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The Fracturing of the Internet

Posted by Zonk on from the there-actually-will-be-internets dept.

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.

3 of 440 comments (clear)

  1. followup field by JS_RIDDLER · · Score: 5, Insightful

    /. 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

    --
    _JS
    1. Re:followup field by Alex+P+Keaton+in+da · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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!!!

      --
      And All I Ask is a Tall Ship And a Star to Steer Her By
  2. IT's all BS. by mindstrm · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.