with handing over control to a government or even a company.
The question then becomes: who will write this constitution? There's no easy answer, but at least the rules and limitations will be out in the open and up for criticism up front. Much better than just putting someone in charge, who might then feel within his rights to, say, point all unresolved DNS lookups at their own registrar service page.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
This is so true. Slashbot moderation is really getting on my nerves lately. What exactly makes this post flamebait? Seriously. I don't see it.
Yeah but, DNS is a fairly high level protocol. From what I can see, it would just make you reroute you for a name that didn't have an IP. At lease if you have the right ip you could still go anywhere you wanted. I was more worried about the lower level internet protocol. Could a company that has control to a lot of gateways do something similar at a the ip level?
I working out a way to break up ICANN and allow lots of competing, innovating domain registrars, I designed the following way to allow the governing body to exist independent of any country.
No government would have the power to change its policies, other than by passing laws on its own citizens.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Bill Thompson is a regular at this one - check some of his previous missives to get a good grasp of his general tone.
Oh yeah, he's a prize idiot. His position is, basically, "governments should keep their hands off everything I do, and regulate everything that I'm not interested in anyway" and also "all corporations are evil, except the ones that make toys I like". I remember he also wrote an article calling on programmers to more more "professional", with his picture in the article, long unbrushed hair, unshaved, in a stained t-shirt with a stupid leer on his face. Bill Thompson, unrelated I'm sure to our Ken Thompson, is nonetheless an embarassment to the name. Still, he's typical of the quality of recent BBC "journalism".
A great FUD merchant if ever I saw one.
The above article, on Linux not having controls to ensure that contributed code is not protected by copyright was the most ignorant piece of junk written. It's interesting to note that when IBM took over a software company, they found numerous open source code contributions inserted into their closed product, and reduced the sale cost of the company by approximately 12 million dollars to allow for the cost of remedying this fact. Linux version control is probably not perfect, but it is transparent and public, and where copyright/ patent transgressions have been found, code has been removed or rejected.
The latest article proposes a totally repugnant idea, the total control of online media. As he mentioned, not all of us live in China, but unfortunately about 25% of the population do, and total government control would be anathema to those people brave enough to oppose the regime.
The internet arose from secure military communications, and later a need for scientists and engineers to diseminate papers and information worldwide. Hundreds of thousands of people have contributed to its development and the results are enjoyed by hundreds of millions. While we may not approve of the child we've created, in general it gives us what we as individuals want, not what Nanny thinks is good for us. There is no denying the internet is exploited by some people, but that is universally true of all theatres of life. Even if the government ran it, can you guarentee that noone would exploit the system? The most classic exploitation has often had the connivance of members of the government.
In addition, anonymity is precious on the net. It should be hard for people to be traced if they do not want to be. This fact alone allows freedom of expression. If Bill wants a different net, he's free to go and develop it.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
... not user-as-consumer."
Which is exactly why don't want it in the hands of corporations or corporate bodies such as ICANN. By their very nature, they view everyone as one of
* competitor
* supplier
* customer
(sometimes more than one at a time)
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
There's a lot of ways you can set each of them up, but the only fundamental difference is who those bodies are accountable to. Corporations are accountable to their shareholders. Governments are accountable to their citizens. The latter is based on the principle of one person, one vote; the former is based on the principle of one dollar*, one vote.
I don't trust either kind of body, but I distrust governments less.
*or equivalent in local currency
Obviously a top-tier military such as the US could easily blow up the island, but it's close proximity to England and the fact that England currently recognizes the sovereignty of the island might mean that England itself might react to some other nation attacking the island as a threat in their "backyard", much as the US considered the Soviet involvement with Cuba to be a threat.
So I think the main potential threats to Sealand are England and, as long as England remains our bitch, the US. If enough rich people in England and the US come to depend on Sealand in the same way they depend on Switzerland, it would make a military attack there unpopular. It would be very interesting to see what would happen if the US claimed (rightly or wrongly) that "terrorists" were using Sealand...
Also, the value of Sealand is not in it's physical incarnation (how much to a bunch of servers really cost?) but its legal status. Even if it were blown up, they could just build it up again (especially if they had distributed, encrypted backups, with a set of at least three people holding the keys with the usual provisions about never having all members present at the same time, etc...)
Although from this photo the whole thing looks a little low-rent...
We need a way to translate names to numbers, not a new world government.
This takes a clue, and a willingness to cooperate.
Look at how usenet is managed. Without the central point of capture DNS suffers from (the root zone) usenet cannot be controlled and it's administration is a boring technical fact, not an object of a power grab by bored Swiss political wonks.
Need Mercedes parts ?
I'm talking about a completely decentralized network with no central body allocating addresses, with strong encryption at the link level and end-to-end, guaranteeing privacy and freedom of speech to anyone who can connect to it.
Freenet and the Freehaven project's second-generation onion router have laid a lot of the groundwork, but they're designed to be internet overlays. What we need is a truly decentralized packet-switching network, independent of the internet, capable of operating over an ad hoc collection of wireless, leased line, modem and (for the moment) internet connections. The internet can function as scaffolding but nothing in the new network's design should be internet-specific.
It's already possible to build small networks of this kind - see Mute, for example. Each machine's address is derived from its public key, and you find routes by broadcasting. But broadcasting every query isn't scalable, so in my PhD research I'm looking for scalable ways to route packets across a large, untrusted network with no address aggregation. If you have any ideas, please reply and I'll send you my email address. :-)