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.

Comments

followup field

[JS_RIDDLER]

/. needs a followup field, to link to previous related articles.
I dont mind hearing about them again, it would just be nice to be able to see the past article. Kinda like the "Related Links" on the right side of the articles we have now.

It nice how this article DOES link to the previous story at the end.
which was Posted 09:43 AM -- Friday September 30 2005

If funny how he calls it the other day tho

Re:followup field

[Alex P Keaton in da]

Uh- lets be honest.
1. Post story about US vs World.
2. Watch discussion degenerate into a flame war, as it always does in these type of stories
3. Get tons and tons of comments, mostly angry rants by trolls and flame throwers posting as ac, which is all but gauranteed with a story like this
4. Get more pages refreshed
5. Serve more ads!
6. Profit.
Even a/c counts as a page view from a traffic standpoint. An intelligent conversation devoid of a/c and flaming gets many fewer posts and thus fewer total ads served. If it that complicated? If you can get a story like this up once in a day, double you money by running it again!!!

Re:followup field

[Dogtanian]

Even a/c counts as a page view from a traffic standpoint. An intelligent conversation devoid of a/c and flaming gets many fewer posts and thus fewer total ads served. If it that complicated?

My feelings exactly. How naive do you have to be exactly to believe that all those "dupes" are really down the incompetence of the editors?

Slashdot is a large, well-visited site, with paid editors, and we're asked to believe that they're not capable of spotting stuff like this?

Sorry, it happens often enough that if it weren't deliberate, they'd have hired someone with two brain cells to rub together by now. Simple acknowledgements of the dupe or even of their supposed incompetence have become so much of a Slashdot "tradition" that it obscures the bleedingly obvious lack of plausibility these repeated "mistakes" have.

But in this case, I'm glad of the dupe, because without it, I'd have missed the banner advert for another gimmicky boy's toy^w^w^w brain-expanding, uh... glowy thing from ThinkGeek that I *must* buy!

Re:followup field

[evildogeye]

It is ironic that one of the Slashdot's primary themes over the years has been the evilness and incompetence of Microsoft, and yet with their constant duplicates, Slashdot is either being evil or incompetent. Personally, I understand that business is business, and have no problems with this behavior - Slashdot attacts much their readership by constantly attacking Microsoft.

Embrace your moral hypocrisy!

Govern

[certel]

I don't think anyone can really blame any country for wishing to control their own aspect of the internet.

Re:Govern

[diegocgteleline.es]

The problem is that Internet is not "their own", it is a world-wide service.

Yes, I guess we can't blame US for wanting to control certain things from another countries. I guess the EU would do the same. What buggers me is that our governments (US and EU) are so fucked up that it seems countries aren't able to think "hey, this is the Right Thing to do, let's do it because everybody will benefit". Instead, apparently they just think "let's do everything we can to have more power and control so we can have more money"

Re:Govern

[anaesthetica]

What buggers me is that our governments (US and EU) are so fucked up that it seems countries aren't able to think "hey, this is the Right Thing to do, let's do it because everybody will benefit". Instead, apparently they just think "let's do everything we can to have more power and control so we can have more money"

I agree. The U.S. has given power over the Internet to a private group with an international board. It doesn't directly control ICANN, but it does retain a veto--a right which it has infrequently exercised. The EU and the other countries are making a power play to move internet governance to the UN, where their governments can gain power over how the internet is used and regulated. This isn't altruistic in its motivations in the least, and it's certainly not The Right Thing To Do. Everybody has benefited from the internet so far, and it is only active government intervention that has limited people's access to free information.

Re:Govern

[certel]

Well, depends when you want to classify the internet as 'international' because the internet originated in the United States and just increased as other countries had the ability and technology to do so. So, one could argue that the internet IS the United States and we 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.

Re:Govern

[anaesthetica]

Right, the U.S., as a member of the UN, would have a good deal of say over Internet governance if this plan were to go forward. On the other hand, should the Internet have the U.S. along with every other government in the world having a say over its governance? The U.S. has given a private organization with an international board control over the Internet. It maintains a laissez-faire position, with the exception of a veto, which is not frequently (or at all) used.

The U.S. is pro-democracy, but only insofar as democracy is a means to guarantee a liberal and limited government. The UN is anything but, because of its member states, who are far more willing (indeed eager) to regulate, limit, and filter the internet. Other nations already have a voice--they just don't have ultimate control. And that's a good thing.

Re:Govern

[displaced80]

Ok -- this is Slashdot -- I think we all understand the 7-layer model.

The IP network would be worthless without the higher level protocols and services. Likewise, there's a whole stack of further inventions, developments and products of world-wide research that the IP concept grew from.

My point is, when it comes to the Internet, Nationalism (for that's what this is) is ugly. There's a pissing contest going on here and it's just plain dumb.

We're talking about root DNS. That's all. It's fucking pathetic that neither the powers that be, nor us /. plebs can discuss sensibly the best management of these (13?) servers that would be most beneficial for the global interoperability of the internet.

Instead, it's deteriorated to "We invented it! It's ours!". Don't behave as if the spread of the internet was pure altruism. It's spread because it made money for companies all over the globe. The internet may have been a US invention, but its current breadth, penetration and sheer utility is a product of global contribution. And that's why the people and corporations (and yes, if they've been paying attention, even the governments) of nations outside the US have a vested interest in the DNS.

Re:Govern

[hunterx11]

Freedom is more important than democracy, but it is rare that you can have one without the other. This, however, is one of those cases. The U.S. has shown no signs of censoring the internet at the DNS level. Many other countries would want to. If the U.S. really were exerting its power, I would be all for shifting it to the U.N., but right now countries are just trying to politicize something which shouldn't be political and has managed not to be as it is right now.

If it ain't broke..

[SaidinUnleashed]

...don't fix it.

I say the US has done a fine job in managing whatever it is managing.

The 'net has become a wonderful, open forum where anyone can express their ideas an opinions.

The UN tends to screw up everything it touches. I really don't want the internet to become another great cockup of the least organized, least effective polital body that has ever existed.

IT's all BS.

[mindstrm]

All authority that IANA or ICANN or any other organisation has over IP addresses and DNS is through the strictly VOLUNTARY participation by every ISP and even end user, out there. Their authority comes form the recognition that an authority is needed.. that addresses need to be allocated in an organized way.

IT is ultimately those who provide the infrastructure who will decide what needs to be organized and by whom. This isn't a government issue.. it's an ISP issue.

Seriously...

[Comatose51]

Seriously guys, not only is this a dupe, but the summary:

There is currently a major conflict between the US and the rest of the world about the control of the Internet...
is such an over statement that it's almost misleading. We're not going to war with the world over this. It's a dispute. The only war so far are the flame wars that broke out on Slashdot when this was posted the first time. The Iraq War was a major conflict; this is a dispute that might have serious consequences on the Internet. Let's be a little more precise.

No, I'm not new to Slashdot. Yes, I'll probably be modded down for this but this is just so silly.

Re:Brilliant Plan

[JudgeFurious]

Will this council work with the level of efficiency and cooperation we've come to know and expect from the UN?

  That's what I thought. I'll take the US-Net.

  Thank You.

Why?

[LWATCDR]

Why should the US give over control of the root DNS to the UN?
The US funded the construction of the Internet and has invited other nations to use it. Each nation has as much control over the network in it's contry as they want. Look at China and North Korea for examples.
Each country has control over it's nation level domain. The UK has control over .uk and so on.
I do not see how the UN or anybody has the right to demand the US to give over control of the root domain servers or get bent if the US says thanks but we feel like that would be a bad idea.

If the member of the UN really feel like they should have root name server control well then I suggest that the UN gets a bunch of nations together and build the UNNet. You could use IP6 from the start and have point to point encryption from the start.

Knock yourselves out.

What's the big deal?

[Spazmania]

This sounds like someone making a mountain out of a mole hill. I mean really, what's the big deal?

IP addresses are already controlled regionally, not by the US. Europe and Asia each have their own registries. Theoretically they manage the IP space under rules set by the IANA, but in reality nobody is going to nay-say them if they don't.

Law and regulation? Ha! The US will regulate for the US and anyone who doesn't like that can block our IP addresses at their border. That's not going to change. Get over it.

The DNS root zone? All 62kbytes of it? Shoot. If you don't want to run ICANN's root zone, download it and run your own version. I do.

Or is control of your own counry's top-level zone not good enough for you? Is there some special zone you particularly feel you need to add to the defacto global root zone? No? Then what the hell are you complaining about!

Don't get me wrong, the ICANN is run by a non-accountable bunch of bufoons, many from Verisign, the same company that somehow managed to lose money selling domain names and ssl certificates. If anyone deserves a comeuppance, they do. But that's not the point, the point is: the system as it is now is stable, functional and reasonably cheap.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

The US and Censorship

[Thu25245]

Can you reach any of those pages?

http://english.aljazeera.net/HomePage/
http://www.korea-dpr.com/
http://www.iran-daily.com/1384/2389/html/
http://www.cubaweb.cu/

If so, you're making use of a system maintained by the US Government.

Now try acessing
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/coredocs.html/ from China or

http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?sofocus=b s&sbrftog=1&catref=C6&fstype=1&from=R10&satitle=na zi+hitler&sacat=-1%26catref%3DC6&bs=Search&sargn=- 1%26saslc%3D2&sadis=200&fpos=ZIP%2FPostal&ftrt=1&f trv=1&saprclo=&saprchi=&fsop=1%26fsoo%3D1&coaction =compare&copagenum=1&coentrypage=search&fgtp= from Germany or France.

Seriously, who would you rather have in charge of the internet?