U.S. Insists On Keeping Control Of Internet

veggie boy writes "A U.S. official strongly objected to any notion of a U.N. body taking control of the domain servers that direct traffic on the Internet." From the article: "'We will not agree to the U.N. taking over the management of the Internet,' said Ambassador David Gross, the U.S. coordinator for international communications and information policy at the State Department. 'Some countries want that. We think that's unacceptable.' Many countries, particularly developing ones, have become increasingly concerned about the U.S. control, which stems from the country's role in creating the Internet as a Pentagon project and funding much of its early development."

Comments

Different spin

[the bluebrain]

The Register has the same story, with a different spin.

To me, looks like the US might not have a whole lot of choice in the matter, in the end.

It should be about ip6 not dns

[amcdiarmid]

The two complaints mentioned are 1) US and European companies snapped up all the good TLDs; 2) US and European companies have snapped up all the IP addresses, leaving only scraps.

my $.02:

1) All the TLDs are snapped up only in European languages. This should piss off basically no one. Why, every country has its' own TLD. To whit, American techies had to use www.theregister.co.uk for years before they decided to make a www.theregister.com version. Why, because everyone in the UK was used to typing .co.uk to look for UK business/media/whatever. The main people pissed off by this are prob. big Latin-American media companies that want a .com name taken by someone in Spain. They were late to the party & the good beer is gone. If they don't want to bring their own beer (country based URL), too bad.

2) All the IP blocks are snapped up by Europeans & North-Americans. I'd say they are late to the party, too bad - but it's a legitimate complaint. Without IP addresses, they can't do what they want. However, what they really should do is mandate IPv6 so that there are more blocks to go around. The people who have blocks now don't want to pay for it, but if the rest of the world want's it - everyone will have to go along (or loose out on business if they don't interoperate well). I mean, really, how many addresses are lost by using a class A (127.x.y.z) block for loopback?

Hey, look - shiny toy: I want it!!! If they really wanted, they could use new.net and IPv6. Waaaaaaah!

To the U.N. haters:

[bobbo69]

I agree the U.N. is pitiful - but maybe it would function better if:

A. the U.S. stopped underhanded tactics such as witholding money owed to the U.N.

B. the U.S. stopped vetoing resolutions against the proliferation of WMD re. Israel

C. the U.S. stopped vetoing resolutions against genocide

And that's just for starters! Please be in no doubt - WRT the U.N. America has a track record of putting its own interests way ahead of those of the rest of the world community, and until that changes there's not much hope of the U.N. getting any better.

Still, you can be sure that when American hegemony is undermined by the rise of China the U.S. will use every means at their disposal - including the U.N. - to try and cling on a little longer...