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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."
don't fix it.
Lots have people have people have been trying to make big news out of this, but it's really nothing.
i) Control of DNS is not the same as control of the internet.
ii) If the US started to exercise internet control via DNS, alternative root servers would likely appear almost overnight. Remember that old saw about "routing round censorship"? This time it's actually true.
iii) As a Brit, I applaud the current essentially hands-off control the US has. We get all the benefits, US tax payers cover the actual cost.
iv) The UN couldn't find it's arse with both hands. Of course, neither can Congress, but at the moment the system is up and running and they'd have to actively intervene to screw it up. Migrating something as important as this to a new bureaucratic body doesn't bare thinking about.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
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.
yes, we have no bananas
I am assuming you have heard of a country called India, which is a developing nation. If you still don't get it, then get out of your basement and watch the real world. We are not in 70s anymore.
Hmm... I suppose that did come off kind of flame-baity, didn't it?
Let me put it this way, I just stayed up most of the night documenting in my blog how the Chinese government abuses its people and ignores the very laws it put in place to protect its people. Now first thing in the morning, I hear that the UN wants to turn over full control of the DNS heirarchy to countries like China. Countries to whom "freedom" is just a word to be filtered. Countries where a constitution is just words on some expensive paper. Countries that care little for anything except maintaining their own power.
If we turn even the slightest control over to these people, it's a surefire guarantee that they will abuse it. They would use the technology to further oppress their people (illegally, I might add) and attempt to extend their influence to elsewhere in the world.
So I will repeat, the Internet is not broken. Don't fix it.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
AdeBaumann wrote: I say let the UN have it. It is the Internet after all, to be handled internationally. The US can keep AOL in exchange ...
How 'bout the US keeps the Internet, and the UN can have AOL.
[Insert pithy quote here]
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.
.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.
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
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!
These words have a specific meaning. The US is the only country founded on individual rights, with the rights of the individual enumerated in its charter, as opposed to a focus on the general welfare of the citizenry. The latter approach always comes at the occasional expense of the individual, be it Canada's enforced news blackouts and language policing, England's refuse of firearms for home defense, or France's willingness to put multiculturalism above their own system of law and allow utter chaos and local force-based conflict resolution in the growing muslim districts.
How is it a threat to diversity the way it is now? Why is everyone invoking such imflammatory rhetoric to describe the horrors of a US housed internet? What has been the problem thus far? I can see a thousand problems with moving control to the UN, but none with the current system. Should we risk screwing up the diversity you seem to enjoy so much to satiate someone's taste for power?
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...
What does any country need with their domain name?
.be domain? Do you not think every country would rather have full control over it's domain zone files?
You seem to have a very peculiar view of the DNS system, most likely due to the fact you live in the US.
I live in Belgium, which has top-level domain name ".be". Any individual or business can register whatevertheylike.be. Do you not think that Belgium would rather control it's own domain rather than depending on another country to make sure root zone files point to a.ns.dns.be for the
As root files will always be necessary, I would rather have a central (neutral) authority guard over such systems that trust on a (not so neutral) country to allow me to use my domain.
Coca-Cola, sometimes War.
WTFx2, are you kidding me? I'm really tired of American's thinking they've got the corner on freedom, when they've let their country be taken over by lawyers and corporations. What's *free* about getting to vote for one of the two guys with the most money, best spin and right connections, rather than chosing a leader who actually has a clue and a plan of his own?
b lican-donkey-you-rode-in-on', if you can't take the criticism then more's the shame on you, because nobody's buying what your selling anymore.
The *rest* of the world doesn't see America as the great land of opportunity anymore, but rather the great land of opportunists, where the average 'honest' guy fights an uphill battle against corporate litigation, pseudo-law that has been reinterpreted via corporate lobbyists to support their agendas (i.e. Software Patents), or military actions that sadly mirror the ones they use to justify who they are fighting (i.e. invading a country to protect its own sovereignty, when the hidden goal could only be oil).
America heaps over with great features and wonderful people, and produces some of the best of everything to be found on this planet, but don't for one second pretend that your country is somehow the last bastion of truth and freedom, and that the rest of the world, via the only legal global governing body, lacks not only the ability but the *right* to govern the internet.
And for those of you who will follow on with 1D patriotic 'fuck-you-and-the-donkey-but-obviously-not-a-repu
----
There's nothing wrong with pissing in the wind, just make sure you are facing the right way when you do it.
I think this US control of the Internet is what's been holding it back. Maybe with international bureaucracy and UN regulation, this "Internet" thing will finally take off...
Syria: "There's more and more spam every day. Who are the victims? Developing and least-developed countries, too. There is no serious intention to stop this spam by those who are the transporters of the spam, because they benefit...The only solution is for us to buy equipment from the countries which send this spam in order to deal with spam. However, this, we believe, is not acceptable."
Brazil, responding to ICANN's approval of .xxx domains: "For those that are still wondering what Triple-X means, let's be specific, Mr. Chairman. They are talking about pornography. These are things that go very deep in our values in many of our countries. In my country, Brazil, we are very worried about this kind of decision-making process where they simply decide upon creating such new top-level generic domain names."
China: "We feel that the public policy issue of Internet should be solved jointly by the sovereign states in the U.N. framework...For instance, spam, network security and cyberspace--we should look for an appropriate specialized agency of the United Nations as a competent body."
Ghana: "There was unanimity for the need for an additional body...This body would therefore address all issues relating to the Internet within the confines of the available expertise which would be anchored at the U.N."
These are the people that want to control the internet. They don't want some hands off technical control, they have specific cultural, moral and economic ideals they wish to implement in relation to the Internet. Yes, spam is bad. But "stopping spam" by a macro control mechanism is a control on information. This is contrary to the legal and user technological controls we are implementing now. Do you trust the UN to actually handle specific information on the Internet via their multicultralism moral compass? I don't.
Its not about being broken, its about trust. Do none of you remember back in 95 what happened to NeverNeverLand.
.nn websites, so nobody knew what was happening, and you couldn't email .nn anymore. It was like NeverNeverLand just dissappeared off the map, and soon people forgot it was there, forgot it ever existed.
.nn off of the root servers.
The US wanted to invade to close all of the Pirate Training Camps, but the NeverNeverLand government was vocal across the internet in claiming there were no training camps, just theme parks. So what happened, the US kicked NeverNeverLands domain (.nn) out of the root servers. Suddenly no one in NeverNeverLand could email one another, the government collapsed and the country went into chaos.
But worse, nobody could access any
Now it's just an legend, like atlantis, and all because the US kicked
Remember it's happened once, it can happed again.