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

Re:And fragmentation is bad?

[robertjw]

because Intranets are so fucking useful on a global scale, right?

Don't know about you, but all my intranets connect to the Internet. Actually, thats all the 'Great Firewall' is, an attempt to make China on big intranet. China may even be running their own domain servers and have their own version of ICANN. Some of the intranets I run have their own DNS servers and use names internally that are not available externally. Even if there's fragmentation, anyone that wants to be connected will be able to be connected. US Tax dollars paid for implementation of the current system, US security relies on the current system, it would be apalling if the US Government gave control of something as vital to our society as the root DNS servers over to anyone else.

One thing, this
Bush, his Family First supporters, and Mrs. Clinton...
is not a phrase I would have ever thought would be seen anywhere.