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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.'"
No thanks, I prefer having the internets run by a group with at least a partial background of competency.
It's not for the "rest of the world" to decide what we should do with what is our. They can get the heck over it
Whenever a new area of freedom opens up, eventually government seeks to control it. We are never really free, just constantly staying one step ahead of the beaurocracy.
12:50 - press return.
I think the U.N. should get involved in all aspects of the internet. After all, aren't these the same guys who want more regulation of cell phones?
After all, that's what we elected these people to do, right? Oh wait a minute. nobody elected the UN, it's a treaty organization.
I'm not trying to sound reactionary, but this sounds like a solution in search of a problem. The internet is fine the way it is. If the U.S. Congress has managed to keep its hands off it so far, the U.N. should follow suit, imo. The more politicians we get involved in managing the net, the worse it will perform for everybody.
Being Your Own Customer
Will do for the Internet what it did for Freedom...
God help us all.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I think thats a great idea, while we're at it why not just disband congress and give the UN total control. Isn't that what they want anyway?
Or not. Whatever hardware they own, they can govern themselves. While US companies owns 70-80% of the hardware that makes the internet run, the US will govern our own, thanks very much.
My initial knee-jerk reaction to this was "Why not the US, after all, we invented it?". But after thinking about it for a few seconds it occured to me that since the internet is global you really need a global entity to be ultimately responsible for it. If there was a single global government then it'd be a no-brainer, but since the closest thing we have is the UN then why not? Yeah, I realize that there are all sorts of arguments like the UN is incompetent, etc. but when you're talking about something that impacts the entire world what better and more universally recognized body do we currently have?
Let me get this straight. I agree it's a good idea to remove tld's from US controll to avoid being controlled and manpiulated by such a large and powerfull political entity that coulnd't care less about my rights online. Anyone else see the irony here?
...then maybe. Not before.
..very well, just look at the Oil For Food program. That was very well run. No corruption there. Or the Human Rights Commission. I mean what better members are there then China, Sudan, Zimbabwe....
It is funny. After the fall of the USSR I made a bet with a friend that we would see a strong unified world governing body within the next 50-75 years. At this point I have changed my tune. The US should leave the UN and form an organization of like mined democracies.
Those complaining in this thread about the Internet being American would also do well to remember that the Internet has grown up into things like the world wide web (in fact most lay-people think that *is* the internet). The world wide web was of course invented in Switzerland at CERN by a European. I haven't heard anyone screaming to remove all the pages served over http because they're somehow unamerican.
Not that it matters anyway - as the parent says, a country struggling for complete hegemony over any thing or any person will not keep it very long.
--
Message from Airstrip 1
I think we need to remember that the internet, although global, has many freedom based goals inherent to it. Just remember, /.s favorite internet blocking country China would now have a say in the final product. If that idea fails to scare you, then I can't reach you.
Call us cowboys, but a lot of the world doesn't want our freedoms, and would be more than happy to stop them for all of us. I don't think the spirit of the internet could survive a bunch of unelected corrupt dictators setting the rules.
Rule of the open mind
People who are resistant to change cannot resist change for the worst.
They only reason the U.N. wants control is so they can TAX it. That and survailance. "Consumer Protection" how can that ever happen if we use software with vulnerabilities. I for one am Completely againts the un haveing control. For crying out loud look what happened with oil or food, it turned into oil for nothing ( and your'll like it).
How about the "entitlement" non-Americans that think that because they can use the internet they are somehow entitled to owning a portion of it, despite the fact that the basic research and developement of it was done in the US, and most of the hardware is owned by the US?
I don't think they have any room to point fingers.
Oh and lets not forget that the solution is to take a system that has been working perfectly fine and give it to an unelected group of people with a incredibly bad track record. A group of people that have members who don't believe in little things such as freedom of speech, which is pretty darn fundamental to the internet.
As another person stated, do you really want China, responsible for massive censorship of the internet, to have a say in how its run?
This is a solution in search of a problem. The only real problem is political, and politics is something that the internet can do without.
I expect those whiny Euro poofter-weenies will next want us to turn the GPS system over to the U.N., too. Maybe Al Gore didn't invent the Internet, but the U.S. did. The rest of y'all are welcome to use it, though. Don't say we never did anything for ya.
Actually, I was trying to be Insightful, not Funny.
Let's play this out. The U.N. takes over assigning TLDs, etc. How long would it be before someone at the U.N. (Kofi Annan) is accepting bribes, or he hires his son, or daugther, or the son of the guy who cuts the grass at the U.N. to oversee this. And then $$$ or euro's if you prefer start getting redirected to someone's personal account.
As a forum for international discussion, dialog and negotiation, the U.N. is a fine organization. The U.N. as a body is, though, not actually accountable to anyone. This is why the U.N. should not be thought of as a government, or even a meta-government (a government of governments). Any body that is not accountable to (as in, risks being voted out of office or power), eventually becomes corrupt.
How much money went to Sadaam Hussein in the oil for food program? How much was actually used for food? Little if any. How much money was skimmed off the top by people at the U.N.? A lot, but we can never know how much because these people neither represent my (or your) interests, nor are they accountable to me (or you)!
They wouldn't. The rest of the world would just point at a different set of root servers. It's an open protocol, remember?
I think a lot of people need some slight perspective with regards to the recent problems that the UN has faced.
It's not overly effective in some respects (stopping invasions, oppression) but that's a fault of the countries involved not the organisation itself.
Without the UN, there might still be apartheid in South Africa. There would be lots more people starving to death. There would likely still be smallpox. Free and fair elections would be unavailable in many countries. AIDS (and tuberculosis and malaria) would be far greater problems. Those accused of warcrimes might not be tried.
While it's easy to knock the UN following recent scandals, get a sense of perspective. It's extremely difficult to coordinate things on a world scale without any real authority but the UN does do an extremely admirable job.
Whether it would handle the root servers well or not is a separate issue but don't critise out of a hand an organisation that has saved millions of lives.
Manta
If the rest of the world doesn't want to be a part of our DNS, they can set up their own. But we already have ccTLDs that expressly give such authority to governments. What do you want for nothing, a rubber biscuit?
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
On a serious note, if ICANN were making politically-motivated decisions, I'd be for taking that power away from ICANN and handing it over to someone less susceptible to political influence.
Even to the extent that ICANN may be tainted, the track record of the UN indicates (to me, anyway) that a UN-controlled 'net would be vastly more prone to political manipulation.
Personally, the scenario of fragmented roots would be just fine for me. You want the Chinaweb, use a DNS server that believes in China. You want the Amerinet, stick with the current servers. You want the Jesusnet, there'll probably be a root server in Kansas. You want the Afronet, go with the root servers controlled by Mugabe and his friends. Live in Saudi Arabia, no b00bies for j00. (And no j00z either :)
The networks with good policies ("good" being defined as "best able to serve the needs of their users") will survive. The bad ones won't. People lucky enough to live in free countries will be able to choose whichever network is "best" for them.
Eventually, some crazy loon will decide that they want to access all the networks. They'll come up with some sort of way of mediating requests between all the different root servers out there. It'll be a network of networks - sort of an inter-net, if you will. I'd probably pay a few bucks a month to access a network like that. Might even catch on outside the universities and research labs :)
I heard a great quote along the lines of "The UN is the place where governments that suppress free speech demand to be heard." It's quite true, the UN isn't composed of a group of free and democratic countries, it's composed of some of those, and some that are rather less free, and some like Syria, which is a military dictatorship. These aren't the kind of nations I want having a say in what is the greatest source of free information, given that a free flow of information is very threatening to them.
Another problem is that the UN isn't an elected body. It's diplomats that are appointed and are not answerable to the public they supposedly represent. Politicians do enough shady shit when they ARE directly answerable, it gets far, far worse when there's no accountability.
I mean for a good example, see the receant Tsunami crisis. When the Tsunami hit, the important thing initally was getting basic aid there immediatly, food, water, and medical attention. A number of nations did just that. Both their military and civilian volunteers went over and worked their asses off to save lives. The UN, sent a group over to survey the damage and fact find, they gave some soundbites to the media, and whined that the troops over there should be wearing UN blue, rather than the uniforms of their countries. All the while people were in desperate need of immediate help.
That's just a good example of the general problem. Look at the UN office in New York. The oppulance is simply unbelievable for an orginization that is supposed to be a representitive of so many poor nations. Then realise they have offices like this all over the place.
Now for the US there's an additonal consideration in that the UN may decide they want regulations on the Internet that are unconstutional. The constution can't be overriden just by some treaty orginization, it overrides all other law in America (well, it's supposed to at any rate, politicans seem to forget that sometimes). So for example China might want to push a regulation that says no subversive political speech is allowed, and they'd have plenty of backers on that. Well, sorry, but that's unconstutional.
While I think we can work out a more equitable solution than the US running the Internet, having the UN run it isn't the right answer.
The thing is look at the list of countries that want control of it. China ok they would want to censor everything. Brazil they don't want any porn on the net cause they are over 90% catholic so more censorship. Syria......hot bed for terrorists, the list goes on. None of these countries are say Britain or France or Germany. Why is that. Well it would cost billions of dollars to make a totally separate internet and so far the US has yet to restrict what can be put on the web. So as long as us 280 million people in the US want to foot the bill for maintaining the nets root why should other countries care.
A budding draconian organization tries to take powers away from an established draconian organization.
And who wins here? No.
I've said this before, on Slashdot, even: There is no Internet. Not the way we like to think of it. It doesn't exist as a cohesive whole. You can't connect to "the Internet". The most you can do is connect your network to somebody else's network. Maybe multiple somebodies. But still, you're just connecting to their networks. Then they do the same with some others. And so on. That's what we're talking about here. An inter-network. A bunch of individual networks. They are operated by businesses, organizations, governments, and individuals.
Right now, almost everybody agrees that US-centric organization like ICANN get to govern top-level things like the root domain. But there is absolutely nothing keeping people following their own set of standards. Indeed, some already do.
I don't even worry that much about "fragmentation". The Internet is already horribly fragmented. It's no longer safe or consistent or well-organized, which you used to be able to count on. If, say, we end up with multiple conflicting namespaces, someone will create some meta-directory protocols or search engines or something.
Of course, it would be nicer if that didn't happen. No sense making things worse then they are.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Do you have examples ?
In any case, what is the UN qualified to have oversight on?
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
The joke was nice, but now back in reality, the UN doesn't have a 100% effectiveness record, but there are lots of regions on this planet where people can live in some form of peace because of the UN.
Also remind the UN is more than the security council, for instance the World Health Org. and World Food Program are UN bodies with millions and millions of human lives depending on them on a daily basis.
I'm convinced the people working at the UN in the offices and in the field are higly motivated, skilled and professional workers, however, international politics is not giving them enough tools to act. This is mostly to blame on the leaders, full with self-interest, of our own countries.
(At this moment an fairly thourough UN peacekeeping mission in eastern Congo is doing the right thing, protecting the local population with aggressive force against militias with the little equipment they have in the region)
Repeat after me: We are all individuals
The U.N. isn't just inefficient, it is a paper tiger. You said it yourself: Too many people have veto power. This makes it impossible to get anything done, much less something good or bad. Think of all of the good things that U.S. policy makers have been able to do over the years, simply because someone could make a decision and implement a plan. The U.N. just can't do that.
When someone says "People are incapable of governing themselves", they are silently adding to the end "except for me".
* It looks like you just reworded "the U.S. went to Iraq for oil." B.S. If they went there for oil, why am I still paying outrageous prices for gas?
Many people make this point, indicating that they don't understand what really happened. The US didn't go to Iraq so that you could have cheap oil. It went so that a few greedy bastards could have more control over the oil supply and profit off it even more than they are. Why shoul they care if you have cheap oil? They also went to profit off the war as they never have been able to before, what with all the no bid contracts and military outsourcing of basic services.
Even if the weapons were there and were moved, which is unlikely, whatever the Republican mouthpieces at Faux News say, you have to admit that before we went, we knew where they were, they were contained in an area far away with little chance of ever being used against us. Now, according to your logic, all we have done by going there is lose track of them. Great!
You are seriously brainwashed by the right wing media. Yeah, you heard me. The rich own the media, they are right wing, therefore, the media is right wing. No matter how many times you and people like you want to lie about the 'left wing media' there's no such thing. Just more propaganda from the rich, trying to brainwash fools like you into thinking that their interests are your interests so you spread their propaganda, fight their wars, and basically do what you are told so they can keep on profitting off of you. Chump.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Internet is becoming far too important for many countries to leave it under the control of a country in which we do not trust. Is that enough reason for you? It is for me.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Africa's real problem is that they ate the milk producing cows and goats. That's after they slaughtered the rest of the herd that was going to breed the next generation. This is because they got desperate and ate next year's seed instead of planting it. Everytime the rest of the world trys to kickstart their food production with breeding stock or seeds, they just eat it.
I thought I'd seen it all on slashdot, but your summation of hundreds of years of colonial exploitation and invasions, arbitrarily defined states (often encompassing many ethnic groups) which war with each other over resources, corrupt government, civil war and finally skewed trade laws which make it impossible to climb out of poverty as
'they ate their milk producing animals'
really does take my breath away.
If the UN know what they're doing, they'll surely be rushing lots of well informed teenage geniuses like yourself over to sort it out right now.
See that's the thing, in the US, we have a document that plainly states, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
Then follows up with ammendment 10,
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
and 9,
"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
To specifically deny certain powers to the government. It does not explicitely state what the rights of the people are, only that there are certain rights endowed by the creator, which the document is designed to protect.
The article you mentioned implies that the source of the rights is the document itself, which grants the signors a certain elasticity wrt changing those rights for you.
That is the difference between the US constitution and so many other founding documents worldwide; It is there delineate the bounds beyond which government may not go. Other documents seek to declare certain rights to the people.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
And then break all the links! URLs weren't designed to handle translation over several differing namespaces.
I design user interfaces for a free network management application,
Where have we heard this before?
Well, I heard it first from Amartya Sen, an economist from India. You probably have not heard of him, but he's very smart. Some people in Europe even game him a medal for being so smart. You can use a search engine to learn more. The medal was called a "Nobel Prize".
Prof. Sen showed us that famine is caused by (... wait for it...) illiteracy. Drought, disease, pests, and poverty are all proximate causes, but they don't cause famine.
You're probably wondering who drought is not the cause of famine. Sen (who had considerable experience with famine in India, years ago), showed us that illiteracy is the real cause. (Let's leave out civil war for a moment--this is obviously another cause of famine, but is also a much more efficient killer than famine.)
The brash young man you took offense to demonstrated a real fact about Africa. The improper management of agro economies is what lets minor variations in production yields turn into famine.
Need another example? Look at what's going on with the displaced Zimbabwean white farmers. There's now a very real threat of famine, because of the land reforms. But this famine was not really caused by the land reforms, communism, corruption or anything else. The real cause is that the white farmers were simply better at growing crops than the new black farmers.
Now, control your blood pressure. I'm not saying the whites are better, superior or whatnot. In fact, the white farmers were better merely because they had education (at the expense of the blacks), and better agro management (again, at the expense of others, historically speaking). They knew how/when to apply fertilizer. They knew what crops to rotate in/out of what fields. They knew how to till, etc. They're not geniuses. They just knew how to do this, because of their education and training. If you took kids from New York City, and had them farm for a living, they could probably feed themselves with great effort. But if they had to feed everyone else, New York City would starve. You simply cannot appreciate how important education and training is for agriculture until you've tried it. Growing a crop to feed hundreds of people is very hard . Get a few steps wrong, and your yield is low. So you eat a little seed corn. And plant less next year. Lather, rinse, repeat, and in 10 years you have a crisis.
So, when the brash young man criticized the farmers for eating their seed corn, he was right on the money. This is exactly the type of problem I encounter in my missionary work. It's not that the villages are greedy, love to eat too much, or anything else. They just did not have the education/training to get enough crop yield to replace their seed stock. After a few years of that, your seed stock is gone, and you're into the spiral of eating livestock, subsistence farming, etc. You can feed your family if you're the farmer, but everyone else is gonna starve.
The truth is that you cannot provide agro aid without also providing an educational basis for its maintenance.