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U.N. To Govern Internet?
Falmarian writes "Apparently the rest of the world isn't happy about the US franchise on internet governance. A news.com article discusses the possibility that the U.N. will make a bid for control of such governing functions as assigning TLDs and IPs." From the article: "At issue is who decides key questions like adding new top-level domains, assigning chunks of numeric Internet addresses, and operating the root servers that keep the Net humming. Other suggested responsibilities for this new organization include Internet surveillance, 'consumer protection,' and perhaps even the power to tax domain names to pay for 'universal access.'"
nobody elected the UN, it's a treaty organization
Anybody want a peanut?
The only reason I'd see the UN take on TLD's is my unending hate for ICANN.
Then again, I have no reason to believe anything will change with regards to corporations getting special treatment from anyone who takes over.
The UN doesn't claim to "own" the Internet. It, like the ITU, is the closest we have to a global forum for administering global registries like the Internet. By what right does anyone claim that the US "owns the Internet", or even is the best administrator of it? Myself, I'd give it to the Dutch. Even though they have a queen.
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make install -not war
I for one don't want to end up 10 years down the road and be unable to communicate with a business client overseas because CHINANET isn't compatible with USANET1 or EURONET.
We're already going to face enough problems down the road from ridiculous program such as "the great firewall of China", and we must fight seperation of the internet into smaller, and completely pointless smaller networks.
UN standardization is critical to maintaining a healthy and unified balance in the internet for the benefit of the global economy.
They were saying: "there is no evidence of WMD, give us time to prove that there is nothing". In contrast the Bush administration said that they had "compelling evidence" (sometimes using the word "proof") that they could not share for security reasons.
Turns out they had no evidence, let alone proof, because there was no weapons of mass-destruction program worth mentioning in Iraq. Oh... and the only ones who were saying that there was were the ex-Iraqis who everyone but the Bush administration had already written off as either delusional or having too much of an agenda to trust.
But not all. K and M (root servers are known by a letter) are run by RIPE (Europe) and WIDE (Japan) respectively.
The majority of root servers are in the US, so I believe that would cause problems. Also, so much of the Internet is American. If that much went away all at once it would be devastating even if Europe's online.
That's simply not true. Travel, talk with locals, and learn, please.
"/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit is a gimp plugin and must be run by the gimp in order to be used."
Internet: PHYSICALLY constructed by the US
Physically constructed? You mean, the US constructed the network everywhere in the world, connecting all those universities worldwide, down to the lines that bring it to my home? Come on, you don't believe that yourself... (I hope)
WWW: later addon from MIT
CERN, in Europe.
The internet is by now an international network. And that is what it makes so special and valuable. And this is also why it is somewhat unpleasant that the US has the final control about important things like adress allocation etc.
The governance over an international network should not be in the hands of a single state.
In the end, nobody can "hijack" the network from the US. In theory, if the US government decide to maintain a national allocation of addresses etc. and force everybody inside the US to use it instead of an international address data base, than this would essentially represent a fork of the network. Of course, this would be a major inconvenience for everyone...
"Second, the UN is ineffective because the US refuses to fund it. Please go read before you make ignorant comments like this."
http://www.mikenew.com/un-debt.html
What a load of crap.
WWW: later addon from MIT
Sorry to burst your bubble but WWW is a CERN invention (international organization part in Switzerland, and part in France). Check here and here.
Here we go again!
The problem is the root servers. They are just dns servers, but if we dont have them, well - we better start remembering ips. I belive this is what he means by backbone.
Freedom or George Bush
There is still no proof that the weapons of mass destruction weren't moved
Except for everything such as ardently pro-war hawk (formerly uberconvinced that Iraq had WMDs) David Kay's inspection report. Except for the fact that there was no infrastructure for any sort of relevant production in the entire country, and the agents degrade.
Read Kay's report. You'll notice no mention of the "sarin" and "mustard gas" shell finds. Why? Because, like the other several dozen false positives in initial testing, this report was later proven false. If this had been real sarin, the troops would have had a lot more than the "nausea" that they had.
Of course, it was widely known in the rest of the world (not America) that there were no WMDs in Iraq before the invasion. Why? Because the rest of the world read about Hussein Kamel in their newspapers, actually heard the inspectors refer to the US intelligence on the subject as "**** after **** after ****" and about their chicken coop of mass destruction t-shirts (a reference to the fact that the US kept sending them to inspect Iraqi chicken coops that they mistakenly thought were missile silos), etc. They got to read *why* the aluminium tube claims pushed by the US were so preposterous (one of the reason why the US's motives came so strongly into doubt), the "Uranium from Nigeria" issue blew up in Europe when it was first pushed, etc.
It was all nonsense being pushed by groups like the INC and their felon head so that they could (successfully) gain power in postwar Iraq. Some of the claims were so ridiculous I can't imagine people who knew what they were talking about keeping a straight face (like the "atomic bomb already tested under a dry lake" one - that cracked me up, as the US heavily monitors for EMP and fallout products of nuclear blasts in suspect nations)
It looks like you just reworded "the U.S. went to Iraq for oil."
I did no such thing. That's an idiotic line of argument; oil companies can only produce effectively in stable areas, there is evidence that Saddam offered the US lucrative contracts (among other things) to not invade, and it was the former CEO of the oil company where my father is a president who worked to stop the CPA from selling off Iraqi oil assets.
The US went to Iraq because Bush believed what he believed and wasn't going to let facts get in his way.
"/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit is a gimp plugin and must be run by the gimp in order to be used."
No, that's what Ritter had to say long ago. Here's what Ritter had to say before the invasion:
... Effective monitoring inspections, fully implemented from 1994-1998 without any significant obstruction from Iraq, never once detected any evidence of retained proscribed activity or effort by Iraq to reconstitute that capability which had been eliminated through inspections.
While we were never able to provide 100 percent certainty regarding the disposition of Iraq's proscribed weaponry, we did ascertain a 90-95 percent level of verified disarmament. This figure takes into account the destruction or dismantling of every major factory associated with prohibited weapons manufacture, all significant items of production equipment, and the majority of the weapons and agent produced by Iraq.
Here's an article with tons of links, for those who would like to distort his views by giving decade-old quotes that were overcome by events. I suggest you start reading the *recent* quotes from each of the heads of UNSCOM/UNMOVIC as well, plus the comments of the IAEA.
"/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit is a gimp plugin and must be run by the gimp in order to be used."
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I simply said that 'my experience' (as in life) is that regulation/oversight is typically created because of a few bad apples abusing the system/our freedoms.
Furthermore, regulation/oversight is not synonymous, as you imply, with authoritarian approaches. A regulation can be the result of a consensus agreement. Also, regulation and oversight are not necessarily the same thing either.
Don't get me wrong, something (food from the UN) is better than nothing (dead people). But is something else (UN regulating Internet) better than what he have now (US overseeing TLDs and no issues).
Besides, if you really want to do things your way there's always http://www.open-rsc.org/, or http://www.opennic.unrated.net/. Ironically http://www.open-rsc.org/ is down right now.
As far as starving people, genocide, and mines; eliminate the problem... The warlords and dictators who create this crap. This myth of unfair trade and economics (ala live8) is bull... I'd say more, but off topic.
Article 19.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html
United Nations Declaration of Human Rights
Insulting the President is not an offense in the USA. A threat of violence against him is.
But the German press was full of the reports from German intelligence, which was that there was nothing there.
6 21.htm
...
That is not my recollection. I think people are confusing what was said by politicians and by spooks, and what was said before and after the issue of invasion was brought up. A quick google found something that sounds familiar:
"I mean, an alternative view is one presented by people like Christopher Heachins [spelled phonetically], the journalist who says: look, if you look at Germany, where the political leaders were against the war, German intelligence was still producing these alarming reports about Saddam Hussein being a moments work away from producing a nuke, for instance. You can't blame that on, you know, serving up the leaders what they want."
Former weapons inspector, Scott Ritter
ABC Sydney : Broadcast : 02/05/04
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5
But we went to war on the promise by the Bush administration that Iraq was actively in the process of building up an arsenal that could find its way into Al Qaeda hands. We now know for facts that there were no real connections between Al Queda
These two statements are not contradictory. The fact that Sadaam would not build nukes for Al Qaeda does not mean his nukes would not fall in their hands. The Soviets did not build nukes for them but we are certainly concerned Soviet nukes may be or fall into their hands.
So how many people have died for what?
No one will know for another 20 to 30 years whether the aggressive US policy against terrorists and their supporters, of which Sadaam was - just not the Al Qaeda faction, was a good idea or bad. It's hard to understand a war when you are in the middle of it. It often takes years and sometimes decades to sift through the evidence and see how things turned out, for good or ill. President Lincoln was merciless criticized during the American Civil War.
Okay, that was really a sly off-the-cuff remark, but it did get me thinking again today; it really doesn't matter if parts are moved to poor countries, because users would find ways around mismanaged portions anyway a la' Freenet.
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,BR>
To call the UN incompetent isn't accurate.
-And a bit later I thought a third time (in one day, possibly a record for me) that this is exactly the reason why it shouldn't be moved into any country that doesn't already have the IT network in place to handle it. Anything moved to a cesspool country and mismanaged to the point of impracticality would just get adapted "out-of-the-loop" anyway, by whatever means necessary. If you collect a list of countries that really have the network capacity in place already for a major piece of this pie, the plan doesn't sound so unreasonable.
But then again, somehow I just know the UN would end up moving most of it into Iran, Sudan and Haiti....
The UN is more like a giant prehistoric incompetency, from thirty million years ago when huge lumbering pea-brained incompetencies roamed the earth.
This was during the period when the U.S. was seeking support for invading Iraq. The inspectors had not found _any_ evidence of weapons of mass destruction, but any sign of reluctance from Saddam to let them examine facilities was blown out.
In order to create a conflict the US had the weapons inspectors search Saddams palaces and harem for weapons of mass destruction, knowing that Saddam would refuse at first.
"Similar charges have been made about U.N. missions in Sierra Leone and Liberia, as well as Kosovo and Bosnia in Europe."
``The US created and developed the Internet.''
Partly.
``The US developed the Web.''
Nope. wrong.
``The US owns it.''
Wrong too. Owns every single backbone? In Europe? In Asia?
``France and Germany censor thier own citizens.''
So the US does not? Well, then, tell me an official, non-shady DeCSS download link. Oh, did I hear DMCA?
``Britain makes it illegal to rip MP3's from CD's.''
RIAA held that position too for a long time until they slipped in the Grokster case.
``Are these really the countries you want in charge of the internet?''
The advantage would be that the power is not concentrated on a single spot. Seriously, China couldn't impose any censorship, it would meet violent resistance there. The UN would be handling it, not China.
25%, when you pay your dues.
Gee, I hope the UN proves better at managing domains than they are at peacekeeping in Haiti.
http://www.ipsnews.net/new_nota.asp?idnews=29506
Seriously though... I'm honestly not sure which entity(ies) I would trust to manage things like domains.
I hate to say it, but I'm not sure I trust my own government to do a good job of this for the rest of the world, but at the same time, am not sure that the UN would do a good job of managing these vital services for the internet either.
I'm thinking the internet needs it's own "UN" in a way... an impartial group that represents the best interests of everyone, and whose goal is to make the internet work... not decide who uses it, how much it should cost, who gets to sneak peeks into other people's stuff, etc.