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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.
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?
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.
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.
My initial knee-jerk reaction to this was "Why not the US, after all, we invented it?". But after thinking about it for a few seconds it occured to me that since the internet is global you really need a global entity to be ultimately responsible for it. If there was a single global government then it'd be a no-brainer, but since the closest thing we have is the UN then why not? Yeah, I realize that there are all sorts of arguments like the UN is incompetent, etc. but when you're talking about something that impacts the entire world what better and more universally recognized body do we currently have?
Let me get this straight. I agree it's a good idea to remove tld's from US controll to avoid being controlled and manpiulated by such a large and powerfull political entity that coulnd't care less about my rights online. Anyone else see the irony here?
...then maybe. Not before.
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.
..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.
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!
Those complaining in this thread about the Internet being American would also do well to remember that the Internet has grown up into things like the world wide web (in fact most lay-people think that *is* the internet). The world wide web was of course invented in Switzerland at CERN by a European. I haven't heard anyone screaming to remove all the pages served over http because they're somehow unamerican.
Not that it matters anyway - as the parent says, a country struggling for complete hegemony over any thing or any person will not keep it very long.
--
Message from Airstrip 1
L'ser
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).
The UN doesn't claim to "own" the Internet. It, like the ITU, is the closest we have to a global forum for administering global registries like the Internet. By what right does anyone claim that the US "owns the Internet", or even is the best administrator of it? Myself, I'd give it to the Dutch. Even though they have a queen.
--
make install -not war
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
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.
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.
How about the "entitlement" non-Americans that think that because they can use the internet they are somehow entitled to owning a portion of it, despite the fact that the basic research and developement of it was done in the US, and most of the hardware is owned by the US?
I don't think they have any room to point fingers.
Oh and lets not forget that the solution is to take a system that has been working perfectly fine and give it to an unelected group of people with a incredibly bad track record. A group of people that have members who don't believe in little things such as freedom of speech, which is pretty darn fundamental to the internet.
As another person stated, do you really want China, responsible for massive censorship of the internet, to have a say in how its run?
This is a solution in search of a problem. The only real problem is political, and politics is something that the internet can do without.
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. ;)
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.
NO! NOT THE DUTCH!
ANYBODY BUT THE DUTCH!
Next thing you know, the streets of the internet will be littered with sites trying to sell sex and drugs.
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)!
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
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.
They were saying: "there is no evidence of WMD, give us time to prove that there is nothing". In contrast the Bush administration said that they had "compelling evidence" (sometimes using the word "proof") that they could not share for security reasons.
Turns out they had no evidence, let alone proof, because there was no weapons of mass-destruction program worth mentioning in Iraq. Oh... and the only ones who were saying that there was were the ex-Iraqis who everyone but the Bush administration had already written off as either delusional or having too much of an agenda to trust.
On a serious note, if ICANN were making politically-motivated decisions, I'd be for taking that power away from ICANN and handing it over to someone less susceptible to political influence.
Even to the extent that ICANN may be tainted, the track record of the UN indicates (to me, anyway) that a UN-controlled 'net would be vastly more prone to political manipulation.
Personally, the scenario of fragmented roots would be just fine for me. You want the Chinaweb, use a DNS server that believes in China. You want the Amerinet, stick with the current servers. You want the Jesusnet, there'll probably be a root server in Kansas. You want the Afronet, go with the root servers controlled by Mugabe and his friends. Live in Saudi Arabia, no b00bies for j00. (And no j00z either :)
The networks with good policies ("good" being defined as "best able to serve the needs of their users") will survive. The bad ones won't. People lucky enough to live in free countries will be able to choose whichever network is "best" for them.
Eventually, some crazy loon will decide that they want to access all the networks. They'll come up with some sort of way of mediating requests between all the different root servers out there. It'll be a network of networks - sort of an inter-net, if you will. I'd probably pay a few bucks a month to access a network like that. Might even catch on outside the universities and research labs :)
I heard a great quote along the lines of "The UN is the place where governments that suppress free speech demand to be heard." It's quite true, the UN isn't composed of a group of free and democratic countries, it's composed of some of those, and some that are rather less free, and some like Syria, which is a military dictatorship. These aren't the kind of nations I want having a say in what is the greatest source of free information, given that a free flow of information is very threatening to them.
Another problem is that the UN isn't an elected body. It's diplomats that are appointed and are not answerable to the public they supposedly represent. Politicians do enough shady shit when they ARE directly answerable, it gets far, far worse when there's no accountability.
I mean for a good example, see the receant Tsunami crisis. When the Tsunami hit, the important thing initally was getting basic aid there immediatly, food, water, and medical attention. A number of nations did just that. Both their military and civilian volunteers went over and worked their asses off to save lives. The UN, sent a group over to survey the damage and fact find, they gave some soundbites to the media, and whined that the troops over there should be wearing UN blue, rather than the uniforms of their countries. All the while people were in desperate need of immediate help.
That's just a good example of the general problem. Look at the UN office in New York. The oppulance is simply unbelievable for an orginization that is supposed to be a representitive of so many poor nations. Then realise they have offices like this all over the place.
Now for the US there's an additonal consideration in that the UN may decide they want regulations on the Internet that are unconstutional. The constution can't be overriden just by some treaty orginization, it overrides all other law in America (well, it's supposed to at any rate, politicans seem to forget that sometimes). So for example China might want to push a regulation that says no subversive political speech is allowed, and they'd have plenty of backers on that. Well, sorry, but that's unconstutional.
While I think we can work out a more equitable solution than the US running the Internet, having the UN run it isn't the right answer.
The thing is look at the list of countries that want control of it. China ok they would want to censor everything. Brazil they don't want any porn on the net cause they are over 90% catholic so more censorship. Syria......hot bed for terrorists, the list goes on. None of these countries are say Britain or France or Germany. Why is that. Well it would cost billions of dollars to make a totally separate internet and so far the US has yet to restrict what can be put on the web. So as long as us 280 million people in the US want to foot the bill for maintaining the nets root why should other countries care.
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.
A budding draconian organization tries to take powers away from an established draconian organization.
And who wins here? No.
I've said this before, on Slashdot, even: There is no Internet. Not the way we like to think of it. It doesn't exist as a cohesive whole. You can't connect to "the Internet". The most you can do is connect your network to somebody else's network. Maybe multiple somebodies. But still, you're just connecting to their networks. Then they do the same with some others. And so on. That's what we're talking about here. An inter-network. A bunch of individual networks. They are operated by businesses, organizations, governments, and individuals.
Right now, almost everybody agrees that US-centric organization like ICANN get to govern top-level things like the root domain. But there is absolutely nothing keeping people following their own set of standards. Indeed, some already do.
I don't even worry that much about "fragmentation". The Internet is already horribly fragmented. It's no longer safe or consistent or well-organized, which you used to be able to count on. If, say, we end up with multiple conflicting namespaces, someone will create some meta-directory protocols or search engines or something.
Of course, it would be nicer if that didn't happen. No sense making things worse then they are.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Do you have examples ?
In any case, what is the UN qualified to have oversight on?
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
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
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."
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.
When someone says "People are incapable of governing themselves", they are silently adding to the end "except for me".
* It looks like you just reworded "the U.S. went to Iraq for oil." B.S. If they went there for oil, why am I still paying outrageous prices for gas?
Many people make this point, indicating that they don't understand what really happened. The US didn't go to Iraq so that you could have cheap oil. It went so that a few greedy bastards could have more control over the oil supply and profit off it even more than they are. Why shoul they care if you have cheap oil? They also went to profit off the war as they never have been able to before, what with all the no bid contracts and military outsourcing of basic services.
Even if the weapons were there and were moved, which is unlikely, whatever the Republican mouthpieces at Faux News say, you have to admit that before we went, we knew where they were, they were contained in an area far away with little chance of ever being used against us. Now, according to your logic, all we have done by going there is lose track of them. Great!
You are seriously brainwashed by the right wing media. Yeah, you heard me. The rich own the media, they are right wing, therefore, the media is right wing. No matter how many times you and people like you want to lie about the 'left wing media' there's no such thing. Just more propaganda from the rich, trying to brainwash fools like you into thinking that their interests are your interests so you spread their propaganda, fight their wars, and basically do what you are told so they can keep on profitting off of you. Chump.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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?
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
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.
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 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
But the German press was full of the reports from German intelligence, which was that there was nothing there.
6 21.htm
...
That is not my recollection. I think people are confusing what was said by politicians and by spooks, and what was said before and after the issue of invasion was brought up. A quick google found something that sounds familiar:
"I mean, an alternative view is one presented by people like Christopher Heachins [spelled phonetically], the journalist who says: look, if you look at Germany, where the political leaders were against the war, German intelligence was still producing these alarming reports about Saddam Hussein being a moments work away from producing a nuke, for instance. You can't blame that on, you know, serving up the leaders what they want."
Former weapons inspector, Scott Ritter
ABC Sydney : Broadcast : 02/05/04
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5
But we went to war on the promise by the Bush administration that Iraq was actively in the process of building up an arsenal that could find its way into Al Qaeda hands. We now know for facts that there were no real connections between Al Queda
These two statements are not contradictory. The fact that Sadaam would not build nukes for Al Qaeda does not mean his nukes would not fall in their hands. The Soviets did not build nukes for them but we are certainly concerned Soviet nukes may be or fall into their hands.
So how many people have died for what?
No one will know for another 20 to 30 years whether the aggressive US policy against terrorists and their supporters, of which Sadaam was - just not the Al Qaeda faction, was a good idea or bad. It's hard to understand a war when you are in the middle of it. It often takes years and sometimes decades to sift through the evidence and see how things turned out, for good or ill. President Lincoln was merciless criticized during the American Civil War.
Okay, that was really a sly off-the-cuff remark, but it did get me thinking again today; it really doesn't matter if parts are moved to poor countries, because users would find ways around mismanaged portions anyway a la' Freenet.
.....
,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?!
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.
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.