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Should the UN Replace ICANN?
An anonymous reader writes "Yahoo news has a story on how some developing countries want control of the assignment of network names and numbers turned over to an international body, such as the UN's ITU (International Telecommunication Union)."
You want control turned over to an international body. OK, that sounds reasonable. But the UN? I mean... how about somebody with a little more tech savvy and a little less politics?
...can you imagine trying to register as domain name with a bureauacracy like the UN in charge?
Jeez....
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
I don't want the UN deciding what is and isn't spam...at least the first amendment is valid in the US, an international body may decide that "hate speech" is illegal and therefore decide to censor certain websites like countries do now. I would prefer as little world government interference with the internet as possible.
http://chrono.posterous.com/
I'm reading The Checkbook and the Cruise Missle, in which Arundhati Roy says injustices increase as decision-makers are geographically separated from those affected by the decision. She cites the World Bank in Geneva, and the IMF, the WTO, as examples.
.com, US sites will have to use .co.us like everyone else? That seems reasonable. If they just set up root DNS servers that don't answer requests for .com (or .org, .gov, etc.), those servers will be more convenient to client hosts in their region. Software will get patched to check both authorities, since it's an easy fix, & US sites will register both types of domains to maximize their availability. Then, over an excruciating number of years, while everyone has to support both naming styles, .com & the other 3-letter domains will die out, & the plaintiffs will have their way.
So Third-World countries want power over names? And they think they can accomplish that by moving the naming committee to UN Headquarters in New York? The UN didn't work for poor people in Iraq, or Palestine. Why will it work in the case of Internet names?
This is the first case I know of where software standards have reached the level of world politics. (It's different from software patents in Europe.) I don't think they ever belong there. Software standards have developed reasonably well under Darwinian conditions: it may take decades, but eventually everyone switches to open standards because there's an advantage to being able to communicate. E.g., everyone uses TCP/IP now, not IPX or any other proprietary network protocol. I know, I know, we're still fighting this battle daily, but you can see the positive trend, & it's happening without any legislation or government enforcement.
What I'm getting at is Third World countries should just set up their own root DNS servers. Whatever it is they want -- get rid of the 3-letter root domains? So instead of
I'm gonna sound like a Wired columnist, but here goes: The Internet is suggesting new kinds of economics, government, maybe religion.... We should stick with what works, instead of imposing traditional kinds of governance onto the Internet.
Well, if the UN can manage CEB [unsystem.org], CTBTO [ctbto.org], ECA [uneca.org], ECE [unece.org], ECLAC [eclac.org], ESCAP [unescap.org], ESCWA [escwa.org.lb], FAO [fao.org], UNCTAD [unctad-undp.org], HLCM [unsystem.org], MA HREF="http://ceb.unsystem.org/hlcp/default.htm">HL CP, IACSD [unsystem.org], IANWGE [unsystem.org], IAPSO [iapso.org], and about 5 times as many more, I think they can handle one more. :)
UN's record isn't that great IMHO
Oh really? Of the organizations I listed (in alphabetical order), how many are bloated and overbudget? How many have involved scandal of any kind? How many have been largely ineffective? Etc?
How about you start by telling us what the heck any of these organizations actually do and what real and meaningful good they actually have accomplished? It is up to the UN and its defenders to prove they are doing some good, not the other way around.
What I do know is that none of those 13+ organizations you rattled off has been able to stop genocide in Yugoslavia or Rwanda nor have they been able to prevent the UN from being a money launderer for Saddam.
Brian Ellenbergero/~ Join us now and share the software
You never hear the small, positive stories. The media want to see blood. It sells.
WE DON'T NEED NO BLOG CONTROL.
I agree that the UN is the wrong body for this, because the UN is an international political body, and control over any essential element of the Internet on a global scale should be as far removed from political control as possible.
Is it just me or is there a lot of misunderstanding here about what UN is. UN doesn't have an army that can stop genocides. UN is made up of sovereign nations that can choose to cooperate in order stop genocides (or whatever) or not. If the countries within it (especially the most powerful ones - guess where I'm going with this...) decide its in their interest not to stop genocides (or whatever), then by definition UN can't stop them. Seems unfair to cause UN to be powerless and then blame it for being powerless.
The UN faithfully delivered all suggested contracts to a commitee manned by 5 standard members of the council, several was marked as financially suspicious but none of these were investigated. The US did however block hundreds of other contracts for what they said was security reasons, the other 4 countries blocked none. This was [b]not[/b] a fault of the UN administration
Furthermore, the money involved in these contracts are dwarfed by both the amount of money mysteriously disappearing from Iraqui oilwells nowadays, and the amount of good old-fashioned smuggling out of Iraq pre-war.
The "genocide" in Yugoslavia is a fairly good example actually, because before NATO/US moved in, people on all sides were killing eachother pretty equally. It was war. However western media somehow(for what reasons? by whose decision?) misrepresented statistics and the whole situation blew up when NATO went in. To add insult to this, they never went in with ground fources to break things up. Europe(Germany? my memory fails me) premature approval of Kosovo didn't help much either. The UN tactic of waiting it out, and not arbitrerarily choosing one side to side with was prudent; and it's only our acute sense of stupidity that keeps us from seeing it.
Lastly, the world is a big place; listing the disasters of the world is not proof the UN is not working. They are not, and never were intended to be world police. They are not perfect, and they don't have a magic wand to remove problems. Problems often seem quite different depending on the perspective, and while I'm sure you're sure your perspective is right, I'm equally sure mine is right.
Oh, and sorry for not providing links, but I don't have them handy; and you're probably just as good at searching as I am :)
"" How about taking the safety labels off everything, and let the stupidity-problem solve itself? """
So what you're saying, you'd rather have ONE country and its ideals control what is and what is not acceptable in the Internet?
Okay.
May I remind you that while spam is an entirely American invention, it still is a worldwide problem. As such it would probably make sense to fight it globally rather than individually in national levels, which is exactly what is happening and not working right now.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
It's kinda hard to have UN solve anything when its biggest member:
a) is not paying its dues
b) does not want to respond to genocide w/in a year or two of its happening
c) has veto on all votes of the security council
Get a clue.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
I would add that up until the invasion of Kuwait, the former Bush Administration was selling arms to Saddam. Additionally, most of the WMD raw materials including bioweapons cultures came from Saddam's good buddies in the US. So it is really funny to watch all this criticism of the UN when it was the Regan Administration (and later the first Bush administration) who gave active support to Saddam's WMD ambitions.
The UN could not do anything because the member countries of the Security Council who were generally much closer geographically to Iraq were (rightly as it turned out) afraid of what would happen when Saddam was ousted.
In other news, we can look at the nepotism that goes on wrt Iraq contracts under the Bush Administration (Haliburton anyone?) and see strong parallels to the OFF issues. Therefore the US government must be bad and we should get rid of it? I don't know anyone who reacts this way to the US Gov't except strangely those who are responsible for supporting this type of morally bankrupt government.
The UN has been coming of age in recent years, and this is likely to be the source of a lot of the hard feelings. The WTO which used to be a sounding board for US corporate interests is now becoming more egalitarian with the third world countries standing up to their interests much better than in the past. Similarly, the US cannot just assume that other countries (particularly those in the EU) will simply bow to US economic, trade, and even foreign policy. The UN has become a strong force for Europe, Africa, and Latin America, and this is a direct threat to the global supremacy of the US. This is why there is so much bitterness against it from here.
Sure there is some corruption, but there is corruption in every other burocracy in the world. What is news is that for the first time since WWII, the US is opposed by a community of nations in a variety of ways from trade policy to its international agenda. There is a lot of cooperation too but nobody mentions this.
The UN would do well to take over the duties of the IANA and the ICANN. And again this is because it would give poorer nations more just representation in these policies.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
And they have recently decided that what is happening in sudan is not genocide [cnn.com].
The problem with the term "genocide," until international law, is that it has an extremely strict definition under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (a treaty from 1951). While the UN committee found that they couldn't strictly, under the treaty, call it genocide under international law, they did point out that serious crimes against humanity were being perpetrated in Darfur. Crimes against humanity are just as prosecutable, and in many cases easier to prove in international courts and tribunals than genocide, with quite similar punishments. The problem is in assuming that the term "genocide" has the same meaning in both international politics and law. It doesn't. International law often makes much more strict determinations of terms, because of how treaties and customary law works. It's not like Sudan is getting off easy in this matter. The Security Council is soon likely to pass (based on the report) a resolution most likely creating a tribunal to prosecute these serious crimes occurring in Darfur. You'll also note that the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda was established less than a year after the crimes there started taking place, and has since delivered convictions in cases.
With the tsunami aid effort, they were mostly concerned with holding meetings in 5 star hotels while other people did the real work.
Generally, I prefer to get my information from better sources than a blog that repeatedly uses such stellar examples of journalistic writing as the use of the terms "UNocrat," "lefties," "deranged pimply-faced trolls" (a term applied to people who disagree with them!) and "The Queen of the High Priest Vulture Elite" (referencing the UNICEF director). See for yourself! Their only source for their accusation that the UN is not providing sufficient support is an ill-defined "fact sheet" that they don't even corroborate with additional sources, nor tell where this "fact sheet" even came from. I would hope people would do much more research than just assuming that such a vitriolic blog posting is true.
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What I do know is that none of those 13+ organizations you rattled off has been able to stop genocide in Yugoslavia or Rwanda nor have they been able to prevent the UN from being a money launderer for Saddam.
And they didn't stop the tsunami disaster - that should have been preemtively prevented like America preemted Iraq using WMDs. And of course they should have moved in right away when GWB got reelected.
But tell me, wtf does that have to do with the bloody governmence of the internet?
Has ICANN?
-- . . ramblin' . . .
Everybody commits attrocities.
Jesus fuck, if that's how you lead off, I'd like a bit of assurance that you don't live within two hundred miles of me. Fuck, what's your attrocity---making cockpuppets from the neighbors' dogs?
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
The denigration of the UN, so mindlessly echoed by many on here, is a neocon tactic designed to set up the New American Century [newamericancentury.org]. Just look at the smearing of the IAEA (and subsequent total failure of the US to do any better). It's sad when people are so ignorant of history that they forget why the UN was created in the first place, or how Germany and Japan undermined the League of Nations as a critical part of their imperial manouevres in the 30's.
I would add to this that the neocons are neither conservative by any classic sense nor are they new. I consider myself both a progressive in mission and a conservative in methodology. The more I study however, the more I fear that my country is sliding towards a fascist style of government based on authoritarianism in both the family and the government.
People need to take a minute to think about the agenda behind this constant rubbishing of the UN. Is Empire really what Americans want? Possibly not, but there's no way of knowing: see e.g. Mike Scheuer, former head of CIA's bin Laden unit, who points out that the underlying reasons for Arab terrorism or the implications of America's continued imperial expansion are simply not part of the political dialogue in America right now.
The UN is largely a confederation of world states, which come together to negotiate treaties and develop international legal traditions (such as the Geneva Convention) and approach common problems. Nobody here has suggested, for example, that we should do away with the WHO, so it seems that everyone here agrees that the UN has a purpose and a mission.
Regarding the issue of the underlying reasons for Arab Terrorism.... Ok, I am relatively nonpartisan.... Anyway, this is a failure of the US government of which both our political parties are equally at fault. Additionally I think we need to look too at the question of the formation of an international terrorist network, how they derive their support, and what we can do about it now. People think of state sponsored terrorism because that was a standard tactic of both the US and USSR during the cold war. However a new problem has arisen which requires no sponsor. Indeed, the monster of terrorism requires only a lawless space. It thrives on injustice because this is the source of its support.
So the only solution to the problem of international terrorism is social justice and the rule of law throughout the world. I am sorry to say that Iraq has made things worse on at least one of these fronts. I think that the objecting members of the UNSC (China, France, Germany, etc.) have been largely vindicated in their judgement.
This is on-topic because people are afraid of being restrained by the UN so they want to undermine it even on this discussion board regarding something seemingly unrelated.
The UN does an excellent job at many things including common infrastructure for vaccinations, radio spectrum, etc. The functions of the IANA and ICANN would be things that they would do well with regardless of their other failures. Even the neocons^W neofascists don't argue against these functions.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP