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The Fracturing of the Internet
farrellj writes "There is currently a major conflict between the US and the rest of the world about the control of the Internet. They are fighting over who will control the root DNS servers and assign IP addresses. The US is against an independent international body to do this. This could fracture the Internet into multiple country and regional mini-internets, with conflicts over IP and Domain Name assignments, with no interconnects between them." From the article: "... the Bush administration said in July that the United States would 'maintain its historic role in authorizing changes or modifications to the authoritative root zone file.' In so doing, the government 'intends to preserve the security and stability' of the technical underpinnings of the Internet. Without consensus, some experts say that countries might move ahead with setting up their own domain name system, or DNS, as a way of bypassing Icann." Update: 09/30 20:45 GMT by Z : I believe this to be another view of the discussion we had a while back.
Can we import all the message from the other discussion we had today? Maybe Zonk can cut and paste them all to save us some time.
That's Zonk officially plonked. The only possible reason for duping your own story within the working day and adding a bleeding disclaimer at the end is to show off how pretty Politics is.
For those who haven't discovered it: It's in your home page prefs next to the topic ratings radio buttons.
Politics really is pretty though.
- Chris
They used to have followups more frequently, in stories known as "Slashback." They're a rare occurrence anymore.
What?
I hear economics has just a little bit to do with it, but you go right on believing that the US has no positive impact whatsoever. I guess it probably helps you sleep at night, huh?
Wow, have you heard of New York City? Removing that city alone would throw the global economy into a fucking tailspin the likes of which you've never imagined. It would take decades to recover from the loss of people/resources/data/stability that NYC provides alone to the global infrastructure. How can you claim that taking out the world's largest country in terms of GDP would not affect anything for more than a few days? You must have no sense of how things work on a world stage, or else you are a troll.
Let's face it: there are some problems with ICANN; there are some issues with DNS; and what the HECK is going to happen with IP6?
Shifting control to the UN though doesn't seem like it's going to help fix things.
If there were one thing I would like to see, it's the addition of more ROOT servers--maybe a doubling of the current infrastructure. As we've already seen, those we have at present are too easily subject to the ne'erdwellers out there.
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Well, depends when you want to classify the world wide web as 'international' because the world wide web originated in Switzerland and just increased as other countries had the ability and technology to do so. So, one could argue that the world wide web IS Switzerland and they allowed access from other countries. Now that other countries are involved, they feel the need to have some type of control. It's a lose-lose situation. ;-)
However, most of the proposals for "Internet Governance" that the WSIS gang have come up with have been evil, clueless, or both.
- ICANN doesn't control the Internet, only DNS policies and IP address assignments, and expanding that scope would be Bad.
- China wants to "govern" the Internet by getting the rest of the world to enforce their censorship policies, which are currently too easy for Chinese citizens to evade by using non-China-based websites, email, and IM servers. A few other governments also want to use "governance" to censor pornography, free speech that criticizes them politics, and pornography. (Really, it's just about pr0n and evil nasty terrorists, pay no attention to that press censor behind the curtain.) ICANN currently has no control over this except perhaps blocking registry of Fulan-Gong.com
- Some third-world countries want "Internet Governance" to tax rich Internet users to subsidize internet connectivity into their countres. Not only do they fundamentally misunderstand how the Internet works, the major problem in many of those countries is telecom monopolies that provide overpriced inadequate service, and the first step in getting their citizens decent internet access is to get the telco monopolies out of the way. That doesn't mean there aren't also infrastructure problems, or that an infusion of cash couldn't be useful, but in general they'd be giving more money and power to their PTT monopolies, which is mostly counterproductive.
- I really hate treating ICANN as the Good Guys here, so I won't - this is a conflict between the Bad Guys and the Worse Guys.
DNS isn't The Internet - splitting DNS would be ugly, stupid, and easily repaired, e.g. by creating records like [newTLD].[existingTLD] or [newTLD].[NewTLDowner].net.Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I say the US has done a fine job in managing whatever it is managing.
And this gets modded insightful?
Our general stance of "my toy, go away" works for a lot of things, such as nukes, primarily because other countries have a hard time implementing them or affording their creation. DNS is NOT SUCH AN ITEM!
To be absolutely clear on this, if the rest of the world is so inclined, they can create their own TLDs for DNS. More importantly, they can, if they so desired, spoof our DNS completely. It would not be easy in the sense of flipping a switch, but it would be very easy compared to say, launching a major offensive.
Here are the implications of spoofing, in as close to layman terms as I can create. Yahoo.com points to a place here in the states (yeah, I know about redirects, but I am trying to keep this simple). If the UK wanted to, they could spoof the system so that any time a UK resident typed in "yahoo.com", it went to some decidedly non-US company. Or how about Ford.com.
In this case, the rest of the world can quite literally have a party on the internet to which we are not invited.
> We all saw what happened with verizon, when they set the IP addresses of all the unregistered .org and .org domain names to their own search engine page.
:P
That's VeriSign. Verizon is a phone company.
And I did see what happened--DNS operators the world over upgraded their DNS software. The new versions of BIND then returned NXDOMAIN, following appropriate standards, when it was told not to allow delegation for that domain and someone was returning a wildcard record. VeriSign then finally quit the damn stupid idea after realizing that it wasn't going to work, anyhow.
Next time, pick something you know more about
Christ Almighty, people, it's Verisign. "Verizon" is a telephone service provider
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.