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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.
maybe they can hire Al Gore to whip up something new for international use.
cue the french jokes.
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
As the internet was invented, created and distributed in the United States by the US military a few decades ago and the US controls the root domain (.), how can the UN decide that they can control this?
The US _does_ control root, right?
Given the UN's proven track record of success, efficiency and effeciveness, I don't see how anyone could be against this.
...don't fix it. Verisign's monopoly aside, I haven't heard of any cases in which the internet has been abused by the United States or any organization assigned to administrate it. This change is fixing a problem that doesn't exist and may create problems that do. Other than political niceness, what does internationalization of the internet's control really offer?
mod points to the first to mention UN overlords!
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.
Cue the "entitlement" Americans screaming "we invented it, if they don't like the way we run it, we should take it back". My fellow Americans, our baby has gone out into the world, and it's the world's darling. If we haven't raised it right, so it still respects its parents while playing/working/sleeping with strangers, we have very little authority in demanding it follow our rules. The Internet no longer lives under our roof alone, and we can influence it only by keeping it's old room available for it to visit, and giving it good advice as it continues to outgrow us. Keeping the apron strings tied will just force it to run away, coming around only when we offer it some cash or homecooked meals that it can find elsewhere.
--
make install -not war
Just stop already with the TLDs.
In fact, get rid of them entirely. They aren't truly necessary except to maintain backwards compatability.
This way when there is a dispute over ip addressing UN peace keepers can just observe the dispute while the parties kill each other...
-- David inquired...
Brought to by the same people who brought you Oil for Food,
__________ Leave me alone I'm compiling a RPG II program on my S/36...Thanks to metamucil I'm a Regular Meta Moderator
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.
we built this one, it's ours. get over it.
if the UN wants a big ass computer network, then start one.
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?
Why not let the UN govern your nuclear arsenal too?
The nuclear option could create a Balkanized Internet where two computers find different Web sites at the same address.
So what is the difference? Half of my customers using IE have this happen all the time, and they have no clue. Spyware? On my computer?
This is sooooooo wonderful *cough , cough*. So I wonder what types of scandals we could look forward to. Maybey we should put koficup annan's son in charge of the net. He is really great at running UN programs, rihgt?
-- Yes, I work for the government, and yes I am watching you.
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?
I think the internet definitely shouldn't be in the hands of a single government.
While I think a multi-national non-profit organisation should be founded to control the internet, the UN might be the next-best choice.
I don't need a signature.
...then maybe. Not before.
the United Nations is not competent to do anything. It was a mistake that we Americans thought invented it. Some day the rest of the world will realize it too.
This is my sig.
I cant believe those UN idiots think they automatically just get to control everything. We invented it. We control it. Can you believe they want to bring in internet surviallence and .. get this.. TAXES!?!?! Oh yeah.. they're dirty rotten socialist bastards that have to control everything and take your money doing because they no have no real freedoms... They have nothin in thier lives without being able to control or DICTATE over everything...
This has all the markings of a disaster. Either a) Leave it with the US and watch countries like China break away and leave us with good and bad "internets". Or b) Give it to the UN, the very people who couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery.
so if the UN runs the internet, I suppose that attacks against 3rd world computers will be ignored until millions of computers are slag. then when they do intervene, it will be half-hearted with the help unable to actually help, just stand around watching shit burn.
There's not many problems that can't be made worse with UN involvement. Get US out of the UN and get the UN out of the US!
I hate to sound this way, but as I recall "The Internet" was invented, etc. here in the US, and this is why US organizations are in control of it. (Not that advances haven't come from everywhere around the world, but the original addressing system and naming system started here.)
If the UN wants to control/tax/etc. the network, let them design their own protocol, with its own addressing system etc. (IPv8 anyone?) If there is ever anything worth while on it, I am sure that somebody will create a gateway to it, at which point the appropriate taxes, etc. can be collected.
McFly777
- - -
"What do people mean when they say the computer went down on them?" -Marilyn Pittman
They seem to do little but stir up new controversies; and that's only for DNS. Imgaine if they started trying to "improve" IP address allocation, "fix" spam, or "ensure" universal access.
I haven't seen any evidence that the UN would be any better, though.
The Internet is now a global network, whether you Americans like it or not, which is why, and how, so many of your American companies get dossed by kiddies in Romania.
The comedy 'the Internet is ours' replies are killing me!
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
Principal Skinner: Order order, do you kids wanna be like the real UN, or do you just want to squabble and waste time?"
Why in the world would anybody want to turn over this control to such a corrupt and bureaucratic organization. The address assignments is not a very defendable reason, it's more likely the other types of control they could start imposing. Like even more outrageous copy controls, censorship, taxes, and other forms of non-democratic social engineering, or anything to further progress on the anti-American movement. That's all the UN is about these days, and we've already surrendered too much of our (US) freedom to the UN already.
..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.
UN, Leauge of Nations, whatever you wanna call it. The concept of League of Nations is what ended WWI relatively calmly, but it was a lie, so there was a WWII. So there was UN and much rejoicing, until there was no longer a UN. So how long til WWIII?
We will give you 1 year to take down your website, before 'more drastic' measures will be taken.
One year later ...
Resolution 30357B - Illegal File Traders:
Oh, did we say one year? We meant two. Take two years. But take it down! Don't make us unleash the fury!
Two years later ...
Resolution 30357C - Illegal File Traders:
We at the UN can't help but notice that you haven't taken your site down. We strongly disapprove of your actions. So much so that we're giving you three more years to do it. But you'd better believe that when those three years are up it's clobbering time. Seriously.
Three years later ...
Resolution 30357D - Illegal File Traders:
It seems you are still running your illegal website. We downloaded several Chingy tunes today (thanks for the UN discount!). But you seriously need to take that site down. Seriously. To show you how serious we are, we're going to start a plan of denying aid to people not in any way affiliated with you. Yes we know this won't affect on you personally, but it makes us look like bad-asses. Five more years! That's all we can give you. Then out come the meat hammers!
Five years later ...
Resolution 30357E - Illegal File Traders
- Rider A: Condemnation of Israel for refusing to just fucking disappear like the Mayans
- Rider B: Pay-raise and trips to Disneyland!
Maybe it's us. Are we doing something wrong? Is there something we could give you to make you take that site down? Because, seriously, we're all pussies here at the UN and don't want to do anything drastic like follow through on our empty resolution statements. So why don't we go ahead and give you as many years as you like to take that site down. Just keep those kickbacks coming! And remember, we are the world's last resort for justice!
Cue the Charlton Heston voice - They can take my Internet from my cold dead hands.
what happens if the US decide to be all freaky n stuff? Go all isolationist, or attack all the rest of the world, they get nuked to feck and back
by china, or whatever else?
They should at least have such a system ready so the rest of the world can carry on regardless. Relying on one country for something so important to the world is one of the suckiest ideas ever.
that'll control the internet. Whether it's the UN that implements surveillance or corporate ISPs that submit personal information in a clandestine manner, the UN that taxes us or ISPs that hit us with secret bandwidth caps and usage fees, we're still doomed.
The UN will fail here, no doubt about that (and thank God), but as with all things Communism, we find ultimately that we can beat the Government but we can't stop ourselves from being blind sided by the big money industries.
The moral of this twisted post? I'm watching the UN but I've got eyes in the back of my head regarding those handful of megaconglomerates that run the US media industry and are close to controlling the Internet, too.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
No, somebody register the TLD "un." quick.
Hey guys... just real quick.
If any of you stop laughing at this idea let me know, so I'll have a rough idea of when I'll stop laughing.
Thanks!
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
.. the 'Oil for Bandwidth' Program, run by Kojo!
Don't call me a cowboy, and don't tell me to slow down!
Of course, the point (quite obvious from the summary as well as from the most basic aspects of common sense) is: it doesn't matter what the US thinks or what random American crackpots want to be the status quo with the internet infrastructure.
The Internet is global. The infrastructure is fully "internationalisable". If the will is there, it will be done.
At that point, I suggest Americans rip themselves off from the global internet so as to retain control "their property".
Really, it's okay... we won't cry a river.
Buh-bye!
Akarsz Magyar Gentoo fórumot? Akkor
1) How much do you think the UN would end up taxing everyone for using "their" Internet
.tw TLD hang around once China starts bitching?
2) How long would the
3) How long until New/Old/Middleaged/whatever Europe tries to legislate speech on the Internet much like they heavily do in their own countries?
Blessed be he who reads this post, Cursed be he who tells my boss.
"Internet surveillance, 'consumer protection,' and perhaps even the power to tax domain names to pay for 'universal access.'"
If you think the U.S. is heavy-handed and autocratic, wait until the U.N. get their hands on this. The above quote provides three excellent reasons to keep this as far from the U.N. as absolutely possible.
If those are not convincing, read the quotes from Ghana, Brazil and Syria. Does anyone really want Islamic religious or Chinese political agendas shoved down their throats?
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
-- Pablo Picasso
Did I read that right? The UN wants to tax the internet?
"I don't need drugs to enjoy this, just to enhance it" - Otto
As another poster said, the UN is a treaty organization.
So would it not then be ideal for this sort of job? After all, what is a global telecommunications network if not a large number of countries entering into legal agreements to connect/share/whatever resources? So, then, what happens when a dispute arises between the US and another country or countries about it? Right now, we would just tell them to shove off, and that works reasonably well. For now.
While we may have made the internet and control most of it, but that won't stand up forever. By divesting some amount of control, however, we can effectively create a hedge against someone else's complete control and make sure any of our interests are properly protected.
Tax on domain names? Are you kidding me?
Look, the UN is the bureaucracy's bureaucracy, and has serious corruption problems besides. Given their track record on everything else, you just know that China, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia would be given prominent positions on some sort of Internet monitoring council. And you're worried about privacy now?
Canthros
Pretty much, the UN exists only to suck money and power away from the United States (and a few other countries with stable economies). Lots of little, greedy countries with their hands out for stuff, and the US is the one who foots the bill.
I'm all for globalization. I'm not bigoted against other countries or peoples, but I am "bigoted" against many of their governments. I'm tired of all these "poor" countries who aren't smart enough to run their own economies coming to the US for hand-outs. Really. And just as often, they take action to try to take some sort of resource, power, or right away from the US so that we're beholden to them and have to give them MORE money.
This attempt by the UN to take control of domain names is NOT an attempt to globalize it. If it were, I'd be in favor of it, but by definition, actions taken by the UN are designed to take money from the US. This is just another example of foreign governments trying to take something away from the US so that we have to give them lots of money. Just you wait. The instant the UN gets their grubby hands on it, the price for owning a domain name is going to sky-rocket, and not only that, but the effort involved in actually obtaining ones will become so Bysantine that the cost of doing business on the Internet will become prohibitive to many small businesses. And guess which country has the most businesses on the Web! Of course, they'll justify the extra cost by marking the money that goes into that as "aid", which is just another word for "taking money from the US and giving it to stupid governments who can't manage a stable economy."
The rest of the world opted into our network. They should be grateful we provided the framework for third world countries to gain communication channels to the rest of the world. We should not give up something we developed just because the rest of the world doesn't like us right now. If they don't like the internet, they can opt out and start their own. All the poor analogies aside, this isn't like anything else. Stop trying to boil down a complex issue to the lowest common denominator.
Did Al Gore authorize all those other coutries to use his invention??? I mean, he holds a patent, right?
Uncopyrightable: The longest word you can write without repeating a letter.
My bet is Bush'll nominate someone anti-UN to the UN to make it ineffective so this UN thing isn't an option. Oh....
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).
Ok, ARPANET was created in the USA. Others wanted to link to it. The USA allowed others to link to it. Others now want to take control of it.
My ISP created its own subnet. Customers wanted to join it. The ISP allowed customers to join it. So if the UN succeeds in taking control of ARPANET, can I take control of my ISP?
Video Production Support
Please correct this if I'm wrong. The internet protocols were "invented" in Switzerland and promulgated by CERN as an instrument for sharing of academic projects. ARPNET was the US miltary net that was similar to but not the same as the CERN net. Al Gore wrote legislation that put the US portion of the early net into non-miltary/non-governmental control (that's right, as in PRIVATIZATION). US dominance is partly a historical accident and partly due to the foresight of people like Gore and those at MIT and Cal Tech able to use capitalism to jump-start the web(sorry to all you sons of Bush's out there).
we pwn!
Life is like a bag of chips you never know whats next
Speel
Some say the United Nations is too corrupt right now. Plus doesn't the U.S. government have veto power?
What I'd like to see is a new organization, a national one, where each country has a single representative sent to it with one unit of voting power. Let them run it that way.
Are you writing from a mental hospital?
The monitoring was done by American and British ships. So either the respective governments were allowing illegal activity, or their militaries' representatives were corrupt or incompetent. (Or, the most likely: all three at once.)
There's a saying: "It's better to be thought a fool, then to open your mouth and remove all doubt." Well, don't worry, there's always next time for you.
Akarsz Magyar Gentoo fórumot? Akkor
since the internet is global you really need a global entity to be ultimately responsible for it.
Air travel, news, food, and Earth's economy are just as "global", and yet there are no global entities in charge of those areas. Not only does there not need to be, there are good reasons to not have global (i.e. centralized) control of such things. 20th century history is full of examples.
One big reason to fear UN control beyond taxes: how long before they try to crack down on "hate speech," which will mean criticism of certain governments and certain religions? I leave it as an exercise to the reader to guess which ones the UN would not want criticized.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
...and I mean that in the nicest possible way. This ain't about our baby going out into the world. This is about her getting into that metal-flake gold 1976 Delta 88 with leopard print plush seats and a Cadillac badge stuck on it what just rolled up in my driveway and played "brick............HOUSE!" on the horn for God's sake, with that hairy-chested (I can see it from here, Marge!) refugee from the P-Funk Mothership.
And she AIN'T GOIN'!
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
Were the UN to assume such regulatory authority over the internet, what assurances would citizens of a United State have that the rights they exercise now, via the internet, would be continued?
Right now if I want I can spew all the hate-speech I like on the internet.
Right now I can arrange the sale of firearms over the internet.
Right now I can play addictive text-based MUDs that waste more lives than either of the above.
Will these be preserved by a governing body who disapproves of all three?*
(*number three was a joke)
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
Or the US?
The internet uses ICANN solely because all the ISPs accept that they are responsible for assigning names and numbers.
But each country has its own organisation responsible for aspects of the internet in that country, atleast handling domain name CCTLDs. These are usually representative of the ISPs and other major internet organisations in the given country.
It's quite feasable for representatives of each country to agree to set up their own DNS system. With support from some major US ISPs as well, they could set up a new de-facto internet authority. This would be an extreme option, but technically feasable.
The people in charge only rule with the permissionof those they rule.
Then there are things that are less known...the NSA used to "grep" for certain 800 numbers from machines it had "sniffing" the Internet, that were in very good locations to do such a thing. Once I myself was reading a web site in Australia about CIA involvement in a sort-of coup d'etat they had there (the prime minister, who wanted to get Australia out of the Vietnam war, and who was beginning to establish relations with "Red" China was thrown out by an antiquated dominion law by a man who had CIA conenctions). Shortly after doing so I received an odd SNMP query to my IP address requesting information about my machine. If I didn't have my machine especially set up to log everything coming in, I never would have seen it (my machine did not respond witht he asked for information). The requesting machine was some US army information intelligence outfit in Quantico, Virginia, I suppose it was the Army equivalent of the Air Force OSI or something. One odd aspect was I was doing this from the US, so the Army would have been spying on me, as a US citizen, which it shouldn't be doing, although there are loopholes out of this I guess. It's unfortunate I have to go to other countries web sites to read about stuff like this, but that's how it is, the USSR had it's samizdat as well, and its KGB trying to track down who was distributing and reading it.
I should have mentioned. No one who has ever held political office would be eligible in my idea. No one who has ever sought political office as a candidate, even if he or she has failed to win. No one who has any honory title, royal title, or whatever, like how Bill Gates has the title KBE.
We invented the internet. (Thanks Al Gore!) We should control it. I'd be for no control before UN control. The UN can't even save starving children.
'mmmmmmmmm.... forbidden donut'
[include mod_point_excuse]
Most of the world does not share our love of freedom of speech. Bash the US all you want, just remember that you can feel free to bash it precisely because of the first amendment. A value the UN sorely lacks
Rule of the open mind
People who are resistant to change cannot resist change for the worst.
In Panama, the UNICEF money was a great source of wealth for politicians. UNICEF had not good mechanism of auditing and keeping track of the money, and ensuring that it was actually spent on children.
- sigs are for wimps.
China is a member of the Security Council. Do you want their censorship-based policies involved in controlling the internet?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Akarsz Magyar Gentoo fórumot? Akkor
Can't you just imagine the U N collecting a domain tax on behalf of the poor?
This is another reason for the US to cut U N funding. Why are we paying dues to this group?
I hope not the way China does it but any way
You're awfully optimistic, eh? When it comes to the UN, you must remember that the UN is a group of countries with their own perrogatives and agendas. That means China and other countries with an interest in censoring the Internet are going to push for such measures. And to quote Eddie Izzard, my favorite comedian, "fuckin' Jihad on that!"
Seriously.. Thus far in US hands the Internet you so enjoy has remained open like a cheap hooker. You can say ANYTHING you want on the Internet. That includes talking about democracy and freedom, forward-thinking ideas that China and other totalitarian governments would like to ban/hide.
The UN is a bad organization.. ineffective and lame. They couldn't handle the Internet.
What is your penile percentile?
An elected group of unpaid net hackers would be the best group. Make sure the position is unpaid as to stifle selfish intent. Make it a position that serves the community.. like an open source project board (ex. debians leaders)... but not debians leaders. ;)
c:\> ping www.google.com ...
pinging 64.36.21.34
network U.N.-reachable
sorry... couldn't resist
Oh wait. I think you really mean DNS. Article title == -1 Troll.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
That's what the poor need!! Lazy gits!
Akarsz Magyar Gentoo fórumot? Akkor
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.
However, the 'internet taxes' thing is right out -- no one in their right mind is going to allow the U.N. to start collecting taxes of any kind.
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
Let them try to take control of the Internet. We have nothing to worry about because all they will do is write carefully worded letters.
.com, .net, and .org domains, as well as anything else ICANN may want to create. But for the UN to use that as a pretext to take over the ENTIRE Internet? I don't think so. Besides you only have to take one look at their track record to extrapolate the doom of the Internet should they somehow push this through.
Seriously, why does the UN need to be involved? I thought that each country had control over its own TLD, and assigned number authorities are assigned to each continent. . The root servers themselves are located all over the world.
AFAIK, the only thing the US really has a "monopoly" on is the
-R
The US manages their own IP network, the Internet.
My employer manages their own IP network.
I manage my own IP network.
What's stopping the UN from starting their own IP network instead of taking over US's?
The Un is about as effective as moldy wet bread. Ask the million plus Rowandans about Effective. If they can't stop telivised mass genoside what makes you think the UN will do any better with Cyber Squatters, issues of world censorship, and taxation. I can see it now, we must tax the US more to provide for internet in the impovished nations. If they want to grow nations responsably they have to stop acting like Mexican Federali Police first.
The goal is, and has always been, to control content , stifle dissident voices, and provide a business-friendly, user-harsh Internet for their downtrodden masses.
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)!
Beyond the usual levers of diplomatic pressure and public kvetching, Brazil and China could choose what amounts to the nuclear option: a fragmented root.
China effectively already has one. No loss there. China isolating itself in this way will put it at a competative disadvantage to India. What is motivating Brazil is harder to understand. Perhaps something like the World Trade Organisation is in order. Its charter should be very narrow. Handing this to the UN is a terrible idea. Not only because it is a political body, but because it is thoroughly corrupt and discredited.
an ill wind that blows no good
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
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.
First, unfortunately for the rest of the world, the US is in control of ICANN and doesn't have to do a damn thing if it doesn't want. Unfortunately for us, that leaves open the option that the rest of the world does take their toys and goes home, i.e. "invents" a new internet and leaves us out of it. I was about to say that neither extreme seems very likely, but given the current political climate I'm not so sure.
.xxx TLD was really stupid - such a domain could make it easier to filter out porn sites if one wanted - because they are NOT going away. I like the internet just the way it is, thank you very much.
I'm sorry to have to agree though, the idea of the UN controlling the Internet is scary, for exactly the reasons that people have mentioned. It's currently largely unregulated (another word for that is "free", get it?). The comments from UN reps in other countries (e.g. Syria) revealed amazing ignorance of how the internet works, and an explicit desire to exert firm control over content. The complaint by Brazil about the
So far I have yet to hear either a good technical or policy-based argument against leaving it in US hands. I'm willing to be convinced, but so far all the arguments against US control have boiled down to, "we don't like you and/or don't want you to have it." Not good enough for me, sorry. I'm going to write my Congresscritters and ask them not to turn it over.
Love, Squeedle
I am sure those cyber terrorists are going to be really scared when the UN creates a resolution condeming them. And I am looking forward to any internet issue being Israel's fault.
www.IBuyMacs.com
Great, so now the UN will levy international taxes for internet usage? Gee, I wonder who will end up paying the biggest share? Oh, and don't forget, contentious words like "freedom" and "democracy" will have to be avoided. . .
Weapons of mass destruction inspections? What do you know,they were right!
The UN never said Iraq had no WMD, the were not "right". Up to the beginning of the war they were saying we don't know and need more time to work, please let us continue. Your portrayal is quite distorted and revisionist.
So how long til WWIII?
We're fighting it now.
The UN has failed because it was created by the victorious WWII powers to preserve the status quo. But the Cold War world no longer exists, and the UN is incapable of adjusting from preservation of the Cold War status quo, to the proactive processing of global connectedness (and the failed nation-states that threaten the rest of us with their unconnectedness), and dealing with the proliferation of non-state actors that have become a global insurgency against global connectedness and modernity.
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.
Okay, so if we agree that the Internet should have some moderation and force to keep it safe/productive/moving/etc, and we don't want the US to have domain over that (which I agree with to a degree)...who should that moderator be? We'd want someone unbiased and universal, and it would have to be someone with the ability to provide not only the logistical manpower and financial backing, but the power to do the footwork (ie - raids/busts/etc).
Although I haven't been a UN supporter for a number of years, I'm having a hard time thinking of another non-government body that can do so. If anyone's got any better ideas, please lay them out.
Of course this means that anyone wishing to use it will need to adjust what their stuff uses for its DNS, but that isn't necessarily a problem. You could actually cut ICANN right out of the loop by setting your root servers to be something else entirely.
"The World Bank Group is a group of five international organizations responsible for providing finance to countries for purposes of development and poverty reduction, and for encouraging and safeguarding international investment. The group and its affiliates are headquartered in Washington, D.C.."
"Technically the World Bank is part of the United Nations system, but its governance structure is different: each institution in the World Bank Group is owned by its member governments, which subscribe to its basic share capital, with votes proportional to shareholding. Membership gives certain voting rights that are the same for all countries but there are also additional votes which depend on financial contributions to the organisation."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Bank
So it's not really the UN.
When I'm dogging the UN, and I do often, based on how it's fouled up International Peacekeeping and International Relations.
Bosnia, Sudan, Congo/Katanga, Rwanda to name four places done wrong by the UN. Inclusion on the United Nations Commission on Human Rights of nations, such as Sudan, Cuba and Libya, which demonstrably have abysmal records on human rights, and also Libya's chairmanship of this Commission is idiotic at the least.
It's funny when an American agenda is backed by the UN it is a "recognized body of the international community" but when it goes against American interests it becomes a "corrupt organization with no right to govern". It's nice to see American unilateralism is alive and well on Slashdot.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
Kofies Anon goal is obvious, a distraction from oll for food and faster uploads of porn for the UN strippers.
The UN is only "good" at handing out food and medicine, not with managing contention and conflict. The later is more relevant to managing the net. How many times does the UN fail to stop horrendous crimes, even when UN peace keepers are on the scene. The good work is done by the doctor and others specidialists working, sometimes indirectly, for the UN. Frankly if they were working for Doctors without Borders or other organizations they would do just as much good work, perhaps better. These doctors and specialists are responsible for the success not the UN bureaucrats you want to hand the net to.
One: If the UN gains the ability to tax domain name holders, you can bet that the tax will not be uniform. They will attempt to "punish" the rich while rewarding the perceived "worthy" with vastly different tax rates.
Two: Much of the money raised will never leave the UN and its employees. Oil-for-food-2 anyone?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Exactly what I was thinking.. Wasn't it our tax dollars funding research that led to the modern Internet? Doesn't that kinda mean... I dunno, that it's ours?
"The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his." - Patton
The internet is a group of all the different national and slightly larger scale networks of the 70s and early 80s. It was mainly US inventors who developed TCP/IP, ethernet, etc. but the way you're talking it's a safe assumption you don't share the same intelligence as them, and can't really claim to be associated to them simply because you live in the same country by some random chance.
Also, the UN is the United Nations. You're probably thinking of the EU, the European Union. The difference is the US actually owns the GPS system, whereas nobody owns the internet, as it's an international cooperation project. Besides, the rest of the world is developing Galileo, a GPS-like system. (Which, BTW, the USAF have threatened to blow up if the rest of the world doesn't comply with what the US wants them to do with it.)
the U.N. will make a bid for control of such governing functions as assigning TLDs and IPs
Eliminating ".il" and creating ".pa"
What a bunch of crap. So basically, and like usual, the small countries want to feel important and play Student Council to inflate their egos while not actually accomplishing anything. Too bad. The internet works fine, it's decentralized, it doesn't need to be centralized, and doing so would defeat the entire point of the internet.
The internet should not be controlled by any one country. WWW is not U.SWW.
www != internet.
People in Nigeria need to learn to feed themselves, before they need instant messaging or blogging.
Think I'm being elitist? Nope. I'm just lucky to have been born in the USA, where food and farm labour is abundant.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
Since the US has a permanent veto, this would never happen against the will of the administration.
If it's going to happen anyway (i.e. they don't intend to veto) and would be a real competitor, wouldn't the administration force a revisit the issue and use the existing influence/infrastructure of the ICANN rather than risk losing decision making abilities over these aspects of the Internet?
Maybe they'll set up an international ICANN council where the US has a permanent veto?
=======
Science -- Sealed, Delivered.
We wouldn't want to mess up "China, Inc." with ideas about freedom, democracy, or faith.
Make love, not reality television.
The American tax dollar invented the internet and led to it's current worldwide deployment. Why would any red-blooded tax-paying American want to just give away it's oversight to a third party? Can anyone say NWO ?
flames gladly accepted.
I'm sorry but "we" didn't invent the Internet, a few people working on Defense projects did. You (and I) could never have existed and the Internet would still be here, so don't act like you have ownership of it simply because you live within specific man-made borders.
Perhaps this is a but of a futurist idea, but why can't the internet have its own government?
I mean think about it, a lot of the online community can be divided into two groups, locals and tourists. The locals have their own culture of sorts that transcends borders. The locals gather into almost self governing communities (slashdot, fark, SA forums, IRC channels) where ideas and information is shared that could better the community, or the over all internet country.
Root servers world wide could be moved into embassies for the internet and thus protected from the laws of their respective countries and be the only physical locations of this new country. Businesses that operate solely on the internet wouldn't pay taxes to the internet since thats what paying for an internet connection does.
Every local on the internet would have dual citizenship of course.
Now, this wouldn't be feasible because of infrastructure I think. Major corporations owning the actuall wires that delivery packets from point a to point b and so forth. But why couldn't that be replaced with a solely wireless network? Either that, or the infrastructure becomes property of the internet country.
Another good idea about this is that in order to become a citizen of the internet, you'd have to pass a skill testing exam. Nothing too complex, but something that would at least judge your ability to protect yourself againt most forms of maliciousness that exist on the internet, like protecting yourself against spam, how to install a firewall and an anti virus, what to look out for in emails to avoid running the latest virus attachment, ect. In otherwords, it wouldn't be a network certification or MCSE or anything like that. You don't even have to know how to make a website to be an internet citizen, just be able to protect yourself, which isn't all that hard nowadays anyways.
Citizens would be able to vote on their preferred leaders, and I guess it would be a series a votes to determine who should actually be in control of the internet. Infact, we could even vote in a group of people to run the internet. And I think it would also be feasible to run an almost true democracy, and be able to vote on most major issues regarding this great country.
Meh, superficially, it seems like a great idea. Though I'm sure there are many reasons why it can't happen (other than world governments not letting it happen).
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
.fam: famine .bmb: bomb .slv: slavery .shr: Sharia .ter: terrorism .plo: kill the Jews .crp: corruption .isf: islamofascism .ict: inaction .brb: bribery .cya: cover your (own) ass .mgb: Mugabe
A legal expert in India once made the remark that the internet is like the high seas: quite appropriately so, IMHO.
Many seem to be arguing here that 1) the internet is global, and 2) the UN is the closest thing we have to a global representative body, therefore 3) they should control the internet. So many things wrong with that it is hard to know where to start. To accept that argument one must ultimately accept the UN as the de facto world government. I am certainly not ready to do that. To accept that argument is to choose to believe that the Chinese ambassador to the UN truly represents the interests of the Chinese people. I am certainly not ready to accept that. Ditto for Saudi Arabia, Syria, Sudan and any number of other nations. To accept that argument is to submit to the inevitable end of the internet as we know it, because the temptation to try and solve other world problems by imposing taxes, fees, restrictions, etc. on the internet infrastructure will be more than the typical UN representative or beauracrat can bear. They will not be mere administrators of the internet they will be more akin to overlords. On the plus side of the ledger, at least the UN peacekeepers could make their kiddie pr0n available more easily to their bosses who don't get out into the field.
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.
We keep Linux and Usenet. You get Microsoft and AOL.
Hey, suddenly I am all FOR it as a European.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The dns root server has a IP address and runs a daemon to serve top-level domain mappings. If somebody (or group of people) want to use a different root, so be it. However, right now many choose to use the one managed cooperatively.
.COM part of the address space, but that's not what this is about either (although this issue is confused somewhat)...
The reason skript kitties in Romania get to your computer is because the machines have an IP address (not necessarily because they have a domain name that resolves to an IP address, but it sure makes it easier for them to find).
Please read the wikipedia and get your facts in order.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root
However, there are certainly unresolved issues with limited amount of IP addresses, but that's not what people are talking about here...
There are also issues about conflict resoltion about the
To me, this is like people complaining about what is on the internet (or tv, or movie theaters, or what they are serving at McDonalds, pick your poison) to their legislators hoping that they'll make some rule to change the world to their vision. If you don't like what's someone is doing, don't go there, someone will offer something different and patronize them instead. If enough people agree with you they'll change too and what you were complaining about will go out of business.
It's not like anyone is forcing people to use the current defacto DNS root that the US doesn't want to cede to authority to ICANN. As far as I know there's no law in place that you have to point a root there.
This is sounding strangely more and more like the Galileo vs GPS debate. If the UN wants to launch their own rootDNS, go ahead, but try not to interfere with Verisign, RIPE, ORSN, ORSC, etc (some of the existing rootDNS servers). Sounds to me, however, they don't actually want to set up an altRoot, but really just want the get the authority over the existing rootservers (i.e., a power play for someone corrupt person's agenda). Maybe they don't trust the US, but of course, the US doesn't have much of a reason to trust the UN either. I don't think ICANN's track record has really helped the situation either.
This has the makings of a bad situation. Currently the UN doesn't have any "tax" authority since they technically don't have any soverignty over anything (it's just a treaty organization). Just imagine if the UN did own something (even if it's virtual)...
will the owner of the blue root server please come to america ..lol.. okay so its a bad joke :-O
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
I actually agree. What's the point in having top-level domains when everyone who registers a domain ends up registering foo.{com,net,org,us,bar} at the same time? It's fucking stupid.
I think you shouldn't be allowed to register every version of the same domain.
Isn't one of the reasons that the United States broke away from the UK was to get rid of the taxation??? I think that we need to keep things the way they are. If they want to put in their opinions, go through our legal system just like everyone else has to.
But not all. K and M (root servers are known by a letter) are run by RIPE (Europe) and WIDE (Japan) respectively.
It was the US who put him in power in the first place. They did that about the same time they were putting groups like the Taliban in charge of the Afgani's to resist Soviet occupation, and training people like Bin Laden to do the guerilla fighting.
The UN is inefficient, but bad stuff tends not to come out of the UN because too many people have veto power. As opposed to here.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
so we should control it.
If you other countries would just have better politicians...
others seem to be seeing. When they would take over the TLD's what they will say is: .us. Belgium has .be and so on. They will also devide the IP adresses acoording to needs.
The US has TLD
This has NOTHING to do with any form of control or wathever. Each country would still be able to do as they did before.
I just don't see it happen to IPv4, perhaps for IPv6?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I thought we invented the internet, didn't we? So why whould we have to let someone else control that which is ours? I mean sure if the UN had helped fund and create the internet, then sure they can have some controll. I don't think that they should be able to just drop in after things are already running just fine and say, "We should get to decide how you run things."
w00t
I've read a lot of the comments, most of them seem to go something like this:
- The USA invented the internet, US defense money paid for DARPANET, etc.
- Response to above: Europeans invented the world-wide web, HTTP, etc.
- The UN can't do anything right
- The USA does whatever it wants
- X% of internet servers are outside of the US, where X is a value between 0 and 100
;-)
I've been an internet user since the early 1990s, (before there was a "world-wide web," so I have some of my own opinions. I don't really know if I'm for or against this, so here are some random musings:First, it's been a long time coming. If the US hadn't wanted non-US sites on the internet, they had the capacity to close that door long ago. IIRC, the main reason that the US controlled the root servers (aside from the fact that it all started in the US), was that pretty much any non-US net was connected to the USA, although not necessarily to any other country's net. Putting them in the US ensured that they would be reasonably "central" in the net topology. But once the net became a commercial entity (not just a research and military network), ownership of the root servers should have been internationalized -- ICANN should have been international from the start.
Assuming the UN took control of the root servers, I presume they would set up a committee very similar to ICANN; In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of this new committee's members came directly from ICANN. In other words, don't expect Kofi Annan or the career diplomats to be on this board.
Finally, I'll admit that it must be galling for a non-USA citizen to go to the TLD "army.mil" and find a web page about the US Army... I wouldn't be surprised if the UN ever does take over the domain system, if the .mil wouldn't get moved into the .mil.us or similar. Don't know if .org or .edu would have the same effect, and .com is too big for anyone to tackle...
First you should look up the definition of fascism and you'll find it cannot possibly be applied to America or Americans.
Secondly, I find it quite hypocritical that you pour your personal resources into your "nice neighborhood," while at the same time decrying poverty and suffering of the masses. Since you seem to have a heart for to see this suffering, you should become a peace corp worker, or better yet, an anglo-christian missionary.
For the two or three Americans who may be interested on the coverage of this case in other countries, I can confirm it's been nonexistent in at least Italy, Norway and Sweden. It's either a world-wide plot og the liberal media with the exception of the US, or someone just wanted to make noise and discredit the UN in one take.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
Since they did such a good job with the Iraqi Oil for Food project...
OK, we tried to warn you. Now the entire world is against you but nobody has the balls to fix it. The U.S. finally has some vested intrest in this issue, not sure why, but they are coming to get you. No we can't stop them, nor will we really try, but don't worry! While they are bombing your servers to silicone dust we will publically condem the hell out of them!
Knightfall
I can ignore them since I am US Citizen? I mean who really listens to what the UN tells countries to do anyway. ;)
Ave Molech Setting
I will assume that you are living in the US. What's the price for a gallon of gas in the US? $2.29 a gallon according to Gas Price Watch.
Ever wondered how much people all around the world pay for their gas? How about you take a look. And that doesn't even list Canada, which is so close to the U.S., yet we pay about $3.14 (USD) per gallon. Wanna try moving to Europe where the gallon costs on average more than 4 bucks, and in many cases more than 5 bucks?
Quit your whining, you are getting your gas at a very low price.
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
How come I'm not seeing any of those mentioned? My god people, these are the groups that already handle everything that goes on on the internet within the bounds of the TLDs and IPs, who could be better qualified?
Direct away from face when opening.
For a second I was confused when looking at the title of the web page :D
"Worker bees can leave
Even drones can fly away
The Queen is their slave."
Not to get into a nationalist argument, CERN came up with HTTP (Hypertext Markup Language). This depends on TCP/IP, which goes back to the US DARPA project, AFAIK. While I'm not an ubergeek who completely understands the whole mess, I think I'm generally right.
"Build something idiot proof, and someone will build a better idiot" - Samuel Clemens
The world prices are wholly irrelevant to the GP's argument. The point is, before the war we were paying $1 to $1.50 or so, and now, we're paying $2.50. Don't pull this "starving children around the world" act.
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.
Indeed, couple the facts that the US created it... with the fact that they own almost all of it... and then add the fact that they were kind enough to share it with other nations, in the spirit of international community and freedom... ... and you will get why the prospect of the UN running it irritates me.
... (ending rant now for the sake of my own sanity)
===
The UN see a way to make a buck and a way to get control and influence. The member nations want whatever power they can get for themselves.
Never mind that taking these controls, potentially taxing them, robs the Americans who created the infrastructure of their rights. It's not about the intellectual property of Americans or even just "possession being 9/10ths" and all of that... the United Nations DESERVES this!
*sarcasm detector explodes*
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
So now Syria and China (I'm not even going to mention their human rights records or the like) want to make sure there is no spam and there is network security. Part of the reason the Internet has been so popular is that it was free to essentially govern itself. The spam laws currently on the books do very little, and while I hate spam as much as anyone else, I don't want any laws banning it because none of them will work and will only stop remove some of the freedom of the Internet.
Now to the next definition of free - the developing countries want us to pay for their Internet access:
So now they want us to pay for their Internet access because they can't afford it.
This is not being done to make the Internet a freer place. This is being done so that other countries get a new tax base and yet another place to govern. To all of you who support this, wait until this happens, and then when your site is censored for being politically incorrect or something because you disagree with the Chinese government, you'll understand why this was a bad idea.
I just read a history on the internet, and saw no mention of CERN. It was, according to this http://www.davesite.com/webstation/net-history.sht ml a product that came out of a US military project.
Actually I did look up the definition of fascism and found that it defined current america. I looked into the peace corp years ago and found that they weren't really helping and while I am anglo I am not a christian so the whole missionary thing isn't really appealing.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
I may be wrong but Im pretty sure the internet was invented in CERN which, the last time I checked was still in Europe.
You are thinking of the World Wide Web, which began as essentially one protol for using the internet (along with others such as SMTP, IRC, gopher, etc). WWW is a much more recent development, relatively speaking, compared with the internet.
The internet itself began as a U.S. Department of Defense project called ARPANET which was the world's first packet-switching network.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
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.
If we're going to change things, we should just limit the TLDs to country-codes and let each country do whatever the hell it feels like under its own TLD.
Browsers can be set to default a country-code TLD based on the users system preferences without much trouble and the problem goes away.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
What are YOU on?
The Internet started out at the Apranet back in 1969 by the US Government. It later moved the US based Universities and from there into Corporate hands. (breif, condensed summary).
The rest of the world jumped on our bandwagon, not the other way around.
the U.N. is nothing more than a collection of petty thugs and murders. Do you really want China and North Korea sitting on an Internet content board?
The UN will probably change Israel's country code to .zi (the "zionist entity") and .us to .if (infidel) and China will get .bf (beacon of freedom).
I support the UN in theory and some UN programs (ex. Unicef) do great work but for the most part it is a place where the propoganda and demands of brutal dictators is taken just as seriously as the relatively informed opinions and peaceful desires of democratic states.
Just shove your gps where it creates some nice feelings, be are building our own system where you guys cant fuck around.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Since we have laws against spying on our own citizens, lets just outsource it! Putting the almighty United Nations in charge of "Internet surveillance" allows foreigners to legally check the IP addresses of the sites I visit and then report back as an independent secret publication to interested parties in the US. "Mondak is indecent because he looks at pr0n" Or how about a circumstantial case like "Mondak was looked at websites on powertools and phone switches over the last month and therefore must have been guilty of the crime committed on X day". Great news
Lot of mobile phone technology was pioneered in Europe. SMS and IRC were invented in Finland. Those are just examples I can think of right now but there are many more. Are you willing to give up the control of anything that has not been made in the USA to other countries? Didn't think so.
The US government circa World War II is calling, they want Europe back.
Every time the U.N. comes up, in any capacity, the rah-rah America faction-- especially, I find, the portion of that faction with "blogs"-- just explodes falling all over themselves to denounce the U.N. and talk about how horrible and evil it is and how everything it does is wrong.
Looking at the U.N. myself though I don't really see an organization consistent enough to draw any conclusions about it. It is an evolving entity. Look at its state over time since oh, say, 1985, and you'll realize there are almost no points over this time period where the U.N. in practice clearly resembles the entity it was just five years before. The U.N. had a clearly defined role during the Cold War; now that the Cold War is over that role no longer applies, and it is trying to find its new role. I don't think there's any way to predict right now what that role is going to be. The U.S. has the option of taking an active hand in shaping the U.N.'s new role, if we want (there have been parts of the last 20 years where we've done this, though right now is not one of them); however, what we can't do is make the U.N. go away. It's going to stay around, and it's going to develop into something. That isn't our choice. Our only choice is, will it develop into something with us or without us.
One thing that it occasionally worries me the U.N. might develop into is a bloc organization that basically represents "everyone but the U.S.". That is, I think it is possible that as the U.S. increasingly acts only in its own immediate interest to the exclusion of anyone else's interests, other countries will use the U.N. as a platform on which to band together and represent their interests in common, until the U.N. eventually becomes something which pens in the U.S. the way NATO penned in the USSR. As an American, I don't think this situation would be good for me or my country. However, I think it is possible. I also think that trying to push hard against or de-emphasize the U.N. does more to make the above "U.N. vs U.S." outcome likely than it does to make the U.N. weaker. The U.N.'s potential strength stems from the countries which wish to align with it; it's exactly as strong if the U.S. appears hostile toward it as it is if the U.S. appears apathetic toward it. However if the U.S. appears hostile toward the U.N. we do begin to set the stage for a situation where the U.N. begins to behave antagonistically back.
I see this DNS thing as a small but noteworthy step toward this situation.
Four or five years ago if the U.N. expressed an interest in controlling the DNS servers (and they did) there would be no point in taking this suggestion seriously (and no one did) because there was already an independent and international body (ICANN) on track toward running the DNS system. Now the U.S. has decided to make ICANN no longer a meaningfully independent body, and the governance of the DNS servers a U.S. national issue rather than an international one. And now, as a result, we are starting to see movements where service providers and governments outside the U.S. are starting to look into ways to break away from the U.S.-commerce-department-controlled ICANN system and into nameserver independence. In this light, the U.N. proposing they control nameservers takes on a very different tone. It underscores that if the U.S. does not wish to administer the nameservers under its control in an international fashion, there are other entities perfectly willing to assume that job.
If other nations choose to break away from the U.S. controlled nameservers, well, it's likely they'll do so together, meaning that we will have the U.S. commerce department running DNS for the U.S. and an international body running DNS for "everybody else". And who will run this international body? Well, the U.N. is a likely choice. The steady smear campaign against the U.N. doesn't exist in the same way outside the
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
The rest of the world would just point at a different set of root servers.
Yes, they certainly could. They wouldn't. Most of Europe has been taken in completely by the Hobbesian Philosophy which posits that all things good come from a strong central authority, and splitting authority is inherently bad since it leads to chaos. It is through an implicit "social contract" that individuals form societies and collectively surrender authority over their possessions and themselves to the central authority, so that that authority may dispose of both in the best interests of the society. Breaking this "social contract" is tantamount to attacking society. Thus the Europeans will not build their own root servers unless they could destroy the authority of the existing root servers, because this would be a division of authority.
Obviously, Hobbesianism and Socialism complement each other beautifully. Less obviously (to some, at least), both are horribly broken and wrong.
I believe that concentration of authority invites its abuse, through incompetence or maliciousness or both. I believe that contracts should be signed by all parties involved before they should be considered binding. I believe that people own what they buy, build, discover, or contract, and that people are the authorities over what they own; this is what ownership means. I believe that charity is good, but that government enforcement of mandatory acts of charity are bad.
I also believe that it would be immoral to try to force these beliefs on anyone else. This is IMO the most important distinction between libertarians and fascists, that a true libertarian lets others walk their own paths.
-- TTK
We've sort missed ideas so let me clarify: One of the main points of society is that if you want to enjoy the better aspects of it you must contribute to it. I pay my taxes (which are slightly higher than taxes in the US) and in turn enjoy the positive aspects of the society I live in. You could probably bury Africa a meter deep in greenbacks and not significantly change to core problems that they experience because lack of money is not the root of their problems. So whether or not I give money to unwashed masses isn't really the issue. I guess, at this point, I should come out and say that I don't believe that donating money is the right thing to do so I only donate time to my charity of choice.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
It's called Galileo and it will co-exist with the US system - if they ever get the funds together, that is.
l ileo/index_en.htm
http://europa.eu.int/comm/dgs/energy_transport/ga
The revolution will NOT be televised.
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."
...to chair the human rights comission ? Yesiree, I want them taxing my domain and deciding where the money should go...
Where ICANN really screwed up, and where the U.S. Dept. of Commerce really messed up as well, was to kill the whole at-large board member plan.
I participated in the election of Karl Auerbach to the ICANN board, and I thought the whole process was incredible. **_IF_** ICANN had kept that policy for the at-large members and phased out the rest of the board, this would never have even been an issue, and the U.N. would not have even been tempted to get involved. Even though it was just for governance of the Internet, it was the first major election to a legislative body that I know about that litterally involved people from arround the world.
If these elections ever came back, I would vote for Karl in a heartbeat. As it was, Karl had to sue ICANN just to get financial records, and his position (in part because of Karl's meddling and getting into the face of Vinton Cerf) was eliminated by the rest of the board members. One of the nasty things that happened, and one of the mistakes of the at-large membership, was that the at-large board members were outnumbered by corporate members, who viewed the at-large board members as a threat (they were, as a matter of fact).
As it is, ICANN has lost all credibility in my opinion, and it appears as though the U.N. may be the only real option to get things cleaned up. They had their chance, and it is sad to think that America fostered this dictatorship (or more correctly, facist organization in the most litteral sense... governance by corporation) instead of having a real democratic movement and organization, even more so when it looked like it was really going to happen.
Totally off-topic, but I feel your pain. Well, I didn't feel it in my pocket but what a fiasco, I certainly felt pain watching what was left.
They're refunding the ticket price at least, right?
The revolution will NOT be televised.
Gasoline prices are artificially inflated in Europe due to punitive taxation levied on it by the social engineers for the purpose of, among other things, herding people onto mass transit systems where they can be blown up by the Muslim extremists they've given refugee status to.
If they do this, can we just f-ing split off from the rest of the world, accessing external countries via some sort of UN portal?
I dont want them messing with things here, they have a really bad track record of doing accomplishing anything, and they have no business telling US what to do.
Besdies they dont acknowledge several of our guaranteed rights here in America.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Why not allow unlimited TLDs? Official structure and organization through TLDs is overrated.
.mobi for mobile sites rather than embedding that in the application protocol. We should be relying on meta-data to define such distinctions, including the categorization companies, non-profit organizations and ISPs. Meta-data would be more flexible, as distinctions do overlap in ways that domains can't singularly cover.
For example, it seems silly to rely on something like
If you need something authoritative, private authorities could use public/private keys as proof to do that. Indiviuals could then decide which private authorities have standards worth trusting. The U.N. could set up such an authority to authenticate government sites. When a user visits a government site, it could refer the application to the whichever authorities it chooses.
Limiting TLDs just creates conflict as different powerful interests vie for their own distinctions. Sure people can more quickly categorize this way, but the limitations seem to outweight the benefits.
The addition of top level domains has been a dismal failure, it just does not work. When .org and .net rules were changed to open them up, people registered their name in .com, .net, and .org. When we add additional top level domains the same thing happens.
They are useless. The international complexity only makes it worse.
The only reasonable solution to the problem is to create a policy where non country based TLDs will be abolished in the future and force all to migrate under a country domain. For example, ibm.com would have to become ibm.com.us or similar.
This way each country manages their own domain space much like each country manages their part of the telephone numbering space.
Since generic TLDs are abolished and international interrelationships are removed, their should be no need to ICANN or UN or anyone else to worry about root servers management. I suppose one could argue that ITU might manage root servers but only idiots would allow ICANN or UN to do so. One might reasonably argue that the root serves should be run by proven reliable entities that are not entirely in a single country, but dont let bogus organizations like UN or ICANN become involved.
It seems like decentralized control works pretty well for most everything else on the internet, so why not the internet itself?
And yes, I know, I'm posting late, and top-level posting at that, so noone will ever read this comment (if you do, could you reply, just to give me a warm fuzzy feeling?), but I had to throw in my 2 cents worth anyway.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
Paraphrasing someone's comment to a recent Slashdot article (I can't remember who or where, sorry):
The internal combustion engine, which, among other things, made way for the invention of the automobile, was invented in Germany.
By the same logic you used in your post, Germany should be allowed to have that same kind of "feel free to run them, but we're the big guys and deserve to be in control" attitude in respect to cars, and inclusively tax American (as well as other countries') vehicles. Does that look fair to you as well?
I'd bite on your GPS rant too, but others have taken care of it already, so I'll just leave it here.
Score: i, Imaginary
But I wouldn't want to have to go to The Hague or wherever to be served.
So as you can see, several decades an millions (if not billions) of dollars went into the creation of what we now call the Internet, mostly all by US interests. Of course, the most popular and most life altering one was by Tim Berners-Lee of CERN. But, remember this... HTTP/HTML/URL are all APPLICATIONS that run on the Internet. They are not the Internet. As far as DNS this too was designed by an American, Dr. Paul Mockapetris(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Moc
God I am glad that you are not in charge!
If you were to apply that logic to everything else, I'm sure there's a whole lot of inventions that took place in other countries you use in your everyday life, and you don't usually think of as someone else's property.
I don't even need to go that far: American-based research did indeed lead to the creation of the Internet, but to say that the effort involved was 100% American is at the very least unfair. The Internet is a worldwide network.
You can take your part of the Internet (the one in American soil) and do whatever you want with it. But please leave the rights of the rest of Humanity to it alone.
Score: i, Imaginary
Wow, this has gotten pretty heated.
The important point is that the internet isn't (or at least shouldn't be) monitored or governed by anyone, including the US gov't. Sure, private companies hold a lot of power on the internet, and they all fall under the jurisdiction of their home country, which is predominantly the US. But why should swiss companies be subject to US laws, or UN laws for that matter when they publish online?
Your analogy (and that of others) is flawed. It would only be correct if we were talking about the U.S. using German engines. Germans may have invented the concept but the engines used in American cars are built for those cars. If the rest of the world wants to build their own Internet they have my best wishes. I won't have any objection to not being able to access sites in Syria, China or Ghanna.
Does the UN say what telephone number I can have, or what name I can have in the phone book? Does it need too?
- illc0mm
That wasn't what the weapons inspectors said. They said they haven't found any. They said they wanted more time. Your government and mine said that they *knew* there were WMD, my prime minister even said they knew they could be launched in 45 minutes. They have admitted that they did not know, and that they are not certain there are WMDs. Looks like the UN's the one in the right there.
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?
Because the corporations can make you pay that much. It wasn't about cheaper oil for american individuals, it was about bigger profits for american companies.
I am trolling
Really! They're doing so well with the Middle East and Africa, I'm sure the net will be just as well off if these people manage it.
What?
Guess what. You conceive it. You develop it. You own it.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Look, the UN is accountable to the "rights" of countries, not the rights of individuals. That's what makes them shch a poor body to resolve disputes involving freedom, individual rights, and fairness to society. The internet relates to all of these.
The UN stood by and picked their nose when the former USSR went on a "purge" of 10's of millions of people and did the same thing again when China's land reform policy put farmers out of business and led to the starvation of 30 million chineese. Not to mention the countless other disasters they failed to prevent or halt and I doubt they prevented anything that western countries wouldn't have halted anyhow.
These are not the people we want in charge even if we do need to get the US governments nose out of it.
No, he was right. The US does own the Internet, always have. George H.W. Bush (41) signed a bill in 1992 that allowed the internet to go public. Up until that point it was for Government purposes only. Even in Europe (they had to have a contract of some sort with the US to hook up to it). That is why the U.S. Department of Commerce still holds the reigns to it today. They also didn't want to screw it up so they got international cooperation - the much criticized ICANN. What they really did was assure that everyone is a bit upset at things. Even here in the US.
I never did understand why Europe wants Galileo. So they can pretend they invented GPS maybe? I doubt they could improve it much, if any (especially for the cost, more accuracy, more money). Why not use what is already there and already a standard for over 10 years? Spend the money on something that we don't already have. Again, we don't mind if the rest of the world uses our GPS just as with our Internet. Think of it as your own, something you don't have to pay for and it just works.
You're argument falls flat in the face of the fact that everyone doesn't use one internal combustion engine.
The real question isn't whether the U.N. should control "the internet" (meaning root domains). The fragmentation of the internet is an inevitability. The real question to be asked is how that fragmentation will ultimately occur. What would the topology be? Would it be that each country maintain its own national network (essentially a national node) or a collection of countries sharing a node? I think any forward thinking, international agency would be wise to consider the event that they need to register multiple domains. One for each potential root node of the global network in which they wish to resolve.
To know is to have knowledge....to understand is to be enlightened.
My Country of origin is U.S.A
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Oh please shut up.
America is the most self critical, free society in the world. Protection of individual rights is stronger here than every country in Europe. (Yes. Europe. Where individual freedoms are very loosely legislated).
Your statement: because I want to live in a nice place sends shivers of "not my neighborhood", anti-immigration, social controlled Europe up my spine.
You should study what's happened in France re: individual rights over the last 10 years before you post ignorant crap like that.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
HTTP doesn't depend on TCP/IP. You could, for example, run it over IPv9, a Chinese protocol, or ATM or something similar. We don't, but that's more for historical reasons than anything else. The fact is the Internet is bigger than any country, and no one country contributed enough of the protocols to claim they wrote the internet as it is today.
I am trolling
Cheney said he knew "exactly" where the WMDs were. If he knew, why didn't he have satellites monitor the sites? Hard to miss a convoy of trucks moving tons of material now, isn't it? If there were WMDs, then the Bush administration and the military is grossly incompetent and should be fired for letting them get away.
Your link is bogus, old news. Yes, a shell with traces was exploded. It's most likely an old shell from the Iran-Iraq war or first Gulf war. The wreckage of tanks are still around, it's not that hard to pick up. Someone took the scrap and built an IED around it. If they knew it had 'traces' of Sarin, wouldn't they put it to better use rather than a shell casing that blew away all the gas in the open wind? That article and incident dates from over a year ago. If there were more chemical agents, how come no more were found? The insurgents are itching to fight, are you going to tell me they are just sitting on the chance to use chemical gas if they had any? I mean, all their opportunities like the election are past by now.
As for point 2, they're not related in that manner. One of the goals was to stabilize the oil industry and ensure less dependance on Saudi Arabia. However, nobody in the administration was counting on the security failures. The oil fields are left relatively insecure, and it's taking years longer than expected to stabilize the oil industry and harden it from attacks. Oil was A factor, but the plan was botched.
It would only be correct if we were talking about the U.S. using German engines.
Are you implying that every motherboard, processor, network card, router, antenna, wire, etc, connected to the Internet is American-made?
If the rest of the world wants to build their own Internet they have my best wishes.
Is is that difficult to grasp that the Internet is not a 100% American project? ARPANET was. The US certainly wasn't involved in building and setting up all the Internet infrastructure outside US soil. And by calling it "yours" you're claiming rights to an entity that belongs only partially to you.
Score: i, Imaginary
Apples to oranges... The UN does not regulate phone service, mobile or otherwise. Why should it regulate the use of the Internet. It's a bad idea plain and simple.
Well, international phone service is in fact regulated by the International Telecommunication Union, which is "an international organization within the United Nations System" (quoted from their web site). To quote further:
"The Union was established last century as an impartial, international organization within which governments and the private sector could work together to coordinate the operation of telecommunication networks and services and advance the development of communications technology."
It sounds a lot like the telephone equivalent of what is suggested for the internet.
All your root servers are belong to us!
I'd have to agree with the people who ask why we need to change anything.... What advantage does having the UN or some other international body give the Internet?
Credibility? The Internet already works just fine for everyone who uses it. That's all the credibility you need. Its not like we have to convince the French and Germans to send troops to the Internet to make it work.
National security? Well I see no reason that you couldn't set up your own root infrastructure if you wanted to spend the money. I think it's a reasonable concern that the US may try using it as a political tool, but at the same time, putting it under an international body almost ensures it becomes political. I mean, just listen to the people adding in the "Universal Access" taxation idea in the very same article where they talk about internationalization. So fine. Install some servers and pipes and have the local capability to start serving out DNS or whatever. Put in a failover contingency plan if for some reason the US does something you don't like. It seems like a reasonable defensive measure to me. That still doesn't require the UN to run anything, though.
The fact is that the only reason I can see that anyone wants to have an international organization run things is purely political. They don't like that the US nominally runs things. It hurts their constituencies that they don't get a "vote". Well, that's silly. The only concern with a technical infrastructure, in terms of input, is whether foreign voices are being ignored in terms of making the Internet work or improve. Well guess what? If good solutions are ignored based on nationality, then the US-controlled Internet will stop being useful and something else will replace it. Again, no UN required.
* 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
I don't see how that affects the analogy; think of the concept of a combustion engine, not of the many physical implementations of it.
American researchers came up with the idea of interconnected computer networks and, in good scientific practice, made it open (both the idea and the network) to the rest of the world. From that point on, it ceased to be an exclusively American project. All I'm implying is that the US are entitled to manage their portion of the Internet, but (should) have no business controlling the rest of it.
(And if you're worried about the concrete, physical aspect, remember that not every computer, router, switch or cable connected to the Internet was made by an American company, neither are all of the Internet nodes manned by Americans).
Score: i, Imaginary
Migrate slowly the current US involvement into a larger UN organization to oversee the Internet as a whole. Allow so many tech types from each country to be a working part of the organization.
With regard to say China's statement regarding the ability to filter content, the UN org implements a base system to allow that functionality on a per country basis if needed for filtering. The filtering country would be resposable for it past that point. I do not see this as a good solution myself because I do not believe in filtering the net but if a country wishes to do that it would be their option. I dont think this would hurt the backbone of the internet but I could be very wrong.
It would be a long and I am sure not smooth operation but something will need to be done because even though "it aint broke dont fix it" works now, it will not hold up for the long haul.
Open Source, Open Formats, Open Doors, Open Your Mind "Break On Through to the Other Side" The Doors
Because we all know how good the UN is at managing everything else.
MadOgre.com
This is pretty much inevitable. As it stands now, national boundaries mean very little on the Internet. If your server is illegal in France, but it is based in the United States where it is legal, as long as you don't care about never being able to go to France, you won't be prosecuted.
This kind of thing makes governments of any stripe, whether right or left wing, communist or capitalist, cringe in fear. Eventually information network interconnectivity is going to be by treaty. It's the only solution that any government is going to be able to live with in the end, now that they are getting up to speed on what the Internet really does.
Your analogy (and that of others) is flawed. It would only be correct if we were talking about the U.S. using German engines. Germans may have invented the concept but the engines used in American cars are built for those cars.
Just as well you can say that the US has developed the concept of the internet by developing most of the protocolls (although one of the main protocolls used by many people - http - was developed at CERN, if I'm not mistaken).
People worldwide are not using the "American internet" (physically build by the US), but networks build by their own companies (or paid for by their own governments) which use the concept developed in the US. And because so far everybody agrees in accepting some US servers as authority when it comes to assigning addresses, it appears to be a world wide uniform network. But I surely hope you do not believe that the network connecting European universities, or the network bringing internet connections into European homes was build by the US, do you? To paraphrase you: The internet used in Europe was build by the Europeans.
If the rest of the world wants to build their own Internet they have my best wishes.
Since the hardware is already international, "building their own internet" essentially means to not accept the US root servers any more. If all countries other than the US decide to use an independent address system, they have their "own internet". Of course, that would be a major inconvinience for almost everybody, including many US companies.
I can't wait for the domain name registration scandle where domain name disputes are bribed away to the highest bidder and Radicals get there message boards politically protected so they can plot more bombings....That is what the UN can bring to the table.
By the same logic, I guess Slashdot is a wholly owned subsidiary of Tim Berners-Lee.
All those websites he owns, you'd think he'd have more money.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
How would that decentralization occur? Along national boundaries, along associations of nations or both?
To know is to have knowledge....to understand is to be enlightened.
Europe wants galileo because at any moment the US is free to pull the plug on GPS. Europe therefore cannot run its affairs on a satellite system that may go down, and should therefore build their own system that they have more control over.
You cannot own the internet, it's not an entity. You can own the root servers, and that is what the US have, and therefore assume they own the concept of the internet.
the rest of the world does take their toys and goes home, i.e. "invents" a new internet and leaves us out of it
There's no need to get hysterical about this. The only contentious point is who controls the DNS root servers, right? If the rest of the world doesn't like DoC keeping control over it; set up an alternate root and point your resolvers to it. That's all!
Anyway, the world has no problems giving Microsoft a de facto monopoly over their computers: controlling the DNS is their lesser problem!
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
so it's ours. Dont like it? Get the fuck out.
I'll take the monster I know (current organization) vs the one I DON'T know (the UN).
I see only negatives to giving it to the UN. Sure, it would be great if the UN was a relatively honest organization that you could be relatively sure would'nt be bribed. Unfortunately I don't think that's the case.
Now you could make the argument that the CURRENT owners are just as bad, but I seriously doubt the UN is better. All risk...and relatively NO reward.
Ahh, I can see it now.
A lot of people are angry at the US and would prefer to put the control of the Internet (actually just the DNS) in the hands of the U.N. Fine. But the world is not unhappy at all that a US company named MSFT controls over 95% or more of their PCs. So what should happen now? Have the U.N. control Microsoft? And Intel? And AMD? Where do you want to draw the line?
The Internet is fine as it is now, thank you very much. The IETF, RFC, etc... are much more friendly than those unreadable ISO protocols! Please, dear U.N. burocrats: leave the Internet alone. There's no need to break a running system!
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Let's see, "America, like your money we the rest of the world expects you to turn over your technology to us as well. Thanks!" True, many technologies on the Internet were developed globally, but it was developed here as an infrastructure. Turning it over to the U.N. is just stupid. Anyone that thinks this is a good thing is frighteningly stupid.
The group handling the RF spectrum has done a good job. I could let a group similar to this handle the internet. But having the UN make decisions and levying taxes (redistribution scheme) is just not going to sit well with the more developed countries. China would just love to have a hand in ramming censorship and putting controls onto all of the users in the world.
Think about that before turning controls over to the UN.
...an international body which has NO membership requirements setting the rules for the rest of us - including the citizens of my own country, which no organization should have authority over except for the one which I elected.
How am I supposed to respect a body which not only allows more than 80 brutal dictatorships world-wide to join it's ranks, but to VOTE on what that body should and should not do? Perhaps if the U.N. had a stringent set of rules defining who could and could not join I'd take it more seriously, but as is I won't even give it the time of day.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
The ITU does not regulate phone service, they simply facilitate standards within the systems/countries much like the IETF does for the Internet already. The UN does not collect taxes on phone service, that I'm aware of, and I've looked a little bit during this discussion.
.com, .net, .org, etc... domain names were created with out thought of the country tlds.
.com, .net, and .org names to go away and all revert back to the country tlds, .uk, .us, etc... This way each country to rule their TLDs as they currently do. I don't think that's going to happen though.
Part of the problem with the Internet DNS is that the
It would make more sense for the
-illc0mm
Comment removed based on user account deletion
At least you're free to speak up your mind; even if most of us (including me) strongly disagree with your opinions.
the only difference between al-Qaida and the americans is that the americans speak English.
Oh, al-Qaida guys don't speak English?
america is becoming exactly what they fight against.
If you're referring to the obsessive focussing on security measures: probably yes, in the long turn. There's a real danger that America may turn into a police state if she doesn't take care. But right now, it is still very^H^H^H^H far away.
Anyway, that was a very unfriendly rant! May I suggest that you cool down before writing down such inflammatory comments? I understand your anger, but, hey, overgeneralizations, esp. when they are plain wrong, are unfair to the huge majority of Americans who are very friendly, tolerant and and generous people!
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Now you can go back to your high and mighty American ivory tower to work out the next scandel (sic) that threatens mighty America.
Akarsz Magyar Gentoo fórumot? Akkor
It's my understanding (and god forbid I'm wrong) but I thought the GPS system is off by 10 yards, or something to that affect. I'm guessing the rest of the world is a bit paranoid that we've tied a lot of our missle guidance into the information that the GPS system provides That's why the U.S. is threatening to blow up any competing system, they don't want any other country/group to have pin-point accuracy of structures/locations within their borders. I don't think the U.S.'s fear is that a large country is going to attack them, I think it's more about a small group, such as Al-Quida, having a cheap effective means of pin-pointing targets.
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
The situation with numbers is a little trickier, but when it comes to names, US control is entirely defacto. Anyone who doesn't like the US having the final word, can simply decide the US doesn't, and that's that. Point your resolver at a different set of servers.
Everyone is free to do this. But they don't want to. They don't really want to be free or determine things for themselves; they want to control others. It's not enough that you can use OpenNIC or whatever -- you want to force other people to do the same. Everyone essentially votes on who is in control, and ICANN is still getting 99% of the votes, and that is pissing some people off. But instead of educating the voters, they want to essentially take over ICANN's defacto authority.
This is wrong. Your laziness in this regard, is the very reason your politicians (completely outside the scope of internet issues) suck. You're just like us Americans who are too cowardly to vote for someone other than republicans and democrats, so we try to influence the republicans and democrats and then wonder why our elected leads still do the wrong things.
Voters have to take responsibility and vote intelligently. Quit fucking with the candidates, that's not the answer.
The first line of the article in your link is:
"Bush administration officials told Fox News that mustard gas (search) was also recently discovered."
Oh, the Bush administration officials said it was true? Please excuse me as I piss myself laughing.
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
It won't.
Everyone is always so concerned about other people getting ripped off, it never occurs to them that the "cure" is worse than the disease.
The "U.N. first" crowd would rather have a million of us send $1 to some U.N. Goon Squad in Nigeria than have all of us free while some dumbass wires $1,000,000 to an anonymous Nigerian con-man. It's 6 of one, a half dozen of the other.
Either an anonymous dumbass gets burned every once in a while or the whole of responsible computer users (you and me) get burned with new taxes and regulations every year. Gee, that's a hard call.
Yes, but the bulk of the cost for Fuel in Europe is taxes (52% in the UK if I remember correctly)
The evil monkey commands you to dance.
There are other governments, such as China, that *like* doing this sort of thing to their citizens, and much of this WSISness is because they'd like to get ICANN-like powers to do it more effectively.
From a technical perspective, ICANN hasn't done a good job with Internationalized Domain Names, which is a serious problem because there are lots of counties where people need to use other character sets, and while Verisign came up with a couple of horribly botched approaches to the problem that worked for the web, didn't work adequately for email, and were totally useless for other protocols, the problem still needs to be solved. China's been threatening to split the root about it, though they could perfectly well hang anything they want under .cn and get the same effects. There are less serious issues (we really could use some more TLDs, and they've interfered with experimentation that could support alternate policies; .museum is the only TLD that's done anything interesting.) They decided to set a price on IPv6 space, which somewhat hindered IPv6 deployment in the US, though that's mainly a Cisco/Microsoft issue at this stage.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Before I go on, please aknowledge that I am from Germany and I think the UN is a great idea.
It is really bad as it is now. Every independent board member that has overseen ICAAN actions has said this. But putting it into the hands of the UN per se would just make matters much worse.
Also I have the strong feeling that many people don't have the slightest clue what the UN really is and what it does. The funny thing is everyone seems to have an opinion about it. Either they hate it or love it or like it or dislike it. Germans like it and left leaning Americans like it. French like it and conservative Americans dislike it. I don't know about Americans, but I know that Germans don't have a clue what it is they like.
Some basics:
The UN is made up of different bodies to which countries are elected. Each world region (like Africa or Asia) has a certain quota for how many countries they can vote into a certain comitee. Then there are also organizations for specific purposes. Like UNAIDS or the UN high comissionare for refugees.
The UN is very good for diplmacy for example. All nations can go there and resolve conflicts instead of starting wars. Granted, it hasn't work very good and could be made better, but I don't see any alternative. Kofi Annan for example pushed through some very important reforms in his first two years of office.
Anyways, I could go on for hours, but maybe You can just check their webpage. It is quite informative.
Just reading the UN Charta would most likely be very invormative to many people here I suppose.
The UN is many, many things at the same time. Maybe if a sensible set of rules would be put together for some kind of organization under the UN umbrella it would appear international and at the same time remain efficient. But is not going to happen anyways. So keep cool and keep cursing Verisign and their control over ICANN.
Well, we can own TCP/IP sure, but to be fare, lets give up HTTP. I mean Switzerland is not the US. It was developed to *not* share information, so why should we use it to do so?
ARGHH. Sorry, I'm just for the fact that the world contributing to a project has led to the Internet to be what it is today. I think if we were to go your route, the Internet should have stayed in the US military because once you remove the ability of research institutions around the world from sharing knowledge leading to the greater good of humankind, all that's left is spam, web advertising, IM, and rubbish. We have plenty of equivalent things outside the net so why add to it?
The upper end of your range is correct. U.S. GDP per capita is $40,100 -- 135% of the U.K. GDP per capita ($29,600).
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
The idea that the US is currently in control of the internet is already silly.
The other root servers could stop mirroring A, ISPs could stop pointing to the current root servers, or the end users could stop using their ISPs domain servers.
If the UN wants to set up and control their own root server, they should just do it, there's nothing stopping them.
-- Should you trust authority without question?
Maybe it is me but that sounds like "the sky is falling" by chicken little. If the US pulled the plug on GPS, there would be a lot of very upset people over here. I know pilots that rely on it more than the traditional nav aids (which is a very bad thing when the battery dies). Whoever did it would have to have an extreamly good reason for doing so, even then would risk being tarred and feathered. Maybe your right, perhaps Europe doesn't know how to trust other people. Even a country that has demonstrated a willingness to help Europe so many times in the past, even at great cost in lives and money. Indeed if I had a choice I think I would rely on GPS rather than Galileo. I think GPS would be more likely to stay up, Europeans like to fight back and forth (shoot in foot disease).
Interesting you think the internet is not an entity. Entity refers to a separate existance, if the Internet doesn't exist then what are we all using? It does exist, as a bunch of interconnected wires, routers, computers and so on. Back before the internet was allowed to go public, clearly the US Government owned it. You would go to a US jail for misusing it and a few did. They regulated every aspect of it. Today I understand they have the legal right to regulate most of it, however they choose not to. Again, it would really not be in their interest to do that. They know if it is screwed up, then the internet will splinter, maybe into a million pieces. It may never recover. Nobody wants that.
The UN does not collect taxes on phone service, that I'm aware of, and I've looked a little bit during this discussion.
The fundamental discussion is about whether such essential things like the allocation of address space or the creation of TLDs in an international network should be the responsibility of an international organisation or if it should be controlled by one country alone. I personally would prefer the former. I see that the linked article also mentions the possibility of impossing an 'internet tax', which in my book is something completely unnecessary. But it's not like you can't have the former without the later. One should not take the most stupid suggestion made in relation with an international internet organisation as an argument to reject the whole thing in general.
Of course the international organisation should have as few responsibilities as possible, but enough to make the decissions necessary to prevent the fragmentation of the network. That includes the assignment of address space and decissions about TLDs, but surely not any taxation powers or any decision about how the individual countries handle their TLDs.
"perhaps even the power to tax domain names to pay for 'universal access.'"
I am *not* paying a tax for which I have at least some measure of direct or indirect control, sorry.
Hello...American Revolution, Boston Tea Party...
I don't trust the UN to take good care of my money.
I don't care if some sort of international organization takes the reigns, but I don't like the U.N. Really, a trade or technology group would be better suited than a political one.
Used to be off by about that much because the signal was intentionally encrypted. That was turned off years ago so now they are within 3 feet depending on terrain. Sometimes my handheld seems to work down to 6 inches.
Alright Algore. Where are ya? You invented this thing and Kofi wants you to give it up. On a serious note, the UN will kill the internet. Just kill it. Do we really need another power hungry politician running something they don't understand?
And which one of those effect me? None. Most were a waste of time and energy.
What does domain control have to do with 'internet control'? Its the foot in the door.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Just a thought... Why not have the UN setup a root name server that handles county names. For example: .us for the US, .uk for the UK, etc. Then each country could run their own name severs and have any extension they want. For example .com.us or .xxx.fr
As for taxation, enforcement, or any other government action, forget it. I might consider it if I were allowed to vote (directly or through representation) on any regulations involved.
Request a Linux Shockwave player here: http://www.macromedia.com/support/email/wishform/
From a year ago for example, a large number of leading indicators showed progress in Iraq's infrastructure. Compare that to the Congo or Haiti in which the UN is running peacekeeping operations.
Pardon me for being Mr. Obvious here but there is a big difference from running a peacekeeping operation and trying to rebuild a country after largely destroying it (first with sanctions, then with bombs).
"Men from roughly 50 different countries make up the U.N. forces in Congo, and the United Nations does not conduct background checks. Furthermore, U.N. troops are exempt from prosecution in Congo."
Can you say "International Criminal Court?"
While the US has made mistakes on the ground dealing with Iraqi and Afghani Prisoners and civilians, at least widespread allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse of women, boys and girls havn't been happening like they are happening in the Congo.
As others have pointed out, this never happend in Vietnam or anything, right?
Also a lot of this type of activity in the Congo has been happening between the warring factions. Sorry, but blaming the UN for their actions is like blaming the US when insurgents attack an Iraqi police station.
"Didier Bourguet, a U.N. official from France, is pictured here in an image found on his hard drive, which was obtained by ABC News. Also on the hard drive were thousands of photos of him having sex with hundreds of young Congolese girls."
If that is the case, then someone has an obligation to prosecute him. IANAL, but last time I checked, I think the country of nationality had the first right to prosecute in these matters, followed by the country where the crimes were committed, and following that, there is no reason why the ICC couldn't prosecute. Oh, wait, the ICC is a dirty word here in the US, sorry I forgot...
I would further point out that there is a large contingent of French, British, and German troops in the Congo under the EU (*not* NATO) flag, the first EU peacekeeping deployment outside Europe.
People forget that a large extent of the issue is that conservatives (the media insofar as most large media outlets are owned by other corporations such as Disney, GE, etc have inherent in their organizations a conservative bias) are largely upset that the US is no longer the dominant power in the world (except militarily). Every major trade war with the EU has ended in a US defeat. The EU has a larger population and a higher per GDP than the US. And the have two permanent seats on the UNSC, and many seats in both the GA and the WTO. Compare that to *1* for the US in each organization.
We in the US can hold our own against China and any other nationalist state. However, because we don't see internationalism as a worthy goal, we cannot hold our own against states who work together to set up common economic policy, as the EU has done.
Note that the parent poster, like many, seems to equate the UN with "France" and/or "Germany." This is further evidence of the building propaganda war against the EU. But what will happen if the EU ends up with three seats on the UNSC at some point (if, say, Russia were to join)?
I fear we are heading into a new type of cold war against an opponent we cannot hope to defeat. Thanks "New American Century..."
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Question for you: Why is "the internet" running TCP/IP (+ UDP/IP, etc.) and not OSI?
Simple reason, TCP/IP was created by technologists who wanted a working system, rather than a bureaucracy. The general rule with IETF was that a working implementation was needed before a standard would be accepted.
Reminds me of a joke about OSI: OSI is to networking as Bary Manilow is to music - something that is supposed to please everyone, but manages to repulsive to everyone.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
that was a good laugh.
Please tell me you did not just link to FoxNews as a legitimate news source. I know that lots of them aren't exactly perfect, but dear god man... FoxNews??!! Words cannot express....
Why not just link directly to the source??
http://www.newamericancentury.org/
My 2c.
Your mind is like a parachute. It works best when it's been opened.
The UN is more than balanced against these 2 nations by other more democratic nations
The Security Council does not control UN agencies, the General Assembly handles such administrative decisions. And the dictatorships and failed states outnumber democracies in the General Assembly by a considerable number. The General Assembly is the 3rd World Dictator Club.
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.
The US can keep the Internet, but Canada wants back insulin.
(btw Africa is not a country, it's a continent.)
The League of Nations planted the seeds for WWII and the UN created Israel to plant the seeds for WWIII. This single act contributed more to make terrorism the worldwide phenomena that it is today than anything. The lobbying efforts of the arms dealers paid off very handsomly.
You don't get off so lightly. What about the Carter (and later Reagan) Administration's "Join the Jihad" campaign aimed at recruiting militant Islamists and getting them together in Afghanistan (with training from the US) to fight the Soviets?
See, it is all the fault of two presidents from different political parties... At least as far as Al Qaeda and any collegiate international terrorism organization goes.
And Regarding Israel--- The history of the founding of Israel between WWI and 1949 is quite interesting and full of material that will make almost anybody uncomfortable regardless of political disposition. However, it was all started by the British who claim to have wanted to reward those Jews who fought for Britain in WWI by trying to promote British Palestine as a place where they could go to as a homeland provided that the existing Palestinians were not displaced (read the Balfour Declaration). The time between the end of WWI and 1949 was full of terrorism on the part of the Zionists and Arabs (continuing today often on both sides despite efforts of moderates on either side). And, most interestingly, the attempted collaboration between the ELHI brotherhod (in part lead by Yitzak Shameer) and Hitler (one might add that the ELHI brotherhood had no shortage of good things to say about the Nazis). As punishment for his efforts and sympathies, Shameer was later elected Prime Minister which should tell you a lot about Israeli politics.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Look, fucko (not that there's anything wrong with that) - she's already gone. And she's KNOCKED UP! You're a grandpappy - the one she learned all her tricks from. And now she's got a new sugardaddy. You can't hold her - the most you can expect is pictures of the grandkids.
"Ha! But if in our fears, we don't learn to trust each other
And if in our tears, we don't learn to share with your brother
You know that hate is gonna keep on multiplying
And you know that man is gonna keep right on dying"
- Funkadelic, "You and Your Folks, Me and My Folks"
--
make install -not war
You really want the U.N. to take care of your currently fine working Internet? You know, the internet, where any person without much trouble can setup his own Web and Blog site? Is the current state of affairs in the Internet world not the best example of freedom of speech and expression in full action?
And now you want the U.N. to take care of that?
The same U.N. which comes in action at places, after which a couple years later the complete area is still in turmoil, people dying of AIDS, young girls forced in prostitution, the African continent at the brink of dying after 50 years of U.N. Aid, Afghanistan getting promoted to the premier export country of Opium , Heroin etc. ?
No Thanks,
Robert
They are owned by a big media conglomerate that serves the interest of its wealthy shareholders, and that is to brainwash ignorant chimps like you into spouting their lies for them. Which you have done admirably. Your corporate masters will be proud of you.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
the big problem is that the US has not only decided to continue with its control past the experation date (Vietnam reunification anyone?) but has actually decided to increase its involvement. This is something that everyone on all sides of the spectrum should oppose.
If you think the status quo is best, then oppose the efforts of the Department of Commerce to make themselves the approval point for any changes. If you think that this is a symptom of the fact that one country controls what should essentially be a global public good, then let the UN take control.
But don't give the US government total power over DNS. That is opposed to the ideology of pretty much everyone except, perhaps, those currently in office...
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
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.
.....
,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.
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?!
The United States did invent the United Nations.
The United Nations had in its genesis the League of Nations, advocated by the American President Woodrow Wilson. Impressed with the ideas of the League but also mindful of its failures was the young politician Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
When World War II was fought, it was through Roosevelt's insistence that the United Nations was founded. Roosevelt though, like Wilson, felt that the United Nations should ideally only apply to Democratic Nations. Unfortunately, he had to get Stalin on board the United Nations and in doing so ruined it.
For historical reference, please read the original Atlantic Charter, and also the text of Wilson's request for war against Germany in 1917.
This is my sig.
Yeah, your right. If I'd thought about it for a sec, I would have said that it runs on top of it, not that it "depends" on it. I agree that the internet is bigger than any one country and arguments over who started it all are largely pointless. However, I also believe that at least its working for now and would very hesitant to hand it over to a body where nations such as China would better position to implement changes making it easier to restrict the free exchange of information. This wouldn't just be a problem for freedom speech in oppressive nation. This would in time provide tools to those in the "free world" less concerned with free speech than restricting speech whereever they might find offense. Its kind of like what the "smart" bomb has done to modern warfare. It is more effective and less likely to cause collateral damage, so there is a better chance it will actually be used. The end result can be a matter of debate.
"Build something idiot proof, and someone will build a better idiot" - Samuel Clemens
Rich != (Conservative || right-wing)
A very interesting remark. Why? lately i viewed the BCC Documentary, "the Power of Nightmares", which indeed reveiled that Al-Qeida is just a name for a organisation which does not exist! the name Al-Qeida is a fabrication by the Federal US Prosecutors in order to get warrent for arrest to nail Osama Bin Laden, a.k.a. Tim Osman within the CIA.
See also :
"Al-Qaeda Is Fiction: The Organization Doesn't Exist"
"
Mark Perkel | July 4 2005
I came across three films produced by the BBC called "The Power of Nightmares" which explain how various groups use the fear of terrorism to advance their political power. I've spent all day converting them to a smaller format so that they can be ea silly downloaded. But they are an hour long each and are about 75 megs each. They are however extraordinary and it's quite an education into the history of Islamic Terrorism and American neo conservatives. Here are the links:
Baby it's Cold Outside
The Phantom Victory
The Shadows in the Cave>
Sorry for the windows (WMV) format but it allowed me to shrink the video to 1/10 it's original size. I don't think there's a copyright issue but if there is I'll wait till someone screams about it. I think the BBC would want people to see these films.
In particular the third film makes a shocking revelation. The terrorist group al-Qaeda in fact does not exist. It was made up in January of 2001 in order to prosecute Osama bin Laden in his absence. In order to prosecute bin Laden there had to be an organization like the Mafia for which he was a part of. Under the law if such an organization exists then the head of the organization can be prosecuted under the law. So in order to bring the prosecution they made up the organization and called it al-Qaeda.
But the organization is fiction. It doesn't exist. It's all a huge fraud.
After 9-11 - a terrorist act that was organized by a bin Laden aide and funded by bin Laden - Bush dug up the name al-Qaeda from the prosecutors in the New York case against him. And since then we have been in a battle against a fictional enemy. The very people who made the story up now are believing their own lies.
What I first heard about this movie I too was skeptical. I thought, "Yeah right! al-Qaeda doesn't exist - sure!" But now that I watched it, and with the other two movies providing further background, I am sitting here in shock and awe. Keep in mind that this was made by the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) which is hardly some tin foil hat organization!
Here's the BBC Link that talks about the 3 films. I edited off the front part of the last two because it was identical to the first one and I wanted to save bandwidth.
If what this movie says is true then we shouldn't be able to find any al-Qaeda references in the news before the begining of 2001. So lets start hunting this up and find out where the name al-Qaeda first surfaced. "
Cheers,
Robert
Sorry for getting waaay off topic here guys...
bhima, please give it a few years to settle. The emotions are still soaring high since 9/11. Unlike Europe, which has had its share of terrorist attacks in the past, this is still quite new and traumatizing in the minds of many Americans. Unfortunately, the administration is banking on a lot of irrational fears and phobia from a largely unpolitical and very ill informed population to push its own agenda. This is really sad actually. Compared to Europe, we react in a real hysterical way to a threat, which while being quite real and high, is still not so mindboggingly dangerous as the mass media are trying to suggest.
But I'm fairly confident that this is just a phase in our history. A sad phase, like McCarthy, but a phase nonetheless. Calling the majority of a largely scared population 'fascist' is IMHO quite gross and way over board. It is the people you're calling 'fascist' right now who will eventually change the direction of its government if it gets too bad, no matter how resentful you think of them at the moment being.
But it's still sad that you're thinking so harshly about Americans. I do hope that you'll reconsider and reevaluate your judgement in a few years from now.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Just like they leech off of our tax money and give it to countries who would like to kill us (live8) now they want complete control over the Internet too. The UN are the real terrorists!
[ brakken ]
If they want to screw up the web, put the UN in charge of it. Within a matter of years, the web will be so screwed up, it won't work anymore. And their fix will be like anything else. Have the countries that have money, pour more money into it. If I were the USA, I'd tell the UN to go take a flyin' leap off a short pier. The United States Government STARTED the net with DARPA, so it should stay in the USA. All these other countries, if they think they can do a better job, go out and invent one yourself!
Apparently you haven't heard that the most of the world is Lactose Intolerant and cannot eat milk products. I think missing something that major disqualifies you as an expert.
"Apparently the rest of the world isn't happy about the US franchise on internet governance"
Correction, the media are not happy about the US governing the internet and want to create some silly U.S bashing stories. Nobody asked me what I thought.
This U.N you speak of, is it not N.U?. Meaning "Not Us"?.
Because that's the answer they seem to give to every damn problem that does require them to put their hands in their pockets for cash and their bullets in their rifles for action.
Is this the same N.U that let 8000 muslims get slaughtered in the balkans during the mid 90's?
Is this also the same N.U that let 1million Rwandans get slaughtered in the 90's?
Finally, is this the same N.U that let 4000 americans get slaughtered in new york 9/11 by not noticing a terror network maturing in their back yard?.
U.N my foot. Feed them to the donkeys. Let them stick to what they do best....nothing.
Its obvious MOST of us dont like this idea. Its just like th UN to try to weasel in on someone elses hard work and dedication. So, I say we take every opportunity to help make sure the UN stays out of our inventions. I havn't the slightest idea how I can help this but I'll definetly be on the look out. GO TEAM!
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.
It will get let go quite easily if Hillary Clinton gets elected. She's so into the whole Euro-socialism thing that I wouldn't put it past her.
Remember folks, the democratic and republican parties are dead. We now have Neo-Cons and Euro-Socialists. Pick your poison.
Life is not for the lazy.
Such a pity that the US government ignores those amendments. At least the UN is up-front about putting its own interests ahead of the law.
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
"On February 18th, 2005 Scott Ritter announced to an audience in Washington State that George Bush had ordered plans drawn up to bomb Iran in June of 2005, and that the Iraq elections had been rigged by the United States. [4] He reiterated and clarified his statements about Iran in a March 30 article published by Al Jazeera. [5] Ritter also alleged that the United States had rigged the 2005 parliamentary election to prevent the United Iraqi Alliance from winning an outright majority."
Oh what's this, a sex criminal too? I rest my case.
our govt neither has the balls or even the capability of exercising any real control of this beast. it has grown and been allowed to "flourish", lol, to the point now that there is all kinds of scam and theft running rampant on the internet. but if a universally accepted commision can at least set the bar, and the rules, then it would be much, much easier to for individual contries to make the arrangements to correspond to the law, i think.
"There was no sex." - hoggoth
As opposed to them being stuck in permanent 24/7 gridlock with smog from idling engines so dense that no Muslim terrorists need to bother, since people will drop like flies, coughing their lungs out, all around anyhow. Sooo glad that you identified the root cause of terrorism. Why, as soon as the public transport is abolished, everyone given an SUV and all immigrants taken back and shot, Europe will return to its natural, pure, safe, Arian state, no?
Though some countries in the world are looking for alternatives. Some already use Linux and prefer it over Microsoft's Windows.
"I thought what I'd do was I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes" ~ Laughing Man - GITS:SAC
Well, I'm assuming everyone else here feels the same way I do about taxes. We hate them and most people said that it's a stupid idea to tax the internet. Even more so what would the money be going to? Helping people? That's great it'll wind up just like Social Security. Working in the beginning but screwed up and needs a huge revamp later on. I hate paying taxes to help other people. Ok, paying for education (fine since my kids can use that). Paying for roads (why not I use them as well). But paying to support other people? Why in the hell would I be forced to do that. I already donate some money to charity. Even worse I bet some of my money is going to some slacker who didn't bother at least trying in life. Yes, it has its benefits but a system that helps people will always be abused. Just let people take care of themselves and the foolish will die out soon.
"I thought what I'd do was I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes" ~ Laughing Man - GITS:SAC
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.
Yep. This is a core issue with voting - majority opresses minority. One way to become a majority, for the US at least, would be to split into 50 states, each represented separately. GDP as a measure to voting weight isn't fair either. But if you consider it really, it's fair, because even though the US is a single voter, everyone else sucks up to it for cash, so GDP has quite an effect in that picture. Dare you vote against the US?
Ultimately any forum where you throw world problems openly on the table still comes down to human beings, elders of the tribe, coming together, working together. I for one love to see the UN, where in a room full of 500 "educated" people you can make speeches, though I don't see enough feedback and rebuttals, it should be livened up, with pro and contra speeches to anything, just like in a courtroom. There are always 2 sides to any story, and the jury, the 500 people, need to hear them. If something is horribly wrong with a speech, you should hear roars. However there were no such roars when Collin Powell made his speeches, partly because nobody really knew the truth, and partly because nobody wants to openly roar against the US, because the US has money, and you'd rather have the US as a buddy, than an outright foe.
So your argument is technically true, that the US gets outnumbered in voting, but it's wrong about its core message, that it's completely unfair, because there is a balancing effect going on here.
Having the UN beats not having a forum at all, and I don't think the G8 makes a good replacement, because there is no sense of checks and balances there, just power running rampant completely uncontrolled. And doing concerts, and lowballing sweet messages like end poverty in Africa, can only fool people for so long. The G8 is nothing more than a push back toward colonial powers. Perhaps a globally elected body, without being representatives of their own nations, would work better - kind of like jury selection, you get to work on topics where your personal biases cannot enter into the picture. But even with what we have now, when two parties are at disagreement, out of the 500 in the UN, at least you have 498 people looking at the issue at hand with a lot less bias, even though they form these minigangs and coherent packs pushing mini-agendas.
Extra: Maybe 500 is too many people, and ganging up becomes pronounced - maybe you need 100, or 50, or at least many layers of leadership, one global president, like Kofi Annan, 12 supreme court judges, 29 something else, 55 something else, 200, 500, 1000. The house full of 1000 should be the least noisy, where issues are presented, and laid down for record, from both sides. Then there is a 1 week or 4 week digestion period, then it passes up to the 200's and higher. The 500 would compete directly with the 1000 house, and try to do a better job. The 1/12/29/55/200 should all have veto power over each other, neither having full authority over the rest. Would it be a mess? You bet!
The International Telecommuncations Union is an international organization within the United Nations System where governments and the private sector coordinate global telecom networks and services. This is the supra-national organisation which should control and operate the DNS in the same way as it ultimately controls all international electronic communication. The first thing that urgently needs to be cleaned up is what is essentially the identity theft of TLD names from small countries with naive governments. I'm thinking particularly of .tv, .cx, and .to. These stolen domain names have been totally corrupted by a bunch of disengenious American 'entrepreneurs'. While the United Nations may not be exactly lily-white in absolutely all its dealings, the magnetude of the UN's sins pales into insignificance compared when compared with the identity theft of not just one, but three nations' names. The next item on the clean-up agenda is to ensure that the three-letter TLD names disappear as soon as possible. Thus all the .com names become .com.us, or whatever country they are actually situated in. Finally the effective introduction of IPv6 is long overdue. It's my belief that the creation of a totally erroneous perception of scarcity value in the current 32 bit addresses is yet another reason to take the administration of the DNS out of the control of a demonstrably corrupt nation.
Nonsense! Virtually every day dozens of emails tell me that it's Pfizer who control the root servers!
Guess what? Many, many, many IETF RFP authors are--here it comes--NOT US Citizens, ergo we don't "own" the internet that exists today.
For example, HTTP was conceived by a Brit, Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
1 - I'm against the UN both functionaly and conceptionally. My original post was about function, but doesnt mean i cant dislike them fundamentally.
2 - If the *few* things it *might* have done ok doesnt directly benefit me and my country, then its irrelevant to me and a waste of resources.
3 - "foot in the door", i do understand how the network functions. The 'foot' would be more of a political control issue, where they control by demands and threats to its member nations, not by actual hard 'network control'. Much as they are doing inconjuction with the WTO. ( another body that should be ignored ).
Once the control of the TLD's is gained, they will start branching out into mandating items such as content control and privacy/rights invasion, with no regards for the local laws of the individual members. It wont stay with 'just' control of the TLD. Controlling bodies never stop with a little control.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Things have changed a bit. Quoted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dns_root_servers
****************
There are currently 13 root name servers, with names in the form letter.root-servers.net where letter ranges from A to M:
A - ns.internic.net - VeriSign - Dulles, Virginia, USA
B - ns1.isi.edu - ISI - Marina Del Rey, California, USA
C - c.psi.net - Cogent - Herndon, Virginia, USA
D - terp.umd.edu - University of Maryland - College Park, Maryland, USA
E - ns.nasa.gov - NASA - Mountain View, California, USA
F - ns.isc.org - ISC - Palo Alto, California, USA
G - ns.nic.ddn.mil - U.S. DoD NIC - Vienna, Virginia, USA
H - aos.arl.army.mil - U.S. Army Research Lab - Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, USA
I - nic.nordu.net - Autonomica - Stockholm, Sweden
J - VeriSign - Dulles, Virginia, USA
K - RIPE - London, UK
L - ICANN - Los Angeles, California, USA
M - WIDE Project - Tokyo, Japan
Chris
Is is that difficult to grasp that the Internet is not a 100% American project? ARPANET was. The US certainly wasn't involved in building and setting up all the Internet infrastructure outside US soil.
You're right. We didn't set up all of the infrastructure outside the U.S. but this brings us back to my point. If the countries that do own that infrastructure want to do something else with it, they're welcome to but I don't see any reason to cede control over the parts that do belong to us to the United Nations. If this leaves some third world countries isolated from the "Internet proper" they should take that up with the officials that made the decision to secede.
I realize that I'm way too late for most people to ever see my comments, but I believe I have perspective that at least underrepresented, if not totally missing from this discussion.
Internet is very important for me. It is my main communication medium, both privately and professionally. My competence and experience is directly tied into it. Internet, or rather my access to it, is a capital resource, the only one that I have. Even beyond that, Internet has a central role in my vision of the future that I want to work for.
I recognize following governments and inter-governmental organizations as having justified power over me:
The Republic of Finland
The European Union
The United Nations
Please notice that the United States of America in fact is not on that list. Consequently, I do not expect the government of United States to hold my best interest in particularly high regard. I don't deny that many US policies have substantially benefited me, the creation of Internet being a prime example, but I do content that for most part such benefit has been incidental. In fact, with the EU and US increasingly competing in the global market, I expect to be royally screwed over by the US and that nobody in the US will care.
The US is the unquestioned military superpower of the world, and plans to remain so. However, maintenance of military supremacy is dependant on economic supremacy and here US only is a reigning but vulnerable champ. Economically, the EU is in the same league already, and has some structural advantages that may allow EU to pass the US. Because of their enormous populations, China and India both pose a serious threat to US supremacy in the long term. To me it seems pretty clear that in the long term US will not be able to sustain its military might compared to the rest of the world without using its strategic resources to hinder its economic rivals. I am not suggesting that US will use military force, simply because to make my case I do not need to do so. The US has other strategic resources. Main is of course the Middle Eastern oil, which US does not itself use (preferring more stabile sources), but does control to sufficient decree to affect its availability and price. There are others, control of Internet being one of them. I won't even suggest that the US will do anything really underhanded with these resources, again because to make my case I don't need to do so. So the US will not block the EU from the Internet, or nor will the US force Middle Eastern countries to stop selling oil to China. The US will use the strategic resources to shape the global economic playing field to favor itself. That is not even very controversial claim; in fact it is pretty much what you would expect a powerful government to do. Somewhat more controversially, I will predict that in realizing this goal the US will be ruthless and vindictive to those that oppose it, it will not care about the human suffering, injustice or ecological harm it will cause, and certainly it will not give any thought how its policies will affect my life. Nor will these policies actually serve the average US citizens' interests of economic prosperity or the ideals of democracy, freedom, justice or truth. When I said "playing field to favor itself" I meant that the goal of US government is to remain the sole military superpower; the production of munitions, not consumer goods. Worldwide freedom and justice, even political but especially economic (i.e. global free-market) would eventually lead to diminishing of the US share of world economy, which would mean that the US could not anymore outspend the rest of the world in military budget and the US would lose its status of a sole military superpower.
One thing I would like to make perfectly clear, when above I say "the US" I really do mean that, not just the current administration. I do not see great deal of difference between Democrats and Republicans, in terms of policies that affect on me. Since the WWII both have been really bad, and I really could not choose betw
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers - Pablo Picasso
Thank you for standing up for this. It's too bad you had to post anonymously because of the risk of being branded a troll.
The one thing I think you skipped over is that here in America, farmers either have college degrees or grew up on a farm and start their career with 15 years of experience. Usually both. American agriculture is a major science and certainly not something relegated to illiterates.
I think the people in my family who actually own or have lived on farms would be far more qualified for the job than myself. My agriculture skills would leave me starving here in america, nevermind africa.
If you want to talk about trade laws keeping them down, then please inform the rest of us about what they actually have to trade...My personal analysis of Africa's situation is that they're mostly at the hunter-gatherer step zero, not step one.
There's very little point in arguing given your blithe ignorance. Africa is a vast continent, and your knowledge seems to start and end with anecdotal snippets seen on American television. I'm sorry but to try to say African Nations are at 'hunter-gatherer' stage is laughable.
As to what various nations in Africa have to sell, perhaps you'd like to read this article, or this one.
Nobody in the UN cared about millions getting killed
I'm curious as to why the UN should be like a red rag to a bull for most Americans on this website. All large political organisations are corrupt (including the US Senate etc), the politicians in the US (and Europe) have turned a blind eye to regimes like Musharef in Pakistan for the sake of expediency, and to torture and yet when it comes to the UN it seems to be beneath contempt for most Americans, even though many of its goals are laudable and sometimes its programmes are very effective (eg WHO).
Nope, dont have any.
Immoral? Well, morals are relative.
Viruses wouldnt travel here if we closed our borders and let the infected die off elsewhere.
Its called evolution, the weak perish. So the UN thinks they can do it better then nature? They cant even manage to find their way to the bathroom.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I was thinking that Germany's rocket research in WWII probably led to most of it, since both the US and the Soviet Union took a whole bunch of scientists & documentation home with them after the fall of Berlin. (And even before that.)
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
just another affirmation of 1984, people agreeing to enslave themselves.