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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?"
Between the Great Firewall of China and the fact that many sites blackhole all e-mail from China to deflect spam this almost seems like the next logical step...
People laugh at this, but what you know as the "World Wide Web" was a term and a concept dreamt up by.... wait for it.... Al Gore.
I don't know where you get your information, but the WWW, both the term and the concept, was developed by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1989. The Internet, of course, is far older than that. Gore came up with the term "information superhighway."
You could make the argument that it was never intended to be under global control, but the Internet was a global network well before the World Wide Web came along.
Doesn't RIPE handle Europes IP allocation now?
RIPE is the same thing isn't it, a collection of European ISPs that got together to handle distribution of IP addresses.
This process is called decolonization ... It started for the USA with the Boston tea party, wanting independency from UK. And now the registrars are doing with their own kind of tea party, building their own root server, and wanting independency from the US, although in a different and in a much more peacefull way.
We did. It was called JANET. It was also based upon packet switch networking which was invented here.
I think you'll find there's no one *thing* that is an internet. Okay the US came up with milnet. Packet switch networking came out of the labs of the British Post Office. The various protocols came out of elsewhere. Who invented TCP/IP say? For example is the WWW (HTTP), which is what most people see as the internet, an American invention?
It's like saying the Russians invented space flight.
"Gore came up with the term 'information superhighway'"
Not quite. See snopes.com:
"It is true, though, that Gore was popularizing the term "information superhighway" in the early 1990s (although he did not, as is often claimed by others, coin the phrase himself) when few people outside academia "
The 'Internet' is a network of networks, and exists only because of the peering and routing agreements of those who own the networks.
Therefore, to say the internet is 'owned' by anyone is a fallacy. Before people start getting jingoistic, no one country has a monopoly on the internet, just portions thereof. And since the protocols are open, it's not unreasonable to expect that if the US did start monkeying around with the DNS servers, then they would find their routes disappearing, leaving them with their very own intranet.
Corporate interests being what they are, I doubt it would happen.
he say that CENTR is "an organisation representing the majority of the world's top-level domains".
this is crock - they represent their members, around 50 TLD's (http://www.centr.org/members/) - that's not even a simple majority of TLD (around 260 - see http://www.iana.org/cctld/cctld-whois.htm for some of them).
Read what this guy writes with a pinch of salt - he can't even get basic facts right.
You would think Slashdot readers would "get" this and know there are at least 2 internets. The one we are using right now to read this and internet2, the higher speed internet used by numerous academia and a few commercial institutions. Too many people rely totally on the media for "facts" like President Bush is not smart, because it's popular with a certain segment. When in actuality it is bias and opinion. I do not think journalists go through any due diligence and fact checking as they used to, that is as dangerous as any one man on any one launch button in this world.
DNS is delegated - and that delegation is absolute - the parent can only remove the child and not individual entries in it.
I challenge you to find me an instance where the US government has forcibly via a court order removed a:
1 - An Anti-War protestor
2 - Innocent Foreigners to a prison without trial
The USA just kidnapped a person off the streets of Italy using CIA agents. So give us a break if we believe the USA is going a little loopy right now and its better to protect the Internet from US loopyness!
1) BS. There are physically seperate links that govern Internet2 ( or MBONE, or 6BONE FTM )
Yes they have interconnect points but they are in fact seperate. ( And most of it is actually IPv6, not IP )
2) No I don't, but I'm fairly certain that the media isn't aware of it either.
3) When the statement was made all the liberals behind the camera's were making fun of him. Some even claiming to be "techies". Those people making fun of the pres for misspeaking, when he was actually correct, was funny.
Well, in fact we already have such extensions but in our native language. For france it's *.gouv.fr for "gouvernement", which I am quite sure you can easily translate.
Cerf and Kahn did TCP/IP, both USians.
Paul Mockapetris came up with DNS and did the first SMTP mail server, also USian.
As for the web, Ted Nelson (who coined the word hypertext) and Doug Engelbart (developed a working pre-internet hypertext system) are both USians.
Berniers-Lee, who developed the first internet-enabled hypertext server, is(I think) British.
A while ago, Bush managed to reach all the way across the world via the FBI and got an Indymedia server confiscated due to activities they'd covered at a protest. ... wake up Americans.
Keep on telling me that the US don't try to squash free speech
That's not true. Any given level can override any level which is below it.
A DNS resolver asks the . servers who owns "www.barelylegalscots.com.eu." and the . servers tell the resolver to go ask the NS set which represents eu., but it could just easily respond with 127.0.0.1.
I can point to one example of US meddling. The Helms Burton law which attempted to force american policy on foreign governments. Not making the Internet international gives the US gov't more control to try and make the rest of the world do what the US wants (and don't get me wrong... the root servers don't give a whole lot of control... but they do give some) (if I could find the link I would show the Onion article with US vs. Them)... I can understand a desire to try and make the root DNS servers for the Internet a little less of a Dictatorship.
It's only centralised if you think the US is the centre of the world.
And you should find out the real answer to your own question about who has put in most of the money to fund the Internet as it's developed today. When you've worked that out, you'll start to understand why so many people think the US government and its ICANN subsidiary don't deserve their de facto overlord status.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
So slashdot.org becomes slashdot.org.us, like it should have been all along.
Really, it should have been us.org.slashdot, but some wacky Americans decided arbitrarily that we should start specific (host, 'slashdot') go to the general (tld, 'org') and then back to the specific (file, 'comments.pl')
I am a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
The U.S. just happens to own the means by which all of these networks communicate. Any other country could've done the same (theoretically, anyhow).
They don't.
What they do currently own is the assignment of addresses and the means to translate somewhat more human orriented names to such addresses.
Most of the interconnects are not US owned however, neither is the majority of the physical infrastructure.
Strongly-held opinion, stated intelligibly, does not equal trollery.
Please mod parent up.
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