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

And fragmentation is bad?

[null etc.]

Maybe I don't understand the issue thoroughly, but I think that fragmentation would actually be good. The "information infrastructure" is becoming just as critical to us as our "power grid", or other major utility. Why would any government trust a resource that critical to be managed by any organization outside of its control?

My opinion is that an international institution should define global standards that each country can than agree or disagree to implement, and if the US wants to be separate at that point, so be it.

Re:And fragmentation is bad?

[garcia]

Maybe I don't understand the issue thoroughly, but I think that fragmentation would actually be good.

Yes, because Intranets are so fucking useful on a global scale, right? Hey, China would be thrilled! They wouldn't have to worry about the Great Firewall! Bush, his Family First supporters, and Mrs. Clinton would love that they could just block all porn from the United States' intranet. Switzerland would make a shitload of money proxying connections between all the different intranets and would unveil the Swiss Internet Bank where you could have an anonymous account access (for steep fees of course) to actually be able to use the Internet like it has been for year.

Yeah, fragmentation is bad.

Re:And fragmentation is bad?

[Monkelectric]

Heres how things work now:

The US administers the root DNS servers, and countries are allowed to administer their own servers. In addition, ICANN alots (scarce) IP addresses. The original distribution of these IP addresses is now considered to be "unfair" because companies and countries were given HUGE address spaces because at the *TIME*, the ammount of addresses avaliable was thought to be nearly unlimited. I don't remeber how many addresses there are total, but its a lot. The assignment of addresses is complicated by the fact that routing tables have extreme constraints on their size and exact duplicates must be deployed to almost *every* internet router in the world. Yes the IP addresses were assigned "unfairly". In our defense, at the time they WERE alloted, nobody ever imagined the internet being what it is today.

So the UN is basically doing a power grab here. Many Americans fear the UN because it has *NO* accountability to anyone or any principles of free speech...at least in the US we have a constitution that (while not upheld all the time) protects individual rights, whereas the UN has no such restraints. We may find ourselves being regulated by the UN and retaliated against by the UN weilding the power we gave them, trying to restrict our free speech. Remember there are lots of countries where talking about certain things is illegal (france/germany: nazis, china: democracy).

Security? Where?

[alexandreracine]

In so doing, the government 'intends to preserve the security and stability' of the technical underpinnings of the Internet.

Security on the Internet? What are they talking about?

IF this happens

[Limburgher]

Will there also be a fracturing of existing standards going forward? Will HTML 5 be defined by individual countries? Might TCP/IP fork? Might firewall rules at national borders mess with worldwide connectivity?

I'd much rather let the UN manage the net than even begin to contemplate the above. I'm not saying the UN has properly managed everything they've touched, but there is no other international body capable of managing the internet. And it needs to not be exclusively under Amerikan control.

And I'm and Amerikan.

This is just further proof...

[eno2001]

...of the United States' growing irrelevance on the world stage. Trust me. If the US disappeared off the face of the earth tomorrow, there would be a brief hiccup and then it would be business as usual. After all, what is it we do for the world exactly, other than bully people?

Re:This is just further proof...

[jdigriz]

Hiccup, my shiny metal ass!

We borrow boatloads of money from it and then buy lots of stuff using that money. If the US disappeared tomorrow, the world economy would crater because we owe everybody money. According to the Bureau of the Public Debt, we've paid $335,528,344,667.72 in interest payments alone on the national debt this last fiscal year. Yes, that's 335 Billion Dollars! I think the interest on the debt has cost more than the Iraq war so far.

Add to those interest payments our 500 billion a year trade deficit and that's a major hit to the world's economy.

Could this be a silly idea?

[ezweave]

The one thing that I don't really get, is that if you understand how it all works, this doesn't really make sense. I mean this isn't something that really matters, for the most part.

A little brush up on teh Intarweb

ARPNET was the origins of the "Intarwebs", it was replaced by the U.S. built and controlled NSFNET [wikipedia.org] (full transion in 1989, Military went to MILNET). All ISPs had to sign an agreement with NSFNET (1987-1995) to connect to the backbone. NSFNET was not federally controlled, it was controlled by "Merit Network, Inc" which was run by public universities. True, a good bit of funding came from taxes, but it was up to academics as to how it was used. In 1995, NSFNET was transitioned to NAP architecture, which provided much faster routing and the capabilites for more growth. Today the "backbone" [wikipedia.org] is a collection of commercial ISPs, a few private, and a few University controlled networks. There is little to no direct federal intervention.

DNS [wikipedia.org] servers are, of course, chained in the sense that one DNS references another DNS, and DNS entries spread like viruses (lookups are forwarded). The root [wikipedia.org] level DNS servers (serving requests from the root). Some of them are DoD owned, and some are privately owned.

But not all traffic is routed through the root level DNS servers. In fact you local DNS might not need to hit the next guy in the chain if he still has a valid lookup entry for your request (check the TTL, not all BIND [wikipedia.org] implementations do this correctly). So the traffic on the internet does not go through one space, and you probably dont hit the root level DNS servers that often. Not only that but the way DNS works, unless you hit the root server yourself, it never knows that you were making the request, all it knows is that DNS server at 217.88.99.42 (or what have you) hit it.

Basically this whole argument is kind of silly. No one really controls net traffic, perse. The root DNS servers (i.e. ICANN) do for the most part reside in the US, but because of the recursive nature of a DNS lookup, it does not really tell you what is going on (put a packet sniffer on your own BIND server and see what comes up).

The Internet is still largely, "grass roots". It is largely peer-to-peer. The only centralized items are the root DNS servers.

Since the U.S. gov does not really control "the Internet", why should we change that? It sounds good in a meeting to say "you control the Internet and that isn't right", but that is gross over-simplification. Nobody really "controls" the internet. If their argument is just about moving or adding new root DNS servers, that wouldn't really matter, but instead it sounds like "politics as usual", that is to say FUD./p

Re:All according to plan

[nokilli]

The Economist? LOL.

Try such pesky venues like Scoop or the Guardian or pravda or AlJazeera. Venues which can and do publish stories which the U.S. government would rather you not see, like the election fiasco or the pictures of atrocities we commit or the fact that the war on Iraq started well before Congressional authorization.

Meanwhile, here in America they've got our whore media turning their backs as the caskets are unloaded at Dover and in Iraq our military appears to be actively hunting down foreign journalists. It's clear that they seek to control all access to information, the only question is, to what lengths will they go to do that?
--
You didn't know.

Re:If it ain't broke..

[Toloran]

I really don't want the internet to become another great cockup of the least organized, least effective polital body that has ever existed.

Not true, the League of Nations was even less effective. The biggest thing it ever did was send an angry letter.

Re:Govern

[Pentavirate]

It's funny. Every reason given as to why the internet should be given to the UN to control are the exact same reasons the US will never give the UN control of it. If a country is afraid the US will do something nasty to their root domain, the US would be afraid of this very same thing should someone else control the root servers. It would be completely absurd to ever think that the US will ever give up control of something that is so important to its own economy.

So every time I see a new argument as to why the US should give up control, as an American, it convinces me even more firmly that it should do everything it can to maintain control of it. It truly is a question of national security.

Re:Govern

[ZoneGray]

Well, the thing is "The Internet" isn't a single thing.

Anybody can run root servers today. The challenge is getting people to use them.

So why would the US give up control of root servers? Because the UN said it would be more fair? Republicans certainly wouldn't go for that, and if Democrats were in power, I doubt they would, either.

Likewise.... why would a foreign country set up their own root servers? Sure, they COULD, but would it really improve things for them? Would anybody but their own citizens use them? Sure, Bongo Congo could set up a ".com" registry in defiance of ICANN. But it would only be good as long as Bongo Congolians were forced to surf through the BC root servers.... and then they'd be isolated from the rest of the 'net. So it'll never happen, not in Bongo Congo and not in France.

The only way the Internet is going to "fracture" is if somebody tries to split off from the existing DNS services, and the downside to that far outweighs the upside, for every country.

That's just the way it is. Is it fair? Of course not. But it works, and that tends to win out.

Re:If it ain't broke..

[necrognome]

You seem to misunderstand the concepts of control, government, and power. The U.S., via ICANN, does not attempt to "speak for" the world's people. The stance of the U.S. government, from adminstration to administration, has been that the world's people should speak for themselves (as far as the Internet is concerned). Would you rather have your voice taken away from you and given to an unelected international bureaucracy?