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."
beastie porn is a small price to pay for free speech!
or if not possible, any Scandinavian country. They have a very good culture of privacy. Plus nobody will ever tell the Swiss what to do or bomb them because everyone has their money there.
The internet should not be the product of politics and debate. Absolute lunacy, and a totally stupid idea, as well.
When its controlled by the government, it will be lobbied into a capitalist tool of consumer exploitation. Profit at its best.
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.
The problem with government control is 'which' government? How do they agree? A lot of governments wouldn't want anything opposing the dominant political group/party/mindset. Other governments wouldn't want any religious references to anything other then Jesus/Buddah/Muhammed/etc.
If a government wants to impose restrictions on servers in their own countries, fine, but not outside.
The articles author starts out with "How to control what is online..." but never asks the question if it should be controlled. (To a very limited extent, yes, but certainly not to the degree he's suggesting.)
;) )
;) We're responsible for our own actions.
Then, he goes on to give an example of a woman who was killed by "someone whose fantasies of killing were nurtured, if not engendered, by the pornographic images he found so easily on the web". I find it difficult to believe that someone went from being a perfectly normal person to a killer sjust he viewed some internet porn. (If that were true, half of Slashdot readership could turn into killers!
Then, his solution to all this is to let the government control the internet, and to "change" it to support that control. There are two problems with that:
1) The government is not some giant parental figure who's supposed to protect us from harm, no matter how much liberalism would like us to believe that.
2) Since he suggests "changing" the internet, but provides no plan on doing that, I have to question whether he has any idea of what would be involved. Market-driven forces are the only thing that really make significant changes now, and giving control the the government would completely undermine that. It would have to be in the interest of the market to have changes made to the internet, and until that happens, change won't.
libertarianswag.com
Someone, somewhere gets murdered and the victims blame the internet. Johnny Lydon curses and someone gets their panties in a bunch.
There is no aspect of anybodies life that the government does not seek to control. They will attempt to control the net. There will always be some whining class of people victimized by something they see as evil. Government now switches between liberal/conservative politicians each with their own sets of victim classes expecting special treatment. I don't expect the future to be bright for an unregulated internet.
I guess he's a columnist and therefore paid to think the unthinkable, but there are more productive ways of doing that than by making yourself a laughing stock whom nobody listens to. A simple search of this site would have given him an idea of the problems with "just replacing email with something better and spam-proof", and that's a tiny part of what he's suggesting. The way the internet is built may have aspects that suck pretty badly, but like it or not we're stuck with it. Perhaps if someone had made these suggestions in 1990 there'd be a chance of replacing it wholesale, but not now. Too much has been built on it.
Besides which, he'll need to do a lot more to convince me that the internet is better in the hands of governments than bodies like ICANN than just say "because I say so". He glosses over issues like repressive regimes with little more than "well if the people don't like their government they can always kick them out".
If this was a one-off piece I'd be prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt but you can read for yourselves his previous pieces on the BBC website - they're almost without exception inane, badly-researched drivel.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
Who the hell trusts their government? Who the hell wants someone else to tell them, and everybody what they can and cannot see. Information should not be controlled, and it can't ever be completely controlled.
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?"
Not only should the internet "...not be another TV or cinema, it should be a free, user-as-peer and user-controllable media an essential (perhaps the most) tenet of "hacker metaphysics" is that "whatever one mind can achieve, another can duplicate and surpass". Control the content of the Internet? Impossible. Just ask the Chinese.
Quod scripsi, scripsi.
Government control is worse, not better!
On the whole, government control of these resources is a bad thing. The best thing is to engineer it so that is no need for a single governing body at all. That way there is no lock-in to any governing body.
Aren't there already several alternate roots for DNS we could all be supprting? That's the way to keep DNS free--have many competing providers. Some can be corporate, some volunteer.
As for ridding the system of assigned numbers (IANA), that's tougher.
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
have control of the internet. It is the best and the worst of society, and while I agree it should be policed by enforcement agencies against crimes committed by citizens of that country that are illegal in that country, it should never be up to those same countries to censor content that may not be illegal in other countries.
There can also be standards bodies, who are a community of users who recommend standards for the rest of the community to follow, but they should not have control either.
Disagree? Reply, don't mod down.
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.
yes. but the world wide web, which is the most important part of internet today (and the part which is used by muggles and other non-geeks almost exclusivelly) is European creation (CERN, Switzerland)
SHE does throw dice.
And if we give it to 'a' country - like the US government, who already seems to think they own it - we'll all be more subject to their insanities.
In addition, the whole concept of 'excluding content' is simply the wrong way to go about it. Censorship never accomplishes its goals, nor does it elevate content. Any step in that direction is a 'foot in the door', and excluding things because we find them objectionable is poor practice; I can probably find someone (or even a 'category' of someones) who dislikes what any given post on /. says.
The way to deal with child pornography is not "banning" it; it's prosecuting people who create and purchase it. It's working to fix the economic problems that create situations where parents will submit their children to such indignities; it's finding the sick bastards that molest and photograph children in the more affluent parts of the world. It's not giving some entity a mandate to protect us from viewing something we find offensive - because it's only a short step to protecting us from viewing something they find offensive. Like, say, open source software that doesn't honor DRM legislation.
The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.
Thinking outside my Head
The Internet is about freedom, not about censorship by the Government. Screw Them.
Note the excessively arrogant language, and the prevailing assumption that the author is already right, and the implication all that remains is to hammer out the implementation details of his perfectly reasonable proposal. This is pure flamebait. Thompson might as well have called this "A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Internet from being a Burden to the Children and Despotic Governments of the World, and for making it Beneficial to Media Conglomorates."
I'm tempted to guess that he wrote it with the intention of raising the ire of slashdot readers, and getting the expected bazillion comments that every idiotic net-reform proposal gets.
Of course, there's always the chance that he really did think the proposal reasonable, and didn't intend to be trolling. If you believe that, check out his closing paragraphs:
Lumping the United States with China on a list of countries that "[deny] human rights"? News flash, Thompson! Can you guess what would have happened to Dan Ellsberg if he'd stolen the Pentagon Papers from the British government and published them in the NY Times? He'd STILL be in jail under the Offical Secrets Act! (Of course, the real irony is that Thompson is complaing about the U.S.-controlled internet because it's too free.) Your flamebait counter should be redlined about now.
It's a troll. Nothing to see here, move along.
Part of the beauty of the Internet is that no single entity has control over it. It's simply a giant network; you can do anything you want with it, whether it's mirroring the Linux Kernel Archive, running a domain name registration business, or hosting pornographic images.
I don't think these people have quite the right idea of what exactly the Internet is. It isn't just another distributor/consumer medium, like radio or television. The Internet is an interactive environment in which information is distributed on an on-demand basis; that is, the user chooses what content is delivered to him. Because the medium is "ask and ye shall receive," rather than "we're stuffing this junk down your throat whether you like it or not," such stringent control of content as that found on radio or television is really unnecessary. On the Internet, any user who knows what he's doing will be quite capable of protecting himself.
Unless, of course, your goal is to stifle the free exchange of information...
"Screw slashdot." -- Linus Torvalds
It seems to me that this piece conflates two issues:
- Should the net be controlled by large corporations?
- Should the content of the net be regulated?
and that it gets the priorities backwards. It only briefly addresses the problem of having a network controlled by large corporations and focusses on regulation. In my view, corporate control is dangerous, as is regulation.The primary problem with corporate control is that the corporations will act in their own business interests rather than in the interests of users and people in general. So far things haven't been too bad, but it is easy to see what could happen. We could get lockin to particular proprietary technologies, e.g. MS Windows and IE, including things like DRM and spyware. Furthermore, precisely because corporations are not governments, they are exempt from constraints on censorship such as the First Amendment in the United States. They could censor content in their own interests. So I would like to see control of the net taken away from the big corporations.
However, transferring control to governments is also a bad idea, precisely because that will facilitate regulation. The fact is, most countries in the world are not open and democratic. Many, probably most governments engage in censorship and would do what they could to censor the net. There is a long-standing movement in the United Nations for a "New International Communication Order". Some of the arguments for this reflect the legitiamte desire of less developed countries not to be dominated by rich, developed countries, but the actual proposals that have been made periodically in the UN, particularly by UNESCO, have clearly had censorship as their primary objective. The current political movement to transfer control of the net to governments is just the latest incarnation of this movement.
The argument for regulation made in the BBC piece is weak. It merely repeats tired old arguments that violent publications (whether on the net or on paper) foster violence and that there is too much porn. The evidence for this is incredibly weak. And in view of the very limited harm that certain kinds of content can be argued to do, as opposed to the very great harm that censorship would do, it seems clear to me that facilitating censorship is a bad idea.
The Internet is not a thing, it's an agreement.
See What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else.
One of the top countries pushing for gubmint control over the Internet is China. You know the country that has it's own firewall to help them government sniff out subversives.
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".
I'd am VERY suspicious of such gubmints, the motives behind them dont seem very "egalitarian". They are self serving, and mostly trying to prevent the free exchange of ideas IMHO.
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.
We not only allow images of bestiality, we allow them to be seen on the public streets. Our art books are full of them.
Leda Lights Up
The internet is publishing. It is no different from any other kind of publishing, other than the difficulty of effectively censoring it.
KFG
Jesus Christ people, if you hang your free speech arguments on the right to show videos of daddy fucking a dog, you will lose those rights.
This is my sig.
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!
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.
Governments are such good managers and because all the governments of the world get along so well, you can be sure they'll have no problems making progress on every need that arises. Oh yeah, this is simply a brilliant idea.
I love the quote "It will be a network on which freedom of speech is guaranteed by law, not simply allowed because of technical decisions on network architecture made 30 years ago by a bunch of academic computer scientists." Yeah, I see China hopping right on board with this.
And let's face it, rebuilding the internet from scratch, as he proposes, poses no real technical challenge. All we have to do is come up with a new set of standards and a new set of hardware and software that supports those standards. That'll only take a week or two, right? At a cost of maybe a few hundred dollars, right?
This guy is clearly brilliant and sees things much clearer than "a bunch of academic computer scientists."
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...
Democracy was also invented in Europe (by Greeks and Celts, later adopted by the Romans), does that mean the US can't be a democracy?? Oh wait..
Anyway, at present the biggest part of the internet is outside the US so control by the US government would be ridiculous.
Another bad property of the US is that it has too much political power in the world, and is thus hated passionately by some, and is untrustworthy at best to many other countries. This should be enough of an argument in itself to keep the US government from controlling the global internet.
Individual governments? They just all create their own great firewall around them, eliminating the current free exchange of information. There are always a few bad apples. There was kiddie and beastie porn before the web, and it'll probably be there if the web goes away.
The internet is the first medium that allows users to publish information themselves outside the control of the government, and without the need for enormous capital investment. This is threatening for many governments an corps, but will in the long term only benefit the world as a whole. Keep the internet free!
Learn from the mistakes of others. There isn't enough time to make them all yourself.
Apparently no one.
The UN is the last place you want with any control over the internet. Why you ask? Simple, outside of the Security Council the UN is proof of what is wrong with a pure democracy. Piss-ant countries have votes of equal strength of large countries. This allows them to band together to punish countries which adopt ideals they don't like, have flourishing economies, complain about the piss-ant countries human rights violations, and etc.
Look at the crap that goes on in the GA concerning Israel. No one takes the GA seriously anymore. Armnament comittees and Human Rights committees are routinely stacked with the worst abusers if not directly chaired by them. The Iraq Oil for Food program was a cash cow for the UN. The admin fees were exhorbinant and when some countries complained they got bought off.
If anything the net should be controlled by a publically controlled body. Something that people can get a hand on. Governments and world governments make businesses look like saints.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
The United States of America is a republic, dumb ass.
Why don't you, and everyone reading this who doesn't understand this simple point, just repeat to themselves 30 times every night before they go to bed:
A republic and a democracy are not two mutually exclusive things.
A republic and a democracy are not two mutually exclusive things.
A republic and a democracy are not two mutually exclusive things.
A republic and a democracy are not two mutually exclusive things.
A republic and a democracy are not two mutually exclusive things.
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
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
"We allow images of consensual sex in our cinemas, but not images of bestiality or child abuse. Why should the net be any different?"
"Freddy Got Fingered" contained images of bestiality. I know there are tons of movies with images of child abuse.
As for real-life bestiality or child abuse, there are already laws for that.
Use their feedback form and let them know what you think. Be polite. Here is what I wrote:
------------------
A poor article with several serious flaws.
Firstly, it accepts without discussion the proposition that people are simply influenced by what they see on the Internet. This is far from obvious.
Secondly, it pretends that the Internet is simple to change. This is hubris. The Internet has grown, not been built. There is a fundamental difference.
Thirdly, it pretends that the Internet is a channel like cinema. It is not. It is fundamentally about individuals choosing protocols and applications with which to exchange ideas. The sheer force behind individual's desire to choose and control their personal communications with other individuals means that censoring the Internet is not just a bad idea, it is impossible.
Responsible authors should not pretend that this is a simple matter of social and technical engineering. If the 20th century taught us one thing, it is that such projects fail, miserably, and often at great cost.
Evils and evil people are a product of human nature and its many faces, not of the Internet. It would be more constructive to analyse how violent and dangerous individuals can be identified and isolated from the general population than to pretend that a simple tweaking of our communications infrastructure can eliminate this kind of tragedy.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
While I agree with you that the UN General Assembly suffers from a lack of moral clarity, I think you are confusing the GA with the entire UN System of Organizations.
It is highly unlikely that if the UN were given administrative control of the Internet that the General Assembly would be dealing with day-to-day policy. Instead, the GA would draft a charter for a UN organization, which would then be given somewhat free reign to manage and implement those policies. UN organizations are frequently endowed with very strongly pro-human-rights-and-democracy charters and are not obviously controlled by any particular country.
So while I agree with you that the UN is an imperfect organization, its track record is largely positive (which, of course, isn't newsworthy) and therefore I would be more comfortable giving control of the Internet to them than any other body proposed so far.
Before we can change the net, and make it more able to reflect the real public interest, taking it under democratic control, we must remove it from the hands of these groups, whose time, like that of the elves in Middle-Earth, is over.
So what's more democratic than a system that allows anyone to create content that anyone else on Earth can read?
The places where that doesn't hold true -- China, frex -- just happen to be the same places where the government controls the Internet. I don't think that's a coincidence.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
... 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
The whole idea of trying to censor the Internet is pointless anyway. It CAN'T BE censored. Even the friggin' murderous Chicoms can't censor their part of the web, and they have 100% control over all servers and switches. They can and do shoot people for posting politically incorrect things, but they can't keep a lid on it. Truth is getting out anyway, as is beastie porn.
It -can't- be regulated. That's what makes it wonderful
To follow this up, the Internet --and computing in general-- is truly a global phenomenon. It's true the original networks (ARPANet, DARPANet) were created and based in the U.S., but there are many technologies that are critical to the overall Interent that were developed overseas. One notable example, as pointed out by the parent) is the original HTTP draft protocols and implementations (CERN) that we now know as the World Wide Web. Another obvious example is Linux (Finland), the OS of choice for many of the servers that exist on the Internet, and which is used in some fashion by nearly every government in existance.
The idea that computing resources, especially the internet, should be under the control of government entities is really laughable. Furthermore, it simply can't be done, no matter the intentions or abilities of said government. For examples, look to China and the Great Red Firewall. Then there is the U.S.'s attempt to restrict exports of 128 bit encryption technologies - we all know how well that worked.
No matter how many of my rights are taken away, somehow I still don't feel safe. -Frigid Monkey
> "When its controlled by the government, it will be lobbied into a capitalist tool of consumer exploitation. Profit at its best"
.edu. Nice little payoff. Esther was by her own admission clueless about the whole thing and did nothing. It's probably just a concidence she was in IBM commercials at the time.
Wake up, it's already happened. At the end of one meeting 4 years ago the head trademark lawyer for IBM bragged they'd spend 2 years of their $30M a year Washington lobbying budget to make sure no new top level domains had been created to protect their intellectual property interests. Dave Farber was at that meeting (as was Vint "Darth" Cerf).
Roger Cochetti, then a VP of IBM, helped Ira Magazier pick the "interim" ICANN board in secret - when that was supposed to have been done by the internet community. Cochetti is now an NSI VP and figures prominently behind the scenes of ICANN.
The IFWP effort, started in Becky Burr's (US Department of Commerce who have oversight over ICANN) office at the suggestion of Kathy Kleinman and Mikki Barry and had 3 meetings worldwide - Reston Va, Geneva, Singapore to determins consensus points to use as guidelines to create bylaws and elect a board for the organization that would replace IANA. While this was going on Cochetti and Magaziner were running around in secret getting the likes of Ether Dysan and Mike Roberts on board. Mike Single handedly tanked the IFWP effort (notice he has Farbers ear) and became the first president of ICANN and his organization was the recipeint of the "intellectual infrastructure fund" - the domain tax fund that we all paid into back then, and and
(" Esther Dyson says that she was approached by Roger Cochetti of IBM and Ira Magaziner in Aspen, Colorado and asked if she would be interested in joining the ICANN Board. The IFWP wrap up was finally completely derailed by ICANN's refusal to participate in the meeting."
ICANN was created to do one thing: make new tlds at a time when it seemed (at least to the US government) the US government had to step in to solve the war between the IAHC camp (who had just been shut down) and the alt root camp (who seemed to be making progress). Magaziner met with us all and created the "white paper" that was going to create 7 new tlds immediatly. Trademark lawyers and the EU freaked and when it was revised as the "green paper" it had punted to "ICANN will create a method to elect a board and a process to create new tlds". Instead they spent 3 years futzing around with the UDRP and other things trademaek laywrs wanted and didn't get round to new tlds till the fall of 2000 and it must have had all of ten minutes thought put into it and was intentinally lame as hell. To this day the new tlds that were picked are still viewed by ICANN as a "feasability study" to deteremine the effect of net stability when adding new tlds. Never mind in that period 100 new cctlds were added almost all of which were commmercial in nature.
Then you have the "Government Advisory Committe" the well named GAC of ICANN. Governments of the world get to meet in secret and "advise" ICANN.
Govrernments and the Tradmark Lobby have already coopted ICANN. It's foolish to worry that the ITU/UN will let this happen if they're in control, it's already happened.
So, don't move control of the internet to ineffective treaty organizations, move it to you
Need Mercedes parts ?
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.
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ICANN has _nothing_ to do with what particular machines are able to serve. It's jurisdiction ends at what IP addresses a machine has, and the DNS.
Seems we're once again dealing with political forces who simply don't understand that by design, that level of control over the internet simply does not exist.
another case of papa governments trying to decide what's best for everyone in the world.
the whole principle of the net is freedom, freedom of information, the internet is just the pipe. it's up to the individual LANs of the internet to control content.
people want to make the internet just like TV, which if you havent noticed, it incredibly shitty, and people are flocking to the net for entertainment, so now big companies behind the government or governments who control the media want to turn the net into another television..
last I checked, the net was for development and the trade of ideas and information, if a few weirdos want to express their horrid obsessions, and it's legal where it is.. fine, it's up to where it isnt legal to block that content.
thing is, the US government would get in trouble for blocking sites as of the current situation, but if th net is a controlled medium by large governments, they cant get yelled at.
in most other countries, it'll be taken just like that, here in the states, it'll be taken away, with the horribll ie of "It's to protect you from yourselves and terrorism, because we care about your safety!"
ah, this is the problem, see, the US government can be changed the way it currently stands, though it's getting harder every day. they keep wanting to do things that will make it harder for us to run our own lives independently.
before you know it, we'll have to call the local police to ask if we can go play in the kiddy pool because those big deep pools are dangerous for people who are even in their 20's.(note: sarcasm)
keep the internet open, it isnt television, and I think this is why developers of various universities are repeating what was made in the 60's and 70's with the internet2, because intener 1 will be a pile of ash within the next ten years at this rate with ads everywhere and TV commercials popping up on your monitor every 5 minutes, or propaganda ads reminding you that the government is your all knowing source of protection, etc, along with those required safety cameras in your monitors to ensure that you're safe all the time.
we're living the last days of internet freedom here, enjoy them while you can.
and I wouldnt be surprised if independent companies start their own networks again like back in the early 90's with aol and compuserve and link together to provide a friendlier internet if at all possible.
that's right, touch Sealand and we'll be in Washington by sun-up. The English
sig under development
You need to go back to first principles and examine the legal framework of the internet. A lot of people refer to it as "the public internet" or some sort of global resource.
It is absolutely not.
What it is is a network of networks. We all agree, implicitly by our use of a specific protocol suite, to interchage packets. But each piece is privatly owned. I own mine, you own yours, and every bit in the middle is owned by somebody else.
None of it is publically owned or a public resource. It is a network of private networks.
There is no central control, no government licenses. ICANN/UN/ITU only has control for as much as you're willing to let them have it.
You'll notice that routing is and under the aegis of ICANN or any government. That's because there was a very sensible decision made when breaking up the AUP defined arpanet to pass this off to the community. Sadly, registration of names and number was neglected, and this left a critical choke point for power hungry lawyers to rush in to fill the vacuum that a lack of control leads to in situations like this.
So here we end up talking about which is worse, ICANN, the UN or the ITU while usenet, routing and a host of other coordinated activities hum merrily along freely (as in software and beer) with no need for "coordination" from governments of any kind.
Question everything, then follow the money.
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Is it any wonder that Slashdot's bid for the ICANN contract was rejected?
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/