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.
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.
"Idiotic" is a bit strong. The Constitution of the United States says that there is no 'criminal content'. Images of child abuse would be evidence of criminal behavior. Let's not confuse the issue by muddying the waters with emotion. I believe child molesters should be shot; send 'em back, they're defective. But let's examine another 'crime', any crime... like, say, defacement of public property. Does the fact that it's illegal to deface public property mean we should remove all pictures of graffiti from the internet as 'criminal content'?
I have no objection to an investigation into the handles used on graffiti websites; but banning the content is the wrong way to go about it. That's why our constitution opposes censorship.
And I don't care what Baudrillard says; the Internet was the first taste of true expression available to everyone who can get into a public Library.
In the end, that last sentence is what will doom the Internet. Big Business and the Government cannot condone a situation where some geek with a webserver is equal in venue to say, Ford, or Wal-Mart, or CNN... They cannot tolerate a truly free forum, and will do their best to convince you that you cannot, either. In your case, it appears that they have been successful.
Thinking outside my Head
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.
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
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. :-)