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EU Domain Registries & ICANN
rob_levine writes "Following on from the announcement a few weeks ago that the U.S. Department Of Commerce intends to retain control of the Internet's root domain servers (originally to be relinquished in 2006), several EU domain registries are preparing to build, test and install a system to prevent U.S. government meddling, according to this article in The Register.
Could this be the beginning of the end of the centralised autocracy that is ICANN?"
So you're now saying that Europe will depend upon China for missile defense? :-) Brilliant national defense strategy.
And per capita military expenditure is a red herring. As things currently stand, the _Pakistani_ army could almost overrun Germany in a conventional war (and definitely overrun Italy or Greece) if no one else stopped them.
Btw, I'm not saying the Pakistani army even want to roll into the Germany, it's an example. The point is, if Europe ever needs to project its power outwards, it'd find it an uphill task because even Grade-3 countries are becoming a match for the once-mighty European powers.
And if you really believe the EU leadership's propaganda that everything can be solved by sitting across a table then I feel sorry for you (maybe you should have attended this conference). Even Europe's chief bargaining chip (trade and access to markets) will mean less and less in the future as economies in East and South Asia eclipse the traditional European powerhouses.
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Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn, while working at DARPA (a U.S. military defense research group).
For example is the WWW (HTTP), which is what most people see as the internet, an American invention?
Depends on how you look at it. The first web browser was invented by Tim Berners-Lee, who is British. The technology behind it (HTTP, HTML) was also invented by Berners-Lee. It was developed on NeXT, however, and thus remained relatively obscure. It also did not support inline graphics, so it barely resembles the web as we know it today, even though it did provide the underlying protocols and markup style.
The first web browser to combine text and gracphics (AFAIK), and the first browser to gain any widespread use was NCSA Mosaic, developed at the Univ. of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. So the U.S. didn't invent the web, but the U.S. did polish it up and turn it into something that was more generally useful.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Can we have a little less utopianism and a little more realism in the room? Greed, Ambition and Covetousness are very human failings. Europeans are so in rapture over their social model that they fail to note the squalor around them (Mid-east, North Africa). For that matter they fail to note the grumblings in the minorities in their midst.
We'll see what becomes of this idealism when around 2050, numerically superior Middle Eastern countries decide that Europe would make a tempting conquest. Remember Bin Laden blathering about Al-Andalus? Which country was that in?
And lest you think I'm revel at the prospect of Europe being invaded -- I don't. What I fear most about this is that a conventional-forces inferior Europe will choose the nuclear option to keep the peace. That will be horrific but given how Europe is giving up on conventional warfare, I don't see much reason for optimism.
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That's exactly what we need! Having to pay the UN for internet access would rock. Not to mention there'd probably be a committee headed by China, Iran, North Korea and France deciding what should be censored (EVERYTHING!). There are notorious human rights abusers on committees for human rights in the UN. Do you really trust those nuts to control global communications?