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!

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

[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

[Anonymous Luddite]

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

dude, this _is_ slashdot. Half your audience is thinking "pastry" when you say "7-layer"

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.

Time warp

[pmike_bauer]

We had a discussion about this the other day
My flux capacitor is out of whack; the earth now rotates ~every six hours.

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.

Fractured Internet?

[rackhamh]

Duct tape!

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.

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.

I only just discovered you could killfile editors

[thumperward]

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

ob Bender

[steveness]

So we'll create our own Internet! With blackjack! And strippers!

On second forget the blackjack. And the Internet.

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: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.

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?