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EU, UN to Wrestle Internet Control From US
Anonymous Coward writes "The Guardian is reporting that the EU, obviously unimpressed with the US's refusal to relinguish control of the Internet, will be forming several comittees and forums with a mind to forcibly remove control of the Internet from the United States." From the article: "Old allies in world politics, representatives from the UK and US sat just feet away from each other, but all looked straight ahead as Hendon explained the EU had decided to end the US government's unilateral control of the internet and put in place a new body that would now run this revolutionary communications medium. The issue of who should control the net had proved an extremely divisive issue, and for 11 days the world's governments traded blows. For the vast majority of people who use the internet, the only real concern is getting on it. But with the internet now essential to countries' basic infrastructure - Brazil relies on it for 90% of its tax collection - the question of who has control has become critical."
I'm not one to regularly use strong profanities, but fuck 'em. Negotiations are one thing, and the EU/UN can feel free to negotiate until they're blue in the face. But if they want to force the issue, I'm thinking that we should "remind" our foreign allies that a country with our military might cannot and will not be forced. If need be, I highly recommend that the US resign from the UN and see how long it holds together without our monetary support.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. The internet root servers are working fine. The UN has presented no compelling arguments as to why it should be turned over to an overly beaurocratic entity that has a poor track record for making joint ventures work. In absence of a compelling argument, the only thing that the UN should hear is, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!"
Keep in mind that the root servers are currently under the control of a private organization. While the servers themselves may reside in the US, the organization that controls them is a true international entity. The US government does not exert direct control over ICANN, and will not agree to do so in order to satisfy a UN hissy fit.
I can only speak for myself, but I would be ashamed of my government's actions if I lived in one of the UN countries that is pushing this resolution. I think this quote from the article sums it up:
"The idea of the council is so vague. It's not clear to me that governments know what to do about anything at this stage apart from get in the way of things that other people do."
Amen.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
It will be officially raised at a UN summit of world leaders next month and, faced with international consensus, there is little the US government can do but acquiesce.
Is that a fact? Right or wrong have you looked at our Government lately? Do you really think that international consensus will bother us in the least?
I'm sure my friends in Europe will take exception to this line of reasoning but why shouldn't the US retain control over the root servers? We built the Internet in the first place. Do you really want to see it turned over to the UN?
In the early days, an enlightened Department of Commerce (DoC) pushed and funded expansion of the internet.
Not only did we invent and build it -- we paid for it. That doesn't entitle us to something? The British got to define the Prime Meridian based on their global empire. Subsequently this has defined GMT. Wouldn't it make more sense for GMT to be based on New York (the center of the World Financial System and headquarters of the United Nations)? Isn't that whole argument just as silly as insisting that DoC hand over the root servers? Where is the problem here that they want to fix?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Bush was just a couple years off... soon there *will* be "Internets".
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
We don't really care what the world opinion is. The United States will never relinquish control of the internets. Ever. They can create all the committees they desire. It isn't going to happen.
It's their obvious strategy. There is absolutely no reason they have to live with us controlling the internet. Just put their own root DNS servers in place, and legally mandate that all of their ISPs switch over. It's not rocket science, but it will fragment the internet a bit.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
We are not giving up control of Gopherspace!
The battle for the future of the internets. And in the end, we will all be destroyed by the Chinese hackers. :)
Do we really need a government, or super-government in charge of this? Can't we have a decentralized network of root servers working together on this co-operatively? If one server or network became consistently unreliable, people would stop using it.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
How exactly do you control the internet to begin with? It's a distributed network.
Are they going to come into the US and take all of the DNS/Registar servers?
Is this going to lead to some overblown political war that may just have the US removing itself from the UN?
I understand that we (the US) created the internet in the first place and have the most invested, but we have to tread lightly.
We don't need to shoot ourselves in the foot again in our relationship with the UN.
DEAD DEAD DEAD DELETE ME
the eu/un arent seen as any threat in the US
no companies nor government officals care or will care about there rullings...
http://DiabloHeat.com | http://Kyle.TheOCSucks.com | http://TheOCSucks.com
if they're so keen on controlling it! Besides, this new internet could be IPv6 and solve all the problems of the current internet...such as HAVING only a small number of computers that are the only way the internet can run.
Seriously, it IS a creation of the US, and whether you feel it's right or wrong, the US and the UN aren't always looking out for each others interests. I'm not sure what the US would lose by giving up control, but I think I'd rather have it here than controlled by the UN where the servers would, I assume, be moved somewhere else. Or worse, moved from country to country as the UN wants to be fair to all united nations parties.
...basically it amounts to "EU and UN say 'Give us the root servers" and the US says "No, we invented and paid for them and we're keeping them." All this seems to boil down to the E(U)N having to establish their own set of roots, which is where we started from, is it not? Wouldn't it have been a lot easier to just set up an alternate root system without all the political grandstanding? Does anyone in the E(U)N honestly think the US was going to invest billions in something, only to invest billions more to hand it over because Tunisia thought they should?
-theGreater.
PS: Yes, I realize only the -summit- was in Tunisia; I needed a smaller country to make my point.
Which country invented it first? Maybe they should control it.
... the UN's legal authority (assuming it HAS such) is based on the nation states making it up. I really doubt that internet access is up there with wars and the like - nations can and do regulate the bloody thing at their borders. Is the UN going to tell China to open up and stop banning things? Would they listen if they did?
Government bodies of pretty much any sort can posture and cajole, but the people running "their" network are going to continue as they have done so to date. The Internet might fracture at the border or regions of the world, but we dealt with Bitnet et al "back then" and can do so in the future.
Much of this Internet thingie consists of private individuals or enterprises paying money to private individuals or money. They're pretty tough to regulate at the UN level.
Which is, of course, exactly why the US wants to maintain control of it.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
All I have to say to the EU and UN is good luck. They can barely managed to manage themselves and they somehow think they can manage the Internet? The UN, as a body of managing anything, sucks. As a forumn to discuss and agree on things it works, sometimes. However, most anything that the UN "manages" fails miserably. Just what we want for the Internet that everyone sees as so critical to them.
If they (other countries) are so dependent on the Interent, then they should have set up redundancies LONG ago that would allow them to "survive" on their own. They should already be managing their own root servers, even though it is unlikely that the US will ever recognize them, or that software will without being manually changed. This is just moronic political positioning. They don't need to "wrestle control" from the US, and, frankly, they're not going to be able to. The US ignores most of the UN anyway, and only pays attention to the EU when it wants something from them. The whole point of this is the UN and EU trying to show some independence, and I suspect it will fail miserably.
In the end, this will fade from the media and the UN and EU will have another black eye of stupidity. Frankly, no one country has "control" over the internet anyway. Absolutely nothing stops any other country from setting up it's own networks (physical), root servers, dns servers, etc. If anyone decides to pay attention to what they set up is a completely different issue, and the real reason that they are trying to have the UN manage it.
As far as their statements on governments being invovled.... Uhm, duh? The UN is just a massive, dysfunctional collection of....you got it...GOVERNMENTS.
- AMW
Remember Barbar the Elephant? That's what the EU running the Internet looks like.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I don't mind an international body doing this, but I really mind the UN doing it. Couldn't we found an international geek body to do this instead? Like IEEE or ICANN or CERT or something?
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Anytime your story ends with:
The internet will never be the same again.
You've already lost the battle against melodrama.
It's called 'democracy', American sons of bitches. Suck it down.
This thread will ultimately devolve into a US-bashing thread, with +5 Interestings for all the posts that describe all the US-wrongdoing in the last 200 years.
Even though most of the eventually flamewars will have nothing to do with the DNS, it's all about US-bashing on slashdot. Offtopic be damned, Slashdot wants pagehits, and trolling anti-US sentiment is the way to do it!
We are presumably discussing the Internet as an international network, and here the answer is obviously, "no-one can own this", because ownership will mean subversion of the Internet for political goals and thus its destruction.
But if we mean the millions of small and large (e.g. China) internets, each of these can and probably should be owned.
The problem of root DNS servers appears to be an artificial one, relatively easily solved if there was the political will to relinquish control and allow the free creation of arbitrary top level names. There are parallels where control has successfully been relinquished and the results are a nice mix of anarchy and order, suiting everyone. Newsnet is a good example.
My blog
I think it would be very interesting to see a divided internet. Once in a while things need to shaken up in order for progress to be made. IPV6 is too long in coming and ultimately since it's easier not to change, things are at most moving very slowly. But really, "the internet" is a global entity with global interest and should be managed globally. And if it takes segmentation prior to reunification, then so be it -- I'm ready to wait out the storm... but then again, such a separation will harm the US far less than any other part of the world. It would be REALLY interesting, though, to see what happens to the SPAM industry if such segmentation were to happen.
I don't agree. Control of the root servers effectively means that they could seriously damage a country's internet structure (and subsequently economy) IF they wanted to. It could effectively mean war by technological starvation. There SHOULD be a united body handling the internet. Full stop. Whether it's the UN or not is a null issue, the UN do a heck of a lot of good generally, so I have no problem with it.
Before this turns into an us vs. them (no pun intended) please take into account the business, regulatory, and legislative tempermemt of each of the opposed parties. Also consider how special interests in other countries *will* influece a governing body's decisions, the same way they have in the states. I personally would want to keep something so crucial to us, close to the vest. But that's just my nationalistic tendencies, after all, I went to war for this country.
Second is that "who controls" means "who can lock out the other side's internet access". But if anyone did this to anyone else, it would rightly be viewed as an act of war. So, who's more likely to lock out somebody's internet access: ICANN or the UN/EU? I kind of think that the UN/EU combo is more likely (say, to "protest" some US action, or Israeli, or even Brazilian), but I'm not sure that's correct.
Did the US lean on ICANN to lock out Iraq during Gulf War II?
I don't mean to sound stupid but, where does 90% of the internet physically reside? Where are all the web servers and routers and fibre and backbone providers?
If I am not mistaken the VAST majority of all of this infrastructure resides within the borders of the United States along with the majority of internet consumers. So, if the EU or anyone else wishes to cut themselves off form that 90%, will anyone miss them? I know for a fact that I couldn't give a rat's ass!
Hey EU you like this internet stuff so much, build you own.
This
All your internets are belong to U.S. :-)
Come on, who really has a problem with Iran, Mexico, Swaziland and China having control over the Internet? Whats the worst that can happen? *sarcasm*
Seriously, this is a real political issue. This is a matter of national security of the utmost importance to the United States. Contrary to popular belief aruond the world, the U.S. is not an evil place. George Bush might be a moron, but most Americans believe in free internet access for all.
The original poster said "For the vast majority of people who use the internet, the only real concern is getting on it. "
I believe what he meant was that, given the content on the net, for the vast majority of people, the only real concern is getting it on! "
Reason why there is hope for the future generation #364:
"I wish my grass was emo so it could cut itself."
This country is starting to look a bit like a fundamentalist theocracy. From a free speech perspective, it's probably better that the UN control it, rather than our own flaky and corrupt congress.
Forget 'force', remember its our ( the US ) funding that keeps the UN functioning.
We should have pulled out of this idiotic thing a long time ago, and perhaps this will be the final straw. Once can hope.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
But what do you expect from slashdot lamers other than being idiots. Nothing, right.
It could become /very/ bad if everyone starts making their own root DNS servers. Websites that are accessible in some countries won't be accessible in others. Government censorship will reign.
It is working JUST fine the way it is. The last thing we need are 50 different internets for different countries, without ways for people on those internets to get to the internets of other countries/organizations.
screw the E(U)N. Leave it the way it is.
over its own members. Do we honestly think that an organization that cannot standardize immagration, currency, and language within its boarders is capable of running the worlds networks?
And how about the fact that the computer industry is anchord in SF Bay, Seattle, Boston, and New York? Aside form a couple notable companies based in Germany and Sweeden, on what ground does the EU think it is more qualified to handle this than the US?
Where is the problem here that they want to fix?
If you examine UN discussions of control over the internet the problem appears to be free speech and political dissent.
That's great. The EU has come to depend on an foreign country for its needs, and Brazil gets 90% of its taxes via the internet. Now they want to control that dependancy.
In other news, the US demands control of Middle East oil fields because we need them but someone else has control.
This just in, the response is the same: "fuck off."
we'll just depeer them.
We seem to be loosing site of the goal of this system. To work. It works. Let's move on. America can say it should be kept with them "since it works", but that probably isn't the real reason. The real reason is most likely for useless power and reputation. But at the same time the other countries seem to not have a goal with a good basis. It's international, so it should be controlled by an international body. Makes sense. But it works fine as is. To me, both cases seem to just be based on intangable concepts that don't really matter when you get down to it, and all that is left is "it works, let's leave it alone..."
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
From TFA:
>A number of countries represented in Geneva, including Brazil, China, Cuba, Iran and several African states, insisted the US give up control, but it refused.
There you go! A bunch of dictatorships and the bureaucratic EU!
WTF?
I really hope the US won't be stupid and agree to any of their demands.
The last thing you in the U.S. need is giving the control to these deadbeats and still having to pay for their screwing around (just look at the UN).
First, as a citizen of a country that isn't involved in this dispute, I'd never agree to use a root DNS server hosted in a non-democratic country.
Second, I haven't been inconvenienced by the US' control of the Internet.
Third, look at their track record - the EU is a terrible place for managing anything, and the rest of the bunch have scummy and/or non-democratic governments. Screw all of them.
I knew the countries of the world couldn't play nice forever.
why must every american first response be "my guns bigger'n yurs?"
i had some respect for batman...
ps:
i think the american military might is having enough trouble just holding down a chunk of sand covered oil at this time, and couldn't even respond to a lil' natural disaster on it's home turf...
No matter the appearance of this, the end result will be the same. A statist governement (US, EU, UN, etc) will either maintain control, take over partial control, or more likely like they will all get together at some point and divide it up in such a way that it still sort of works.
;-(
But in the end the result will be that the USERS of the internet will have NO voice in what happens.
Either the US maintains the "status quo" that DOES have plenty of problems many people have long posted about here. The whole thing get chopped up as mentioned earlier, and we get the Balkanized Internet. Or likely the worst result, they resolve their conflicts by sacrificing all the USERS rights to not be interfered with, as all goverments do at some point. Because in the end it really is about whats good for the governments - NOT - whats good for you
You can have my internets when you pry it from my cold dead server....
Correct me if I'm wrong, but won't dictatorships that terrorize their people have the same ability to vote in important matters as democratic countries? Hasn't there been a history of less than decent governments being represented in, say the Security Council? I mean, what is China doing there?
Regarding the Internet, I'm leaning towards saying "if it ain't broken, don't fix it". It's working OK the way it does today (although Verisign needs to get the boot). I also want to make sure that China and other such governments have no say over my Internet connection.
And the EU sure seems to be taking the hardball approach to this! I can't even see how they can possible force the control away from the US. They will be making complete fools of themselves if they end up splitting the Internet. Unlikely, but I'm sure they are willing to do so just to prove that the EU has the balls to stand up to the US...
Clever signature text goes here.
"with a mind to forcibly remove control of the Internet from the United States."
How in the world do they think they will "forcibly" do this without full US support? I'd like to see them try to land UN troops on US soil.
I don't agree. Control of the root servers effectively means that they could seriously damage a country's internet structure (and subsequently economy) IF they wanted to. It could effectively mean war by technological starvation.
Because if you take the root servers away from the US we won't be able to hurt your economy. The simple fact of the matter is that the United States could destroy most of the economies in the World simply by telling our citizens not to buy or sell things from/to them. You might begrudge us for having that kind of economic power but it's the reality of the situation and it isn't going to change anytime soon.
the UN do a heck of a lot of good generally, so I have no problem with it.
I have a whole lot of problems with them and since it was my tax dollars and not the EU's that paid for the Internet in the first place (from the R&D to the initial deployments) I'll be damned if my Government turns it over to the World. The UN does a lot of good? I doubt anybody living in Sudan would agree with you. I seriously dislike Dubya but he and his cronies are dead right about the UN.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
They can cry about it and use this to help characterize us as arrogant, but they ain't gettin' shared control so long as we don't want to let them have it.
And by "we" I mean the American govt.
This is stupid.
The US built the Internet with US funds. If the EU seriously wants to run the show, they don't have to be jerks about it. What exactly do they want control of again?
Domain name registration? Start your own registrar. Get everyone to use your alternate DNS servers. Compete.
Protocols? Build your own network, or get some seats in a standards body.
Seriously, making an international issue of this is stupid. It screams "we're jealous, we want control." Build another network. "But we can't." Fine, then don't. I don't care, just don't try to force your agenda on us.
People act like the Internet is some sort of revolutionary battleground. A new frontier. The Internet is... a really big computer network. Internetworking is cool. The Internet is cool. Is building another one silly? Perhaps, but this is still worse.
Does anybody control the phone system(s) of the world? I can call pretty much anybody from my cell or this black thing on my desk just fine without UN intervention...
Obviously the mod has never heard of Gopherspace or he might have realized that it was a joke.
http://Lenny.com
Essentially, that is what this is. We're being hijacked and this could get ugly. What if the US decides not to go along with international consensus? Would the EU and others try to take over the root servers by force (hacking their way in)? Could they actually get away with it?
This is some pretty scary shit. Obviously, the US is currently in the hands of an illegal and diabolical regime, but they haven't really threatened the internet yet. Is this a pre-emptive strike on the EU's part? The Justice Department has announced a crackdown on pornography, but I doubt the EU is to concerned about that. What's going on here? There must be more to this story than squabbling over who controls root servers.
I'm not convinced these bureaucrats even know what they're talking about. Do they really understand how the internet works? Do they realize that DNS servers are not the end-all, be-all of the 'net?
I guess I'm just uncomfortable with the idea of the UN controlling the net. As I mentioned in a previous post about this, it's pretty obvious that the UN will soon look into taxing the internet. No other body could, but the UN is by definition an international body, and they would just love a revenue stream like that. But what about representation? The UN represents governments, not people.
I think dark times are ahead for the internet. The last thing we need is a bunch of know-nothing bureaucrats making stupid rules and standards for a communication medium that has thrived without them.
Electric Monkey Pants
Something intelligent here.
Indeed, that is the problem -- there is quite a bit of speech that the UN would like to ban in every medium if given the chance.
Or maybe the Kiwis as everyone from NZ does seem unusually civilised.
No. Because then the date line (meridian opposite of the prime meridian) would pass through heavily inhabited zones (Asia) rather than through the Pacific, which would be kind of disruptive.
I posted these same words last week and I'll post them again.
I am anti-US on many things, but let back them by saying this.
The USA created the Internet as we know it today, it is their creation, from their tax payers money. As much as I dislike many things that the USA is doing and has done in the past. I'm going to have to say that I'm behind them on keeping control of what is theirs, which happens to be the foundation of the Internet as we know it.
Just due to the fact that it is now a globally used system that effects everyone in the modern world does not give any body/group the right to demand rights of control over that system. Just as new protocols are created over time and are layered ontop of the old to keep the system running regardless of 'obsolete' hardware/software that might be in some remote corner of the web, so to should the U.N create a system that runs along side the current one if it so desperatly wants control. That is the most logical solution to the problem at hand. Countries and corporations can create 'internal' networks that overide the current systems of the Internet.
The fact that the developing world does not see that as the most logical first step attempt at a solution at hand is evidence that they are not ready to have control over a system such as complex as the Internet.
I whole heartly back the US on their choice to not hand it over.
Er.... You built what became the internet.
And the only reason you now pay for the relevant servers is because you will not relinquish control to the UN! So to say you pay for it and use that as a reason for keeping it is insane.
The UN will have control one day, perhaps after we're gone, but or course it will happen
The World does not trust the United States.
It should not be under control of any one governing body/country. This model may well have worked fine in the days of the nets infancy and even today, but a better solution is to allow other countries to bear the brunt of backbone costs/mainentance. This would allow them control, as well as decentralize the net even more. I think using a model based on this would make the likelihood of the net "bieng taken down" even more remote as a bulk of traffic would move to another contries backbone. The largest logistic in this endeavour would be an accepted system of standards which would have to be adhered to and enforced by a coalition of countries, so that again no one country was in complete control.
I see no reason why my government refuses to give up control. I suggest if they don't want to completely release the reigns, they produce an idea to spread out control between countries, or lose any type of control it currently has.
I think for some countries the internet has become economical, but this refusal to hand over control seems more political than anything else.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
The UN has finally lost it....
Wrong. You have failed to understand how the Internet works. The EU/UN can simply setup their own root servers. If the rest of the word decides to point to those servers rather than US than they have won. The EU/UN does not have to really "force" anything they simply have to persuade politely. Since, as you have arrogantly pointed out, the UN lacks a military to force things the UN has throughout its years been pretty _dam_ good at the polite persuasion method. A method the US no longer has at it's disposale. Add on top of that a US government that is run by a whack job and you have a recipe for other countries to run instead of walking to this new proposal. Are you going to suggest now that if say Canada, Mexico or other countries do not toe the US line that we bomb and kill their citizins?
I wrote about this in my journal on Oct. 3rd.
Leave it to the EU to decide that they must have control over something that they had nothing to do with creating.
The EU can piss off.
When politicians are involved, everyone loses.
The EU ans UN should just make their own internet. This is a stupid issue.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
This strikes me as very bad. While it's decreasing lately, at least the U.S. still has some semblance of regard for Freedom of Speech, whereas the EU and/or its member nations tend to want to censor speech that's not "nice" (Nazism, Scientology, in Germany, for instance).
What makes anyone beleive that the EU would be any more aware that their laws don't extend beyond their borders than the US is?
If they want to run their own DNS servers, let them.
/etc/hosts file is as much a threat to the US government as this new approach will be; i.e. not very.
We let private industry do it (DynDNS, for example), we let individuals do it; why should we care if other countries want their own DNS servers, too?
They're not talking about touching anything on US soil; so the comments I've been seeing (military conquests of sovreign nations, for goodness sake!?! -- over a DNS server?!? ) are just plain insane.
Calm down; it's just DNS. A linux box with it's own customed
Put down the guns guys, and stop it with the hair-trigger postings. No one is attacking the USA; no one wants to. They just want to run their own services; and frankly, I don't blame them. Trusting the US to take care of anyone's intrests but those of the USA interests is just plain stupid; the US doesn't trust anyone else, and always puts it's own interests first.
These countries just want to do the same thing; ensure that their own interests aren't controlled by a potentially hostile foreign power. In their place, the US would do exactly the same thing.
Before control is delegated, you must answer these questions:
Who invented the internet?
What country did the most to get it running smoothly?
What country has invested the most R&D in the internet?
What region is critical to the operation of the internet?
Does the country who has invested the most time and money in the internet have the right to control it?
Will AOL ever stop mailing out its free cds?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
The Internet has become a global network of networks, and whilst the original concept was devised in the US, it is important to remember that such concepts such as the Web Browser, hypertext, and other such goodies were invented and created outwith the US. So whilst I see a lot of posters claiming: "we invented it, we should keep control of it", I don't see them pushing for British control of web browser standards and the like.
Because the net is a global medium, it seems the correct thing to do to have it controlled by a global body; a global body which could/would be unbiased and not subject to the (IMO) unfair control the US Government has over the Internet.
Let's take a recent example: there was to be a .xxx TLD introduced. Bidding had taken place, companies chosen, and a lot of work had gone into the infrastructure and readying the Internet for this new TLD.
What happened? An unelected country in the global world that is "Cyberspace" decided on a whim not to introduce it, and could do so purely because it was in control of ICANN. That's one country out of hundreds of connected countries.
With a global body, made up of representatives from many different countries, there would be proper accountability, transparency, and I've not even gone into the possibilities of the US shutting down the DNS to unsympathetic countries - similar to how it retains the right to shutdown the GPS system as it sees fit, and didn't want the EU to create Galileo - purely because they wouldn't have control.
Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic
Build your own Friggin' Internet! Then we can disconnect you from ours, LEECHES! It was US RESEARCH and MONEY that funded the DARPA research that birthed the internet... Take a hike if you don't want to play by our rules!
/dev/null
Think of the spam that will be eliminated because we disconnect the internet from the rest of the world... No more zombie china computers relaying spam...
Put up a large firewall... UN & EU >
Blah! You know where you can goto on this one...
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
Either way, this is irrelevent. The point is that, today, the Internet is a global network. It needs to be "governed" globally, not by one major player. I'm finding the nationalistic cries of outrage posted here difficult to stomach. Something tells me that if it were proposed that control of the World Wide Web be handed over to the EU, on the grounds it's a European invention, you'd be pretty pissed.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Prepare to have the internet as we know it go away. The Europeans aren't just interested in control of the roots. They will also want to rewrite all of the 'standards'. As they have done with telephone networks in the past. As soon as the europeans started upgrading to digital standards, they immediately rewrote all of the pre-existing standards to make sense. Taking the 24 channel T-1 and making it a 32 channel E1. Sure, it made sense, but it created an unecessary incompatibility. Same goes for cellular standards. Also prepare for European style billing, where every packet is measured and metered. Wanna pay a UN Internet Tarif? Often times Europeans will want to change standards just to make them less 'American'. As they have fought over their own consititions, fearing they are becomming too Americanized in the process. I believe one constitution draft nearly caused a riot when it's title was something akin to "The United States of Europe". The American's and the Canadian's spent decades fighting over and developing these standards from scratch. The Europeans, with the benefits of the decades of that work, will create new standards (just because it makes sense, hindsite is 20/20 after all), and to make them less American. Breaking all old software and hardware compatibility in the process.
Here's to losing my Karma Bonus again....
you have my sympathies.
wow, this is really shocking - no, wait, it isn't. we're dealing with the UN and European politicans. what part of "the US invented and paid for the internet" do they not understand? it's been said over and over here, but why in the world should the US have to give up what rightfully belongs here?
you euros can throw out every argument you want, "CERN is in europe", "we invented the web browser", etc, etc - but it doesn't change the facts.
and to think we saved your asses in WWII - some friends you are. this is just another reason for the US to pull out of the United Nations, an organization formed on a good ideal that is rapidly descending into a one world government bully.
it's simple - you want to "own" your own internet? then put one together yourself and it'll be all yours. we've even given away all of the specifications, designs, and protocols you'll need to make it work right.
what's the problem? it's been working great for years now, and you wanna go and mess with that? think you can do a better job? no, that's not it - it's just selfish, childish behaviour from a group of countries (or are you one big country now) who didn't beat us to it.
sour grapes, indeed...
So some places outside the US, as is their right, are going to set up their own root servers. This kind of thing has been done many times before. Those other alt-roots have never been very heavily subscribed. Naturally that reference level could change, if other countries mandate that their ISPs use the new alt-roots.
But you know what? To the extent that the data coming out of the latest alt-roots conflict with the ICANN, they will be generally perceived as broken, particularly but not exclusively from the point of view of users in the US. For example, domain names will fail to resolve, or will resolve to the "wrong" place. If the new alt-roots do much of anything differently, users will start pointing their DNS clients at nameservers that resolve up to the ICANN. So for example if China sets up something that won't resolve (say) freechina.net, the individual users will soon learn to point their DNS clients at US nameservers.
The only way I can see these new alt-roots being heavily subscribed is if they make sure they agree with the ICANN everywhere ICANN has a route to a name, and if their use is legally mandated so that ISPs are forced to go through the hassle of changing. If they do that, the only value that they could possibly add would be of including extra domains that resolve for the alt-roots, and that ICANN does not yet have. Is there really a lot of demand for such a thing? I'm not sure.
But hey, it'll be fun to watch....
- Dan
> it isn't going to change anytime soon
NEWSFLASH:
Growth rate of US economy: not much. A few percent possibly.
Growth rate of China's economy: huge. About 11% IIRC.
Which means China is on course to become the largest economy in the world in about 30 years' time. (Figures all OTOH, but there or thereabouts.)
The US and Europe may be far and away the biggest economic blocs in the world at the moment, but we're going to have to get used to sharing economic might sooner than some people realize. And I doubt China (and India) will have the same ideas about where the centres of world power should be that we do.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
I for one welcome our new EU overlords. I'd like to remind them that as an employed system admin with no other skills, I may be helpful in rounding up DNS servers to resolve IP addersses all over the world...
There's GALILEO, the European Satellite Navigation System that should provide a GPS-like service.
Then there's the plan to have a european army, the "military reaction force".
Then there is the increasing anti-Americanism (for the sake of it) in a lot of political issues (esp. middle-east).
Then there is the anti-Nato trend
Then there is the shuttle program (EADS Phoenix).
And now they want control over the Internet? Or maybe an internet of their own?
...
Has the EU reached puberty?
Somehow all this technology replicating and saber-rattling reminds me of another fallen empire that also had a shuttle program "like what the Americans had"...
pretty pathetic IMHO
After reading the posts made by fellow slashdot contributers in this thread, I'm really appalled.
/. users try and distance the "average American" from. Trying and failing, if this thread is anything to go by.
What's your problem? Why are you reacting so defensively? What the ridicule of the EU?
Stand back, and look at the situation logically: the root DNS servers are all in the US. These underpin the internet as we know it. Now, at the best of times it's a bad idea to put all of your eggs into one basket. What happens if a terrorist attack takes out communications in the US? Or what happens if you suddenly adopt a China-like xenophobia (i.e. like what's happening in this thread already)? The internet for everyone else'd be pretty fooked, right?
Invention. No one man or organisation "invented" the internet. Yes, a lot of the underlying networking was developed by Americans. Parts of the topology were developed in Europe. The browser/WWW were was developed by Europeans. If you go further back, the microprocessor was "invented" by an Englishman. If you really want to stretch is, the language we're using now was a collarorative effort between half of Europe and Scandinavia (including those who's later settle US/Australia).
Likening to the meridian time: unlike the core DNS servers, each region runs their own accepted time. There are atomic clocks in UK, Japan, Paris and various other places. Yes, the zero-point is in Greenwich, but the world doesn't rely on the Greenwich clock working to tell their time. So the analogy is redundant.
Really, I'd expect more from my American friends here. This reaction is stereotypical of the mindset of current US administration, something that general
1) GMT is completly virtual, while DNS isn't. It's made of packets running across cables, to find logical machines.
2) DoD probabily created the basics of today's internet, but the CERN (EU institution) created HTML and the WWW.
Would it be logical for the EU to maintain a control on all html pages ?
You don't trust the EU, fine, but why should the EU rely on a bunch of pro-military freaks for key communication systems ?
I know there are a lot of countries that use the Internet, and as such, rely on the root DNS servers. Those being in the US, paid for by the US, and in fact designed/invented by the US. If the EU/UN want to fracture the internets by using their own root servers, fine, go ahead, but I don't think they are seeing things very clearly. The Internet is not just about pR0n or downloading music files.
... umm lets see... ignoring genocide in Rwanda and Food for Oil... yeah, those are the guys I want to be in charge of the Internet. They put Libya in charge of human rights? Next thing you know, the UN will let China in and put them in charge of censorship on the Internet! About the EU? hmmm Germany and France didn't want to help with the war in Iraq until they could go in and make money from it... Guess that fairly well explains their interest in global matters.
There are governments, and a huge number of businesses that rely on the Internet and its smooth running. If the EU/UN fractures this situation, it will disrupt not only the US businesses, but those businesses in the EU/UN. Damn, the British and EU can't even agree on what to name different cheeses and other such nonsensical things. How in the hell are they going to manage 'The Internet' without screwing the pooch very badly?
The last cooperative efforts from the UN were
The only reason for the UN/EU needing to have control of the root servers is to ensure that they can implement their own version of 'fair' management.... somehow I doubt that it would be anything close to fair. I can see the yearly bill for Internet services now...
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
I have to agree with the American position on this. your government should probably respond with something along the lines of Build your own internet
Realistically their is no good reason the Americans should relinquish control of the net, and even if their was good reason... they built it and they gave it to the world.
Your point being? Relatively speaking, it didn't cost you that much at all. Just compare it to the SSC or other scientific ventures in the USA. Sometimes people, particularly scientists and researchers don't do things purely for a profit. At any rate, the purpose the net was designed for is now irrelevant - it's used for much better things now.
-irb
This is the same issue that Europe and the rest of the world realized with GPS. They have a strategic interest, the US has a strategic interest. In that case, they've decided to create Galileo, an entirely redundant system. Why can't their diplomats stuff it and let their engineers figure out a way have a backup plan in the event of war, if that's the case? But strategic considerations isn't what's at stake here. What's at stake is the imposition of some sort of international law on the internet. As long as the US maintains some independence in maintaining the network, they can stop international laws they don't like.
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
I would be interested in knowing how they will implement this idea ...
How will they be able to assure the integrity and security of the servers ?
If the Internet is fragmented, how can you be sure of the integrity of the
data coming from outside of your borders.
Does that mean also that in case of war, you would have to break the
connectivity with enemy countries and maybe with the countries that may not
want to do it with your enemy ? Or redirect the routes so it would not get
trough a potential dangerous country ?
Even though I quite understand why the EU countries would like to own the
part of internet coming trough their countries, I am not sure that they
thought about all the implications caused by this move.
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
"we paid for it" seems to be the core of most of the "America owns the internet" comments. Unfortunately this simply isn't true. Americans paid for that part of the internet which is in America, the rest of it belongs to whoever owns the wire.
At the end of the day countries will have their own root DNS servers whether the US government approve or not, because there is no way of preventing it from happening and it is in the interest of everyone outside the United States.
So far no slashdotters have presented any good reasons for keeping exclusive control of the DNS system, unless you think "AMERICA! FUCK YEAH!" is a logical argument.
The problems with ICANN, these proposals, and so on is that portions of the internet domain space are "shared" among different countries with different laws and desires.
.COM, .ORG, .NET, .MIL, and so on should all be scheduled
for elimination in say 2 years. After termination all domains
must be under a country domain, such as .uk or .us.
Then let each country do what ever they want within their own space. Their laws and desires can be executed in their own space of the dns. If someone wants to pollute their namespace with lots of disorganized domains like usenet has, they are doing so in their delegated space and not affecting everyone else.
In the above the root servers would be greatly simplified as they only contain top level country codes like .uk and a
few others such as .arpa, .int, and so on.
Believe it or not the dns was origionally intended to be hierarchical, not a messed up parallel flat system like .COM/ .NET/.ORG have become. Deligated space can be managed in
different ways without upsetting someone else's deligated space.
Suppose the worse case scenario, and the US decides to "wage unilateral info-war on Brazil", they redirect everything under .br to point to http://www.gator.com/. If everything in Brazil goes through Brazil's root DNS, this action will have no effect.
Whether you like the The Great Firewall of China or not, China has demonstrated that it is possible to create their own partition of the internet completely subject to their own rules. If Brazil was worried about that, they could do something similar (not the censorship aspect, but having their own net).
This is nothing more than typical politicking at its worst. Ambassadors trading blowjobs, in the hope to gain poltical bargaining chips that they can use next time the US pisses everyone off.
As opposed to... Yosemite Sam?
Since you've been modded up, I'm surprised that nobody has bothered to explain to you yet that the web isn't the internet.
All your bases belong to UN
In a rather startling statement the EU with several other members of the UN (China, Iran, North Korea, and Colombia) have sat down at talks with the US and demanded that they relenquish control of the New York Stock Exchange to an international body headed by Malaysia (chosen at random from a hat by the head of the UN Comittee on the World Economy). The EU has stated that if the US does not hand over control of the NYSE the UN will force the transition. They cited that the NYSE has become an important global network. The coialition also flatly denied claims that "France would be bad at running anything involving finance" and "It might be a bad idea to let China and Iran have any kind of control over things that should be free from repressive strictures."
Well, I guess it is time to kill DNS alltogether. DNS is centralized by design. Tim Berners-Lee doesn't like centralized designs, and has referred to DNS as the achilles heel of the internet, and I think he has been thinking about replacements. What we need to remove control from any monolithic, centralized body. Make it webly. Then, they can argue over themselves, but control, they won't get.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
There seem to be some problems with this. :-)), as an example think about Japan in the 80's. Second, how many people are there in the US and how much money (import/export) are we talking about. It's only a small percentage of the world economy (only talking citizens buying power here).
First of all, the citizens in the US like in many countries don't listen very well to this (something about freedom and stuff
Further, i just don't think it's something that would go over well with the rest of the world. Even with all your leet military and economic powers you don't want too much enemies. You still owe the rest of the world quite some money as well. Let's just hope they don't all want it back at the same time :-).
" we paid for it.
In the end it always comes down to the wallet
Unleash the trolls!
May I use your sig please?
Jeez, not even Mr Gates has that kind of money.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Bush has a history of instituting Christian law whenever he feels it will gain him votes from the religious right. Whether it's porn or gambling, P2P or nudity in games, Bush is right up there with Pat Robertson and the Wahabi. Preventing Vice and Promoting Virtue.
I say let the RIAA/MPAA spend some of their money on the UN delegates and France. They'll lose all their cronies in Congress, and have to contend with European laws when they funnel cash into the various slushfunds.
Shake up the establishment. This is a good thing for America.
I have a whole lot of problems with them and since it was my tax dollars and not the EU's that paid for the Internet in the first place (from the R&D to the initial deployments) I'll be damned if my Government turns it over to the World
No, you'd rather have them hand it over to private corporations.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Neither is DNS, which is what the whole discussion is about.
he said the internet as we know it.
Hey guys, I can only read pro-americam posts here! Why?
It's incredible that somebody says: "The Internet was built by US
so we should keep it under our "democratic" control!"
It's so naive!
The Internet is like a collage, built of many patches and I belive
that there should be a global coordination.
Repeat after me, HTML/HTTP != The Internet.
So yeah, we did invent the internet. :-)
>> It will be officially raised at a UN summit of world leaders next
...Isn't that whole argument just as silly as insisting that DoC hand over
>> month and, faced with international consensus, there is little
>> the US government can do but acquiesce.
> Is that a fact? Right or wrong have you looked at our Government lately? Do
> you really think that international consensus will bother us in the least?
Truly. The only thing the UN can do without the cooperation of the US is split the internet into different networks, each under the control of a different body.
Eventually, that might be for the best, as long as they are all interoperable. But doing so by unilateral action without US cooperation strikes me as a poor way to start.
>
> the root servers? Where is the problem here that they want to fix?
There are issues that are driving this. Trademarks, patents, laws covering searches and protected speech all differ vastly by nation. ICANN is grossly ineffective in dealing with these issues, and they have pissed off nearly everyone. The internet is an international resource, and people in other nations are rightly concerned about the US government potentially taking ill-advised unilateral action, with physical control of the root servers being the ultimate hammer.
Of course, dealing with a -potential- for ill-advised unilateral action by the US by taking an -actual- ill-advised unilateral action -against- the US strikes me as both ironic and, bluntly, stupid.
Not only did we invent and build it -- we paid for it. That doesn't entitle us to something? The British got to define the Prime Meridian based on their global empire. Subsequently this has defined GMT. Wouldn't it make more sense for GMT to be based on New York (the center of the World Financial System and headquarters of the United Nations)? Isn't that whole argument just as silly as insisting that DoC hand over the root servers? Where is the problem here that they want to fix?
If having GMT in one's capital meant total control over information infrastructure it sure as hell would'nt be in London.
I think they Misunderestimated your comment!
If you're going to spout something as doctrine, at least know what you're talking about. Tim Berners Lee helped create the World Wide Web not the Internet.
The US is holding on to its unilateral control by force. "Posession is 9/10s of the law", "we were here first", "we pay the bills", "we've got the UN building", "we've got the Security Council veto", "we've got the big bombs". Where's the "we're the most trustworthy, the most reliable party to keep this essential system running"?
The US has alienated enemy and ally alike. In the past, even enemies of the US, or uneasy "partners" like Russia, have still trusted US governance of the Internet. But now the US government has declared its unilateral selfinterest at the expense of any other nation that stands in its way. The boss of the US delegation over at UN now, the John Bolton installed by Bush this year, is famous for gloating over how irrelevant the destruction of 10 storeys of UN building would be to his terrorist fantasy. And few in the UN will forget US Secretary of State Collin Powell lying in session about Iraqi WMD, waving a prop vial in front of fraud satellite intelligence captions.
If you want the US to back up our control of the cooperative Internet with force, you're backing the forces destroying not only the unified Internet, but also the international community itself. The Bush people running our country today are clearly willing to risk the Internet in their desire to destroy that community. Those people are exactly the kind of people who pray for American bombs to find their targets, then "amen" themselves, rolling in their alienated, disconnected virtual "faith based" reality. No surprise you put that icing on your divorce cake.
--
make install -not war
I thought the /. stock response would be "I hate the USA, going global is cool. We're all the same species anyway."
In soviet russia, internet controls you!
Am I open minded towards open source, or closed minded towards closed source?
Why is that Americans want to impose their flawed concept of democracy (tip, google for Switzerland) on the rest of the world, and wants the resto of the countries to surrender their soveirgnty to the International Treaties, but when they have the slightest to loose on said treaties, they despise them for "convenience issues"? Wasn't democracy about sometimes winning and sometimes loosing for the greater good? This is just another show of the American double talk. "You should do this because the International Law says so, but we won't because it goes against our interests". I just hope that USA would stop this double talk and actually say "we are the bullies, but we have a too powerful army for you, so submit".
The World Wide Web, for instance, was a European creation.
Yes, it's a protocol, that runs on the Internet.
15 minutes, three different answers. Kick the UN out, your guaranteed at least 3 months of bickering amongst the remaining nations of where they should go ...
-everphilski-
maybe you should read your sig... <_<
We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our intarnetts, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills, wee shall fite on cuontrstriek sevurs; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this intarnetts or a large part of it were subjugated and lagins, then our republic beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the riged-hull Inflatubl baots (RIB's), would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World intarnetts, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.
Which means China is on course to become the largest economy in the world in about 30 years' time. (Figures all OTOH, but there or thereabouts.)
On course is not the same as "is". And China has a whole set of problems they have to deal with before that happens. Like the fact that in a generation or so they will have 200,000,000 more men then women. Or the fact that eventually their people will get restless and want actual freedom.
In any case I doubt that China will join your little happy anti-American socialist empire in Europe regardless of what happens to their economic power or system of government.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
All your internets are belong to us.
Our (U.S.) government has become less predictable and some would argue less stable. We've been giving anybody who looks our direction the finger on nearly every issue we can. And we've been doing odd things at home, also. From the WMD/Iraq thing to erosion of Civil Liberties, to the ultra-right neo-conservatism to the President suggesting that he needs the power to use the military for law enforcement if he deems it necessary. It's no wonder that the other nations of the world are a little skittish about the U.S. controlling something so vital to their national interests.
.ir domain as a type of sanction against Iran. I use Iran as an example because they are currently one of our hot buttons. But who might we be angry at next? China, France? How about Brazil? One of our religious leaders has called for the assassination of that nation's elected President.
It's really not that hard to imagine, for instance, that our government might force the root name servers to stop handing out answers for the
That all probably seems like hyperbole. It does to me, too. But if you're the leader of a foreign country, it would seem a lot less so. And if you're responsible for your nation's economy and the internet plays a significant role in that, I'd say you've got a responsibility to mitigate such risks. While I think the root DNS is safe with us, it doesn't surprise or anger me that the rest of the world doesn't agree. If anything, it surprises me that it hasn't happened sooner.
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
Bingo. You can't have free speech and ban "hate speech" at the same time. It's a contradiction. Even though the US is falling into that hole too, it's nowhere as deep in as the EU is... yet.
So, this story has only been posted a short while, and already the posts saying "We'll do what we damn well please. We're untouchable. We can do without you all. We'll just pull the plug on things. We invented it. We paid for it." are running rife.
All modded up as insightful and informative.
Well.. That's the reason the UN really wants things to be run by an international board, not a US controlled one. The net, as the article states, is now vital to many countries.
Which means the rest of the world would also like to have it's fair share of the say, without having to listen to the US, which has recently showed it's absolute contempt for international view (and in the posts here, is showing it all over again).
The aim, from my interpretation of the article, is that an international body, that fills the shoes that ICANN now fills will be formed as a technical arena to ensure that the needs of the world are fulfilled.
The rest of the world is perfectly able to build it's own root servers, although this will then lead to the US being cut off if it refuses to use the new ones, and fragmentation of the whole will occur.
This is what the ongoing argument is about.
Not 'Give us the root servers. All of them. Give us what you paid for.'.
The infrastructure outside the US was paid for outside the US, by the companies that operate outside the US.
Without that foreign buy in to a Standard, there would be no worldwide internet. It would be the US military net it started off as, or perhaps their academic net, like UK had JANET, and Europe's other competing national networks.
What is being requested is that the ownership becomes joint. No one country can pull the plug and get overall control to suddenly yank a whole area out of the system at will.
The amount of inventions used in the US created outside of it (or before it existed) are many and multifarious.
Without those, it's entirely probably that the ideas that lead to the creation of the Internet would have not formed for a goodly long time.
But, the ideas did come around in the US, and honestly, all credit to the guys that did come up with it. And for the forsight to put it into the academic arena, which led to it's increase in scope worldwide (I still remember the net from it's almost entirely academic days).
Now the choice comes to either make it a truly worldwide and international entity and show real enlightenment, or to hoard it, use it as a lever to gain other concessions, or a stick to beat people with if needed.
This whole issue is a lot more complex than most here give it credit for.
Personally, I'm interested in seeing how it evolves.
I think a lot of the character of both the UN and the US will come out here, and I very much doubt that either one will end up smelling of roses.
A typical response - "we (the USA) paid for it". If that were true, I for one would be happy to leave in US hands. As it is, being Canadian, I pay for my monthly access, which goes to my ISP who built their own network and pay the monthly operating costs.
If you look at the total backbone infrastructure, I would be willing be bet that all the bit are moving over fibre paid for during the telecom bubble - none of it US government money.
Even if you look at the investment into the basic science and development, it would be difficult to argue that USA paid for it all. There has been lots of advances done by individuals (in universities and industry), by government organization (USA, Europe and elsewhere). The RFC's were all "free" work by everyone. Hack, the Web (which is what most people know) was invented in Europe.
It is fairly silly to claim the USA paid for the net (it is toally nuts to claim the USA is paying the it now).
Old and busted: "The Internet treats censorship as damage, and routes around it."
New hotness: "The Internet treats [BLOCKED] as [BLOCKED], and routes [YOU PROMPTLY TO YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD POLICE STATION].
Outside of a small, relatively powerless group of our fellow geeks in Europe, I doubt that many people are concerned with DNS.
It's more likely that the parties behind the challenge are interested in control of content. Consider who's leading the charge: the EU, which is just plain pissed at the US (and from where there have been several court cases challenging content on US servers that violated EU/EU-member laws,) Brazil, which is pissed at ICANN, and Iran, Pakistan, and China, who are pissed at free speech.
The Bush administration (and maybe Clinton's, too) missed the chance to spin-off Internet governance to a strong, independent private organization. Now the struggle for control is between a state and an international organization. The lone state is at a disadvantage anytime that's the way a bureaucratic conflict is structured.
Really? Then a united body should have invented it and funded the research. As of now, control belongs to the US. In the absence of a compelling reason in the US's best interest to do otherwise, why should we? You want to give us something in return, that's negotiable. Right now, this self-entitled crap is getting old - Europe's acting like it's owed something and it's not.
Don't like it? Too damned bad. I love this whole "force" thing. Ya gonna invade and take the root servers? Good luck.
It is neither; it is IP, TCP, UDP, DNS and so on. These were all invented in the US. And the specific item in question is not the internet at large, but DNS in particular.
Y'know, I expect my grandmother to fall into the fallacy of believing that the World Wide Web is the same thing as the Internet, but I expect more from a Slashdot reader. Silly me.
You mean Al Gore didn't file a patent to protect the intellectual property rights associated with his invention?
I don't need no estinkin'
Jeepmeister
TCP/IP is a protocol that runs on copper wires. Your point?
he EU had decided to end the US government's unilateral control of the internet and put in place a new body that would now run this revolutionary communications medium.
Comstar?
Please tell me if I understand the situation:
By "control of the Internet" one means "physical control of the root DNS servers."
It is possible to set up a DNS server and convince people to use it as a root server.
Control of the physical infrastructure comprising the various networks will remain in the hands of those who maintain jurisdiction over the physical area in which such infrastructure lies.
Assuming the above statements are true, then those wanting to "wrest control of the Internet" from the U.S. are pols simply ignorant of how the Internet works. They've got a bug up their collective ass because somebody told them that the US controls teh internets and gee we can't have that.
If I'm wrong about any of these things, please let me know and explain the error in my thinking.
Nobody has "control" of the internet... to suggest so is absurd.
The internet works through the cooperation of thousands (millions?) of private and public netowrks agreeing on certain protocols and standards.
The US Govt or any other group can dicatate address allocation, DNS servers, and so on, but nothing FORCES anyone to use it.
If the major ISP's decide to ignore IANA or any other group, that's their perogative.
Given that global cooperation is necessary to have a globally reachable internet.. we only need two things.
1) Sane address allocation that everyone can agree on.
2) Sane DNS allocation that everyone can agree on.
That way we can just pimp out the internet to offshore companies...uh just like now.
No seriously, the EU and UN are merely mouthpieces for the parochial interests of each. Giving control, whatever the hell that means - - what does it mean? No routing to the US? Give control of TLD to Iran? - - would merely grind things to a halt.
Hey, don't count me among the fear-struck militaristically obsessed bunch, but an aggressively expansionist campaign of wars both solves both the disparate proportion of men to women, and gives the men something to do to keep them occupied.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
If the US drops the UN enntirely, I'm sure Toronto would be a nice place for it.
Nice city, but I think Geneva is a more logical choice. With the US the sole superpower does it make sense for it to host an organization has become the primary forum for its adversaries? I don't think so. Move the UN and it shrinks in relevance. This is good for the US given the major negative shift in the UN disposition towards it.
an ill wind that blows no good
Those "support the UN at all cost" folks are real twits. Can't they see the obvious that the UN is nothing but a bunch of apologists for dictators, the more anti-Semitic the better? And that the votes of the French and the Chinese on the UN Security Council are up for sale to the highest bidder?
This could be rather bad for the United States. If we continue to piss the world off, every country could simply migrate to IPv6 and then block us off completely. Yikes. Corporate control isn't in the spirit of the internet anyway. Good riddance, I say.
This quote is from the following web site:
"The United States is the largest financial contributor to the UN, and has been every year since its creation in 1945. U.S. contributions to the UN system in 2003 were well over $3 billion. In-kind contributions include items such as food donations for the World Food Program.
The U.S.-assessed contribution to the UN regular budget in 2003 was $341 million, and to UN specialized agencies was over $400 million. The United States also contributed $686 million in assessments to the peacekeeping budget; $57 million for the support of the international war crimes tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia; and $6 million for preparatory work relating to the Capital Master Plan to renovate the UN Headquarters in New York. Moreover, each year the United States provides a significant amount in voluntary contributions to the UN and its affiliated agencies and activities, largely for humanitarian and development programs."
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
So if all HTTP traffic was blocked at major routing points in or out of the US, it wouldn't make any difference, right?
We invented the type of government where the people are represented by representatives in a legislative body, separate from an executive branch, commonly known as the Republic. Your use of the aforementioned type of government infringes on our Intellectual Property rights. Please cease to use the aforementioned type of government within 30 days.
Best regards,
The Old World The internet is, by definition, the sum of its constituing networks. The constituing networks are build and paid by their respective owners. Basic property rights. You don't own anything you can't show the receipt for.
In the case of the domain name system, that is payed for by the owners of domain names. Year after year they pay for it through their registrars. Other then whining on
You want more examples? Graham Bell invented the phone. Does that mean the US has the final say in deciding whether Moldavia gets country prefix 0418 or 0418? No, that is decided by the ITU, which is a special organization of the UN. (Which are known to be anti-American communists, having done such terrible things as providing North America with the obscenely long country code "1" just to make it harder for the rest of the world to call the US.)
No, it's a lone state versus several states using an international organization. The lone state is at a disadvantage, but not as much as would otherwise be the case due to the widespread public acceptance in that state of telling international organizations to bugger off.
Stop learning! Only you can prevent esoterrorism.
Oh yeah, and promotes the economy.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
There was no inter governmental agreement that causes countries to listen to whatever rules ICANN dreams up. ICANN was supposed to become more international, that was nix'd by Bush and now other countries have decided they'll stop listening to ICANN and start listening to basically a committee of themselves.
.xxx domain won't exist because it offends God, then it won't exist in your world because it offends God.
So it changes nothing from the USA's perspective, you still control your net. Still own what you own. If you decide
Up to you, but why should anyone listen to you if you refuse to listen to them?
Each national TLD should be controlled by a body appointed by that nation's government, and this information should be disseminated to the nameservers in other nations. The US are free to opt out of this system, but when the entire rest of the world is effectively using a different namespace, then you will soon find that it is worth joining it. Your ISPs would probably make that decision on behalf of the government anyway.
The truth of the matter this will have little to no effect on what many people do on the internet. I use the internet as a tool to promote local businesses, events, news, etc. The ISP that I work for is out in a rural area, where most of our customers aren't thinking on a global scale. I'm not trying to be a "self-centered" American, but how are backwoods farmers, 9th grade level-educated folks, going to even think about this stuff - they're just playing Yahoo! Games. Even if other countries try to "take over" the basic infrastructure that I use will still be there. Nothing I do is global, and I like it that way.
You're right. We, the taxpayers of the US, paid in taxes to lay down the infrastructure which was then happily given to the corporate overlords so they could fleece us blind.
fast as fast can be. you'll never catch me.
What is laughable about the whole thing is that the UN and the EU think they have any sort of leverage on this issue. The US owns the hardware, and the ICANN, and that's all there is too it. No amount of bluster or whailing will change that.
It is really sad that so many of the worlds governments think that because they have allowed themselves to become dependant upon an American pioneered technology that the Americans should just hand it over to them.
The US feels that the Internet is part of its national economy and security. It should not, under any circumstances, let anyone else have control of it until a case can be made that will show any change to be in the best interests of the US. The case that is to be put before the UN seems to be in the best interest of nations other than the US.
The lie here is that the US is somehow forcing the rest of the world to use its system. TCP/IP can and does support other protocols and the rest of the world is welcome to develop and deploy them. In fact, one of the foundating principles is that the TCP/IP underpinning be freely open to any who want to experiment. That has never changed.
The UN has zero power to enforce anything. The EU is just discovering that it has painted itself into a corner and now wants the US to bail it out by handing over something it has no moral claim to.
The US built it. It belongs to the US. If you think the opposition in the UN and EU is strong when the US said it's going to keep what it built to itself then wait until you see the American reaction to hearing that someone wants to steal it from them. Us Americans will likely burn it to the ground before we give it up.
komori_san@hotmail.com
Comment removed based on user account deletion
- Lots of countries depend on oil and the Middle East seems to have a lot of it, all those oil fields should be turned over to the UN?
- Suppose some European country develops stable, controlled fussion. This would be precedent to opening it up for the world instantly. Good luck recovering those tons of research money whatever company does it.
The UN is all but a joke these days. I wouldn't turn over the balancing of my checkbook to them, much less anything "important". Personally, I don't care quite so much that an international body overlook the stuff, as long as it is a competant body (and there are some). The UN is not in the set of competant bodies.
I posted a comment or two the last time this came up, but now I will take a different tack: it is understandable that they want some way to maintain access to their country level domains even if the US goes utterly nuts. I suggested that is just what they should do.
.br and .tv. Starting this day the US root zone file would point to the UN zone file for look-ups for the domains. The UN file would of course point to the US file for the .us domains and for the existing international TLDs such as .com and .org. The UN could also create their own new TLDs, maybe .comnet or something, but the old ones stay with the US.
Now they want to force the issue, I think we should help them along. Tell the EU and the UN to pick a date on which the US root zone file will no longer be responsible for containing the look-up information for non US country domains such as
Now if they actually did this, the US part of the internet would not be order the control of an organization that is not beholden in the slightest way to the American people, while the rest of the world gets to deal with something administered by the UN or the EU. Really, what is so hard about this?
Oh, as for the internet being essential to the infrastructure of some countries, might it be said that the internet pretty much IS the infrastructure of the US economy, government and whotnot? Turn off the internet everywhere, and the transistion in the US would be substantially more severe than the transistion in Brazil (I am sure they would still get their taxes somehow).
But the modern internet?
Methinks that CERN should receive the bulk of the credit since Mr Berners-Lee/CERN is credited with inventing the web - you know, the part of the network we use everyday (right now in fact!)
Americans might well notice that it's called the WORLD wide web, not the AMERICAN wide web...
Do any of the nay-sayers know how much influence the US Gvt actually exercises over those servers? While I don't know, I suspect there is very little interaction/influence.
As for Brazil's taxes ...uhm, couldn't they (by design) ensure that regardless of being cut-off from the outside, their taxes still get collected within their physical borders? The root servers just direct traffic that gets to them...
Am I missing something?
If you think imaginary property and real property are the same, when does your house become public domain?
I'm remembering my first season of baseball, the first year we had actual pitchers, not using the pitching machine any more.
My team sucked, and I'll tell you why. Fatty McFat was our pitcher. Not because he was a good pitcher, god no, but because he cried the loudest and his mom was delusional in thinking that he was simply big-boned and the greatest athlete. EVER. His crying and her excessive bitching made Fatty the pitcher. Oh yea his dad was the coach. 4 eyes was 1st base. Couldn't see shit, but hey he was Fat's best friend. I was 2nd base and I kicked ass I tell you. I was also 2nd batter up, which was retarded. I couldn't hit shit, and I told my coach that. "I'm going to strike out; me hitting the ball would be a miracle. make me bat last". but no, we batted alphabetical to be fair. We picked our own positions, which really meant who cried the loudest got what they wanted, and who couldn't take it and would play outfield just to shut the crybaby up.
Did I mention we sucked? Anyway we lost a shit ton of games, imagine that. Next year I went to a select team, which had tryouts. I didn't make it, and I quit baseball. I wasn't offended, I just sucked at baseball and had no business playing. It's not the coach's fault, who was paid to make that team win. He made the decisions based on his experience as a player in college and a coach. No one cried on that team.
The moral is that lots of things are nice about being 'fair' and giving everyone a say and a shot. The results are dog shit though. Just look at the UN.
i don't care
I wonder you you think the "we" is here. This decision will likely be made by government and corporate power centers, along the usual party lines.
TFA already frames the debate in language that will encourage this: "Will a governmental body running the internet add unnecessary bureaucracy or will it bring clarity and a coherent system?"
Another interesting question is: "could a governmental body running the internet bring it out from under the control of big corporations & ISPs?" Now, I don't think that U.N. control would be an unqualified good; but there are multiple sides.
As for the invention of the thing, I think it's largely irrelevant. It belongs to the world now and being selfish about it would be like Italy trying to keep everyone else from using the radio without permission.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Not only did we invent and build it -- we paid for it. That doesn't entitle us to something?
Sure, it entititles us to all the wire and boxes we bought, except, of course, that most of that is actually in private hands. You'll find that much of the wire and many of the boxes do not reside in and were not paid for by America.
Should CERN (the "E" in CERN does not refer to the US) "own" the web (we're talking about control of the DNS namespace here, not the internet, which is largely uncontrolable, although China's giving a good try. Bloody shame that Slashdot continues the internet/web confusion, innit?). Europe invented, built and made the initial investment. You could say that America stole it in the first place.
Or is the web, perhaps, just an idea, a set of published, open communications standards, free for anyone to impliment and use?
Or do you think that Italy has some sort of propriatary rights to radio, Scotland to steam engines and Germany to the Theory of Relativity?
KFG
The United States has always provided 20-25% of the UN budget, far more than any other nation in the world. How anyone could mod the parent post as "informative" is beyond me.
Slashdot - where clueless imbeciles slap each other on the back for wildly inaccurate statements.
Just as the US wouldn't allow any other country unilateral control over a vital part of it's information systems, neither should any other country.
But that's what the EU/UN is trying to do. Why do you think it's justified?
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
How in the world do they think they will "forcibly" do this without full US support? I'd like to see them try to land UN troops on US soil.
Well, there are always sanctions or other non-military actions. Really, we Americans seem to have the opinion that the world is like 85% US. We are a big part of the world militarily and economically, but the rest of the world could survive without us. I don't know if we could survive without the rest of the world.
every country already has their domain extensions, they should have control over their extensions, and anybody registering a domain in their country has to use their extension. then when a person browsing from their country types in a url it automatically resolves to ...
Example:
I register www.google.com.us
anybody in the us gets www.example.com.us when they type www.example.com in address bar
some guy in england registers www.example.com.uk
if anybody in englang types www.eample.com they get his website, however they can still type www.example.com.us to get the american version.
I realize this brings up issues with people who has already registered sites, but what we need to do is just localize them. the sites I own will know all have .us added to the end of them. and the guy in england with the addresses I want with have .uk added to them so I can register the .us ones equivelant ;)
I guess the only other part need to be worked out is how to deal with international corporations. it would be a huge pain for say google to register their domain with every country... I guess they would have the staff to do it.
another nice side benefit is that I could block all .cn and .ru and it would automatically block all chinese and russian junk mail
Not only did we invent and build it -- we paid for it. That doesn't entitle us to something?
The British got to define the Prime Meridian based on their global empire. Subsequently this has defined GMT.
Yes, and all other nations shake in fear of the power that control of time itself grants the British Empire.
You can't take the sky from me...
No. WE DID define it, we didnt "get" to, we just did. It was beneficial, efficient and sensible for people of other time zones to be based around it, afterall time is purely human law and has now center in the real world.
Can anyone point to a part of the internet, an absolutely critical part that is 100% designed, owned and made by the american goverment? is it TCP/IP? or the fibre? or cable? or is 'the internet' really services and applications like apache and bind?. Personally, I view 'the internet' as its content, if the US resigns from the UN, and the UN/EU make its own network, will the US use its content?
The internet has out-grown America, entirely. It needs to be placed in the domian of where it is being used, if not then hey, everything can be replaced. This is part of how things evolve. I would say at this point pass this 100% completely unbeneficial psuedo "ownership" on, or the technology (protocols, hardware and applications) will stagnate until it is superceeded by a root shift in technology elsewhere, then in another 15 years we will hear china, or brussels or wherever saying they own 'it'.
btw, anyone notice UTC?
The hate crimes bill threatening your favorite talk-radio show, the UN trying to control DNS servers and threatening your favorite source of on-line news, self-censorship of the major news media threatening our country ... where are we to turn???
For excellent on-line videos that report real issues in a truthful manner go to
www.infowars.com (or)
www.prisonplanet.tv
They're so good Time-Warner and AOL ISPs filter them out at the DNS level. (Fancy that. The great wall of America. Traceroute is great.)
No problems, mate. Just go to infowars.net. The M$ clones overlooked that one.
Get free movies and info-links about real issues that are well-documented and can be found in major news media (if you look on page 26, in column G).
The UN will die away just like every other would-be empire...
The UN and EU better watch out, they have Team America!
Oh s**t!
Not really. Either side of the line would be only 1 hour apart wherever it lies. On one side it would be 11:00pm on one day, and 12:00am the next day on the other. This happens everyday on every time zone border, not just the international date line. GMT, the date line, etc, are simply artifacts of the development of the longitudinal system done by the Royal Observatory, in Greenwich, England way back when.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
...we can just block all e-mail coming off of Nigerian, Russian, and Chinese servers, and VOILA!! 90% of our spam problem is gone.
You want your half of the Internet, Rest-of-the-World? Well, you can friggin' have it.
You miss the principle of Charity. Rather than call his logic invalid because he started with "EU/UN" and then dropped it in favor of just "UN", you should charitably add the "EU/" yourself and see if his argument holds up. Otherwise, you're just nitpicking at spelling errors at best or launching a veiled ad hominem "UN-hating gingoistic bigot!" attack at worst. As always win you ignore Charity, you may win points with the audience, but logic isn't a popularity contest.
That said, you completely failed to address his major arguments, which were:
There are obvious counterpoints to all of these, and I only consider #3 to be worthwhile. But you didn't make those counterpoints at all.
What is about to happen is that the Silver Age of the Internet is about to end. The Golden Age was before the web; the Silver age has lasted since '91 or so. Now we'll see fragmentation and provincialism. Whether that is good or bad is an open question, but it will surely be different.
What's really at stake in this struggle is who will have the power to block network access to and from a given country. Some countries are afraid of the US having that power, which they would "never" use, while the US is afraid of the UN having that power, which they also would "never" use.
It's neither more, nor less, than that.
sigs, as if you care.
"The World Wide Web" and "The Internet" aren't really comparable in this context. The WWW is nothing more or less than a protocol and a (collection of) markup format(s), and a bunch of people pointing their pages at other peoples pages.
IP assignments and DNS would seem to require some control/infrastructure that isn't paralleled by the WWW.
-Peter
This just sounds like a bunch of envious kids wanting to steal our coolest toy.
Truthfully, I would be more afraid of the UN taking control, considering most of the countries on this planet are technologically retarded. We have the internet, its running well, lets leave it that way.
Let the UN and other primative entities on earth develop their own tech and then they can control it..
The simple fact of the matter is that the United States could destroy most of the economies in the World simply by telling our citizens not to buy or sell things from/to them.
What, like Cuba? They may be suffering, but last I check there were still there, doing business, living their lives free of US control. Sometimes freedom is more important than money..
I have a whole lot of problems with them and since it was my tax dollars and not the EU's that paid for the Internet in the first place (from the R&D to the initial deployments) I'll be damned if my Government turns it over to the World.
Then be damned, because you will lose control one way or another. You did NOT pay for the cables in countries outside the US. You did not pay for the routers, the power usage, the servers that are outside the US. You payed for a small part of the internet that connects your military servers and some academic institutions. Last I checked, no one was demanding that you give the World control over these segments.
but it would have to be a neutron bomb type solution. We don't want to harm the precious (oil)
After all, we Europeans designed and built it!!!!1111!!!111
And while we are at it, would you please stop using telephones, computers, automobiles and TVs!!!1111
Thank you,
Your European friends!!
P.S.:
China insists on the US not using explosives and paper!!!!111
I'm finding the nationalistic cries of outrage posted here difficult to stomach.
Jingo! J-j-j-jingo!
You take a post from the bottom and you mod it on top.
You take a post from the middle and you mod it on top...
You can't take the sky from me...
FTA:
It will be officially raised at a UN summit of world leaders next month and, faced with international consensus, there is little the US government can do but acquiesce.
The UN can build consensus all they want to, but we don't _have_ to give up control. Are they going to invade the US over the issue of the Internet? Highly unlikely. I think the EU is was off base in thinking that they have the right to do this. ICANN owns the Internet. DoC gave it to them. What else can the UN decide should be donated to the international community. Our American tax dollars and private investments paid for it. I'm sorry, but requiring that ICANN give up control of the Internet is akin to requiring Lilly to give up its patent on its latest cancer drug, because it is not in the best interest of the EU to have a drug controlled by the US.
Stop trying to flex your muscles for the sake of flexing them. My favorite part of the article is:
Brazil relies on it for 90% of its tax collection - the question of who has control has become critical.
How would having control of the Internet in international hands help Brazil at all? Presumably there are high level DNS servers that would get every Brazillian to the Brazillian govt without ever hitting the Root DNS. If something happened to the Root DNS there would be 0 impact on the Brazillian Infrastructure to a well known host.
Can we please get back to fighting terrorism or something more important than this.
I tried for 5 years to come up with a clever sig...only to realize that I am not clever.
In other words, the Internet will get forked. Now who exactly will that benefit?
--
The "are you a script" word for today is nonlocal...like the root servers.
"Slow Down, Cowboy our cheap equipment and poor coding skills can't keep up with you.
It's been 2 Days, 22 Hours, 7 Minutes, and 30 Seconds since you last successfully posted a comment, and if I had my way? It would be the last one you ever did."
They've made their decision, now let's see them enforce it.
I can understand how some people from other countries may have their panties in a wad because another country is controlling the DNS servers, but that's just the way things are, and it's not going to change. Are there any major problems right now with how things are being run? No, there are not any major problems. The US is in control, and should be in control, as it was the US that created and pushed this technology and made it was it is today. Yes, other countries contributed to it, but they certainly didn't have anywhere as the impact on it as the US. Bottom line, if you don't like it, then that's really too bad. The UN and EU are more than welcome to create their own fractioned internet that they can use. For the EU and UN to even make an issue out of this just really shows an inferiority complex on their part, and those countries that are partaking in this sob-fext should really be embarassed. It's like watching a little child get upset at another one becuase he won't give the other child his toy. Grow up EU and UN, just freaking grow up.
Tim Berners Lee (Who currently resides with his wife and child in Boston, MA) did develop the http protocol while working for CERN in 1989-1991. However, it's clearly a derivative of many other internet protocols. Hypertext markup is a subset of SGML. Thus, TBL's contribution was that he happened to work at a place with a whole lot of information, a lot of SGML data, and an Internet connection. He created a simple program that would let scientists communicate data in an easily readable form over the Internet.
He never dreamed that the "Web" would become anything like it has become. The idea that he was standing over people's shoulders and forging the Web from red-hot steel with his bare hands is totally misleading. Yes, he put up the first web site (info.cern.ch) on August 6, 1991. Big deal. Who created the sockets library he was using? Who created the RFC system that let him publish his RFC? What country invented the programming language he wrote it in? Heck, what country built the machine he wrote it on? And what country produced the Apple HyperDeck that inspired him to use internal hyperlinks? When he wrote HTTP, there were new protocols hitting the Net almost every day. His just happened to be the one to catch on because it was mind-numbingly simple.
If this is your "reasoning" that the EU should own the Internet, then I imagine that you'd want to enslave everyone in the World, after all Francis Crick was from England, and he discovered DNA. Let us all hail our new EU overlords.
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
Europe designed and built the world wide web and should control it. End of story. If Americans want to use it, great, and they should be thankful to us, like they should be thankful to us for a great many things, for opening it up to everybody around the world. There was no requirement for us to do so.
In fact, the majority in the US now seem to disagree with many of Bush's actions as president as well as with the way he is handling the White House in general.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Where you don't know where the problem is, it's about money.
Plastic & Metal. Is this sh*t worth livin' 4?
Is diz sh*t worth dyin' 4?
Has the United States been a bad custodian of the internet in some way? Has it abused its powers of control? Has it bullied anyone or threatened to misuse its authority? Beyond wanting to wrench the steering wheel away, what reason do the EU and UN have for forcing such a change, and what benefits do these organizations think will flow from it?
The utter fecklessness and corruption of the UN in bringing authoritaritan/totalitarian regimes (Iraq, Syria, North Korea, and a depressingly long list of others) to heel, protect the helpless (Kosovo, Rwanda, Sudan), or deter nuclear proliferation among rogue states (Iran, North Korea) don't give me a warm feeling that it's going to do any better when it's in charge of the internet.
From Jon Postel to ICANN and now the acknowledged corrupt and insolvent UN. This is a definite downward trend.
I can see why international control of the internet would be a good idea. But the UN is primarily a political body lacking in many of the characteristics that I would look for in such an organization. I'd much rather see a consortium like the ISO running this.
Since New York City is within US borders why dont we just simply kick the UN out, end of story. Let another country host them if the UN is so great.
Has anyone considered the sheer logistics of this? It's not like you're just creating a couple european user accounts on a computer in the US. If the UN were to take control of the internet (and I'm assuming that means moving a large number of the root dns servers, among other things), it's going to be a massive and EXPENSIVE undertaking. If this is done, will they be able to do it without a lot of downtime? Is there even any guarantee that everything will work correctly afterwards, even if we have to deal with downtime? Right now, the internet works. Muck around with its guts, and it might not...
I don't agree. Control of the root servers effectively means that they could seriously damage a country's internet structure (and subsequently economy) IF they wanted to. It could effectively mean war by technological starvation. There SHOULD be a united body handling the internet. Full stop. Whether it's the UN or not is a null issue, the UN do a heck of a lot of good generally, so I have no problem with it. This statement does not sit well with me. The UN hasn't done a heck of a lot of good. The US as a member of the UN has done a lot of good generally. theres alot of memeber states of te UN that do there fair shair but others sit back and ride the aid and military support of the US and UK. More US peacekeepers and aid have gone out to the world then every other UN nation combined. If the US does with draw from the UN then I feel that the UN will crumble like The League of Nations did when congress would not approve membership.
My Doom. The gift that keeps on giving
...with all the effectiveness and ethics exemplified by Oil for Food and the "Toyota Taliban", right? Perhaps sex in exchange for Internet access in developing countries?
An international standards body like IEEE would be better and hopefully non-political. UN is a treaty organization, not a government. Its representatives are not elected by anyone and you have the problem of various countries' policies directly conflicting with others (free speech in USA vs Germany, France, China, etc.).
Given the choice of having one country being capable of interference vs many countries capable of interference, I choose the devil I know.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
From the Gardian article:
"It will be officially raised at a UN summit of world leaders next month and, faced with international consensus, there is little the US government can do but acquiesce."
They say there is little the U.S. can do about it but just how are they planning to wrestle control away? By force? By hacking? I don't see any good way for them to get control if the U.S. doesn't want to give it up.
From the ICANN site:
"ICANN is governed by an internationally diverse Board of Directors overseeing the policy development process. ICANN's President directs an international staff, working from three continents, who ensure that ICANN meets its operational commitment to the Internet community."
and
"ICANN's Board has included citizens of Australia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, China, France, Germany, Ghana, Japan, Kenya, Korea, Mexico, the Netherlands, Portugal, Senegal, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States."
If this information is correct then there already is international representation for setting policies and top level domains. What are they hoping to gain by doing this? Has the U.S. been censoring countries or something?
I'm sorry if any of this is redundent but anyone who could explain to me how they will force the U.S. to hand over control and what possible benifits they (UN, EU) could gain by doing so.
~Petaris "The world is open. Are you?"
This one is going to change the world, mind by mind.
Maybe, just maybe...
the US is a bunch of hos.
the EU is a bunch of hos.
people in general, are a bunch of hos.
I assume your world has been rocked.
(people aren't really that different. stop pretending your nationstate is unique! it's not!)
Not exactly. The American system of government as described in the Constitution has some fundamental differences with all forms of government practiced in Europe at the time. I suggest reading Max Edling's (a Swede, I might add) recent book on the subject if you don't believe me. That claim has no more merit than to say that Bon Jovi should pay royalties to Bill Haley, since the latter invented rock 'n roll.
The internet is, by definition, the sum of its constituing networks. The constituing networks are build and paid by their respective owners. Basic property rights. You don't own anything you can't show the receipt for. In the case of the domain name system, that is payed for by the owners of domain names. Year after year they pay for it through their registrars.
If that's the case, then why should any organization control it?
You want more examples? Graham Bell invented the phone. Does that mean the US has the final say in deciding whether Moldavia gets country prefix 0418 or 0418? No, that is decided by the ITU, which is a special organization of the UN. (Which are known to be anti-American communists, having done such terrible things as providing North America with the obscenely long country code "1" just to make it harder for the rest of the world to call the US.)
And if the ITU were as heavy-handed on the phone system as most UN and EU are with their internet laws, the US would probably tell it to go bugger itself with just as much vigor.
You're missing the point. The US will not voluntarily surrender constitutional rights (the freedom of speech, in this case) to a foreign government or group thereof. If you don't believe me, I encourage you to come to the US and attempt to convince the residents that foreign control over their speech rights is superior to what they have now. You will find the experience enlightening, and, if history is any indication, also tarring and feathering.
Stop learning! Only you can prevent esoterrorism.
Nations and countries are increasingly obsolete terms. Globalization will make this discussion meaningless, quite soon.
Please google and research "peak oil" a bit. You will discover this crisis is a lot worse than they have told you
As opposed to the lack of bureacracy that was so evidently successful in managing the Katrina disaster?
Would you want those guys controlling your TLD?
Now let's see you try to use the internet without the web.
A much bigger issue is around IP address allocation, but even this is solveable (even if all hosts are not reachable -- probably a desired end).
The real issue is grandstanding. Having once had control over their colonies, the EU chafes under US de-facto control.
There SHOULD be a united body handling the internet. Full stop.
Not at all. The internet was designed as peer-to-peer, and to route around any damage to the network. There SHOULD be no way that one country can control another country's part of the internet. Brazil should be able to cut all the fibers to other countries and still have a fully functional internet with which to gather their taxes.
The article is down, but I'm guessing that we're talking root nameservers? There was a push at one point for an alternate namespace on the Internet, mostly because people were pissed at ICANN, what ever happened to that? With that example, nothing says that the EU or UN can't start their own namespace. Nothing says that can't actually roll out IPv6 so that IP space isn't congested and controlled by the US. When we're not trying to hurt each other it certainly helps to have standards so that we can work together, but if they don't like the way we are doing things it is certainly possible for them to go their own way without having to take what is ours.
The worst thing about a "united effort" is that design by committee tends to suck. Even with just a US effort we have a committee that is too big and too political. Think of all the complaints about the space shuttle, how it suffered from having to buy parts in all the right constituencies. Now, spread that out over the whole world, so that Lithuania wants to make sure that they have their say in how the Internet is run (possibly even PHB-style, where they demand changes for the sole reason of having put their mark on it). By decentralizing you can have smaller groups doing a more efficient job, and you just hope that the best solution wins.
All of which is irrelevant as both DNS and the Web rely on the underlying US developments; e.g., TCP/IP et al. That's just the bottom line.
Kind of like if Europe came up with the color TV, yet the basic cathode ray tube (CRT, i.e., B&W TV) was developed in the US, the color TV could not exist but for the underlying foundation in CRT tech.
Granted, Europe and T.B.Lee really are responsible for making the internet explode and become much more useful (at least in my opinion), but it is still fundamentally built atop the the basic internet. If it were otherwise, there wouldn't be a fuss.
The reason people are asking for change is that they do consider there to be a number of problems with the current system and with ICANN, creation of new top-level domains, the seemingly arbitrary handing over of .com to verisign, and other issues. The EU and other countries would like a bigger say in the resolution of these problems.
It's not a case of wanting the physical relocation of the root servers, as many of them already reside out of the USA. There are a nominal 13 root servers, of which 1 is officially European and 1 is Asian, but there are really 13 clusters of root servers, of which about half have nodes outside the USA.
While the Internet was (obviously) the most successful attempt at building a global network, it wasn't the only one - for example fidonet started in about 1984 (a few years after the IP rfcs were written), and peaked at about 20,000 nodes, and minicom is another example. Most of these other network ended up being gateways onto the Internet, and that's when the Internet stopped being Arpanet and became the Internet of today.
I don't think handing the administrative controll of the Internet from ICANN to the UN would be wonderful, but it's not like ICANN is doing a particularly good job either.
Its just another of their devilish plots to take over the world (again).
Don't listen to his decentralised ideas, it will be all about cups of tea and warm beer.... and there will be NO escape.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
This is a common misconception which many USians seem to have.
Fact is, the USA only became involved in WW2 when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor - not out of any sense of goodwill or friendship, but merely because they wanted revenge.
In any case, Tony "W" Blair has more than repaid any help provided to Britain/Europe by his support and help in the non-sanctioned and illegal occupation of Iraq.
Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic
most of those inventors.... get this... left europe and came to the U.S. to work on their inventions.
So actually the U.S. invented those things.
Nice try though.
Europe seems to have been a pioneer in world wars and ethnic cleansing. Nobody does it better. Congrats.
Oh right. And chocolate. Your chocolate is just yummy. Better than anything in the U.S.
The US will follow it's usual course i.e. it will never make any kind of a deal to change anything unless it directly stands to gain something out of the deal.
The only way to move the current administration is to force it.
the current problem with the US and the UN is that the UN dared to disagree and to not rubber stamp Bush's new little 'nam
It is much worse than that.It is not about money nor independence from US control,it's about restriction and taxation without representation by default.Think about it,if the UN and the EU got control over the internet,free speech will go away,politically correct speech will be the norm.China,Saudi Arabia,Cuba and others are using software filters to screen the internet for subversive ideas as of now.But if the UN gets control of it and the way the UN is leaning idealogically,all these countries have to do is lean on the UN and China and the rest will never see those subversive ideas again over the net. Or how about criticism towards the UN and the EU,do we really think the blogs will be free to criticize these institutions and their bureaucrats when they have control? Chances are that these bloggers will see their internet access permanently revoked while they are paying a national tax for it's use. How about taxation,I'm living in the US and I want to buy something in Australia,if the UN or the EU has control of it,I may be forced to pay a fee for using it outside my region,another fee for sales tax and another fee for time of use.If you think I'm exaggerating,just wait and see.
Please don't get us wrong, oh mighty god-blessed USA!
We just want to continue using the internet even after China, Iran and/or North Korea throw nuclear bombs at you.
We don't want the DNS to be over-run by cockroaches after that.
Manojar - pronounced like Manager
Can someone PLEASE tell me WHY we should change the current means of Governance?
I do not accept, "Its a world resource." This is not a valid argument since many of the world's resources are controlled by a limited number of governments.
So, tell me...
1. What is *broken*
2. How it can be fixed *ONLY* by the UN/ICANN taking control.
3. How no OTHER problems will arise like what WILL result, a UN/World internet TAX that has been proposed many times before at the UN? Now they can hold the Internet hostage and force thier views.
*You MUST address ALL three points.*
The burden of proof is on those who want the change. This just looks like an anti-US power-grab to me.
I won't be logging on to my bank's website on any trips outside the US.
The US have already been preparing an invasion of The Netherlands (Scheveningen) for a few years.
Dutch protesters already started building a defensive wall against the US
Say Hello to International Monitoring and Suppression (Chinese Model).
Say GoodBye to Slasdot.
Say Goodbye to Freedom of Expression.
I imagine the discussion went something like this:
Kofi: Now how do we blame this on W? Ayatolla got any Ideas?
Mugabe: We got the EU on board from pure nationalism, irrational fear and plain old hate for Americans. How can we expand on this to include national sovereignty?
Abbas: If we succeeed maybe next we'll be able to force territorial concessions. Isn't this Instant Messaging wonderful? My Al Qaeda brothers have been using for years to plot the wests destruction. Now that the invasion of Europe is well under way, taxing the Internet will make up for the loss of the Oil for Food business and allow us to begin new opportunities in South America. They hate Americans too.
Kofi: First thing on the agenda is to remove all references to "God"
Ayatolla: That doesn't include Allah does it?
Kofi: LOL! of course not!
I think that giving limited control to other nations isn't a bad idea. We aren't discussing the US having no say, but rather other nations getting a say. If we can keep enough power in our hands, we can work out some system where we can easily organize coaltions to get whatever we want. It seems like the article is talking about the EU setting up discussions on a better way to run the gov't control of the internet, not directly taking 100% control. If we can take these arguments to the table, maybe we can get a large bloc of votes, like 20%-30%? That way, we can block anything by getting a few decent sized allies. We can make the other nations happy, while not ceding much in the way of power in reality.
Not to mention, now we can go after international problems with some measure of success, hopefully. Simply being outside of US borders might be less of a protection if the world has more of a vested governmental interest.
As I understand it, the internet flourished (by which I mean became more than a few hundred academic/military machines linked together) because it was build on open specifications - if you want to add a node, you can build one (to the specs), and run the right software on it (based on the specs), connect to the net, and you're in.
But apparently when it comes to the top-level organisation, this 'share and share alike' policy goes out the window, and it's all "We invented it! Get lost!"
I'd say most of the use of today's internet is web and email. Email was invented in the early days of the internet in the US, and the web was invented in the EU at CERN.
Should Tim Berners-Lee take his web and ban the US from using it, or from resolving DNS names that point to web servers, because "we invented it"? It all seems rather childish.
When EU citizens are foaming at the mouth bashing "Americans", one of the most diverse populations ever to coexist with relative peace, with a broad brush, do you pipe up with your anti-jingoism speech then? You want China-like xenophobia? Look to your own house with its reblossoming of antisemitism and the way immigrants are treated even in the hard core socialist nations.
Whether it's the UN or not is a null issue
It is an important matter because, to date, US is the only place where most countries have a voice, hence I don't think it should be something else than UN.
I am John C. Dvorak's alter-ego?
SIG: HUP
As an American, I am thankful to CERN for creating the web. How does that change anything?
I think you'll find thats exactly what they've been calling for. The UN committee will simply set the rules by which the root servers change with the actual root servers themselves in the control of many different countries.
So it will be the same as the telephone system works now, in theory a committee of UN member countries controls it, via the ITU. But the day to day running is by hundreds of telecoms companies which in some cases are government owned. No single country can wipe any other country off the telephone network.
So China can't wipe +1 numbers and remove the USA from the telephone system and USA can't wipe China from the the international telephone system either.
It should be a big improvement, its not a USA vs World issue, at the moment it only takes one hissy fit from Verisign's CEO and they can wipe China, (or cnn.com for that matter or any other USA site) off the net.
Growth rate of US economy: not much. A few percent possibly.
Growth rate of China's economy: huge. About 11% IIRC.
Which means China is on course to become the largest economy in the world in about 30 years' time. (Figures all OTOH, but there or thereabouts.)
Err. No. If you see a linear trend line, it is generally foolish to extrapolate out that trend line 30 years. China has and will continue to see a lot of growth. Thinking that they are going to maintain 11% growth for the next 30 years on the other hand is close to insane.
People don't realize this, but business in China has a LOT of problems. The most obvious problems are the extremely high level of corruption and constant government meddling. China has a lot of people just starting to get out of third world style poverty and very cheap labor, but it isn't the business utopia people seem to think it is.
One of the other little talked about problems with China is their gross inefficiency. When the oil crunch comes, China and the developing world are going to be the ones to be hit the hardest. Granted, the first world will feel the burn too, especially in the indirect cost of having the developing world's economies getting a good shaking, but the pain in places like China will be much greater. The amount of oil it takes to grow the GDP in china 1% is significantly higher then that of US, and higher still then places like Europe and Japan.
I am not saying China can't become a super power, but it has some very serious hurdles to overcome first. China is still a mess politically, they are extremely bureaucratic and corrupt, their market is riding essentially only on the fact that they have cheap labor and a billion potential consumers, and their levels of oil consumption per percent of growth of the GDP makes the US look down right green. China has its share of problems. Boiling down China's rise as a super power to seeing a 11% growth rate is a naïvely simplistic way of examining the issue.
Excuse me, but the Internet (in the form of the ArpaNet and DarpaNet and finally the Internet) had been around for nearly twenty years before Tim Berners Lee did anything. He distributed his magic, shiny "web browser" across FTP and Gopher, two services that had fifteen years of use behind them before he came along. I was playing MUDs in 1985 across Telnet, long before Tim Berners Lee even got hired by CERN. At that time, the number of non-US nodes could have been measured in the dozens and they were almost all universities or research facilities. At the same time, companies in America were already fighting over IP addresses.
Your comment, "how technically it is very difficult for one country to "control the internet."" You think that's hard, wait until you see a committee of twenty countries trying to do it.
And I just can't wait until the UN/EU tries to impose a "Root Fee" to pay for managing it, that every man, woman, and child with an Internet conneection will have to pay. If you don't think the UN is thinking about this, then you don't understand the most fundamental rule of politics -- "It's all about the money."
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
I disagree. I say the EU and others are telling the US they have to listen to the rest of the world, if they are going to control what has become a global asset. To their minds, and I must agree, the refusal of the Bush Administration to listen to the wishes of the rest of the world, especially in regards to top level domain names, is unacceptable. The US invented, started and fostered the Internet, and I applaud that effort. But the Internet has not been a US only phenomenon for quite some time. It is unacceptable for the US to tell other countries that they have little to no say in regards to fundamental aspects of access and control to the Top Level Domains. As I said before, the 'xxx' TLD was what set this whole thing off, and I can't blame the rest of the world for getting upset.
To my eyes, I see the EU telling the US to play ball, for the good of everyone. Otherwise the rest of the world will be forced to create a new TLD system. If this happens, then everyone suffers.
Dave
The Bush Administration should stop acting like spoiled brats and facilitate the transition from ICANN to an international governing body modelled on the Universal Postal Union and the International Telecommunications Union. Sure, the ARPAnet was developed by the United States, as was a lot of the other technology that underlies the net. So what? The web as we know it was created by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, whose members are: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, the Slovak Republic, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. CERN is located in Switzerland. Does that mean that CERN or the EU should control everything to do with WWW and HTML? Of course not. Radio was invented by Gugliemo Marconi, an Italian with an Irish mother. Does that mean that Italy or Ireland should control radio communications? Of course not.
The regulation and standardization of an international communications medium is obviously something that should be done by an international body. Who invented it is irrelevant. I am amazed not only at the Bush administration's position but by the numerous /.ers who advance the position that whoever invented it should control it without any justification for this bizarre assumption, not to mention the lack of attention to the major non-American contributions. American jingoism never ceases to amaze me. (And before someone whines about me being an anti-American foreigner, I am a US citizen. I am also a Canadian citizen.)
My main concern about shifting control of the net is censorship. On several occasions third world countries have made noises about wanting to control communications so that they could control information. They use various euphemisms, but what they want is the ability to censor. I am therefore very pleased that the current effort to internationalize control is being led by the EU. If the US wants to foster freedom and democracy throughout the world, the best thing it can do is to cooperate and make sure that control passes to a technically competant non-political organization like the UPU and ITU rather than to a politicized disaster like the Commission on Human Rights.
I'm infuriated with this idiocy! Must everything be "governed"? The Internet is currently "governed" by a mixture of post-hippies, libertarians, and "cyberanarchists". This is to say that the Internet is not "governed" that much at all. This is what sticks in the craw of the world's more statist regimes: that the primary means of communication is not controlled, regulated, or taxed. The Internet is insufficiently "governed". I like it that way. :D
Let's get drunk and delete production data!
The EU and UN can just go get screwed. We didn't force you to connect to the net, you don't like it, build your own.
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
And when are the French going to hand over control of the Minitel?
Let's just share, people!
"Kind of like if Europe came up with the color TV, yet the basic cathode ray tube (CRT, i.e., B&W TV) was developed in the US, the color TV could not exist but for the underlying foundation in CRT tech."
The US *did not* invent the basic CRT! It was invented by in Germany, Karl Ferdinand Braun in 1897.
Typical!
NO!!!!...because then I'll have to get up even *earlier* to catch the train so I won't be late for meetings in New York.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
then they can pay for it. Seriously if a company starts with an idea and grows it into something everyone uses they are entitled to be paid for it. So the US goverment and industry has poured billions into the internet, it has become extremly valuable, the E.U. should be made to cough up their share.
The U.N. can put their tax idea where the sun doesn't shine, I quite buying CD's cause of the RIAA and I can, with the right theropy, quit using the internet too!
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
Should they continue to control the use of these inventions and all derived inventions?
This post of all them get's it right. Control of the Internet is more like control of one's road system. The US controls (and built) what's within their boundaries. The EU controls (and built) what's within theirs. The only thing that a control battle would do is fragmentation of the Internet, and everyone on both sides would lose in that.*
*It would be most instructive to look at a map of the Internet, and the resources most people go to. If one wishes to see the impact of a control war.
It is important because no one sees it that way because that is what this is really all about. More control by more governments. Once control is achived, many "needs" will be discovered where only more regulation and taxation will solve.
American DNS = freedom, mom, and apple pie. Is anyone surprised?
Al Gore.
It was invented in the US, but most of the Internet isn't being paid for by the US - most of the Internet as at today was put in by non-US entities.
Comparing it with the prime meridian is silly - the UK can't just cut off the prime meridian. However, if the US really wanted to - right now, they could essentially disable (or seriously disrupt) networks abroad by blocking access to the DNS root servers. The Internet has now moved on, and it's only right that some root servers should be based in other countries.
Of course, the rest of the world could just set up their own root servers, and if enough of the rest of the world switched to those new root servers, it would be de facto done. But that would result in the balkanization of the Internet. It would be better for all concerned (including the US) to come to an agreement on this and move some of the root DNS servers.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Uh, Tim Berners-Lee's contribution was HTTP. Not the idea of TCP/IP and the underlying infrastructer.
Sorry to disappoint you but,
The Internet existed long before Tim B. Lee collaborated on the creation of the browser(s).
It was invented in America. It was mostly used for connecting academic and research facilities for most of its life, with the number of international connections steadily growing. Only recently, around 1995, did the general public become aware of its potential for other uses.
As for letting the UN or the ITU be in charge of the ROOT servers, well - ICANN has done many things poorly in the history but the behavior of the UN in general and the ITU in particular indicates that letting either of those organizations takeover controll of the root servers would be a huge mistake.
The ITU can't even figure out how to publish specs without charging very high prices for each copy. RFC's on the other hand, have always been free.
The inability of the ITU to understand why specs should be freely distributed is just one example of the why the ITU is inherently incapable of running the Internet.
Mod parent up. - The level of discussionn is pretty dismal in this thread.
Turning anything over to the UN seems like a bad idea to me, but saying "we invented it; fuck off" or "we have the strongest military so you can't take it away" are hardly eloquent or compelling arguments.
Better to trot out the track record of the UN and then ask, "Is this who should run the show?".
I don't think ICANN is perfect, but I'm positive I don't want it handed to the UN.
http://request-header.info
Dear USA,
You've earned the world's gratitude for inventing, and indeed funding it in the early days. Gratitude is what you are entitled to (not to mantion the virtual "landgrab" on IPs and domain names, not so much something you were entitled to, but something you took). But now, by your own design, the internet has become critical infrastructure for all countries. That this means it can't be in the hands of any one country, however likeable that country is. You would say the same thing if let's say the UK had invented it, so recognize it's the right thing to do. Yes, it's hard to let go of your baby, but he's grown up now!
Sincerely (and gratefully),
The World.
Quite wrong. One side would be Monday, the other side Wednesday. This is an exclusive property of the International Dateline alone, not other meridians or borders.
You mean disruptive like taking a control of a functional communications medium and handing it over to an organization with a history of impotence?
How will the UN/EU "wrestle" control from us? As far as I know the UN has no control over US law or corporations. And it'd just be laughable if they decided to "pass a resolution" handing themselves control. Even if the whole world agreed that we shouldn't control it, that doesn't mean that we'll hand it over.They could decide to go along the route of "Fine, we'll just build our own and not let you have access to it", but it'd be interesting to see what happens afterwards.
"The boy is dangerous, they all sense it, why can't you?"
... thank you very much! And if the UN don't like that, you know that they can do? That's right, sanction us! And write us a letter how terribly concerned they are.
US control of the Internet simply allows our trans-global corporations to spread thier products, services, and wealth across the globe with little interference. They are also the backbone of our economy. Of course we want to make it as easy for them to do business as possible. They are saturating the world with US brands and eliminating the diversity of this great world in its wake. McMonoculture. Get it?
A global network should be operated by a global entity, financially bound to no country's GDP. $.02.
eric http://www.ericdfields.com/
It should be the UN and not the EU in charge of the Internet. However, what is really needed is a decentralized infrastructure with many distributed root servers instead of the relatively centralized and vulnerable setup we have at the moment. Perhaps mesh networks can be a step in the right direction.
From http://www.ibiblio.org/pioneers/cerf.html :
"As a graduate student at UCLA, Vint Cerf was involved in the early design of the ARPANET. He was present when the first IMP was delivered to UCLA. He is called the "father of the Internet." He earned this nickname as one of the co-authors of TCP/IP-the protocol that allowed ARPA to connect various independent networks together to form one large network of networks-the Internet."
Furthermore, the people involved in the design of the ARPANet were schools: UCLA, Stanford, the University of Utah, and UC Santa Barbara. And that's a group of ACADEMICS, not a bunch bureaucrats who bought votes with propaganda.
So, if someone must take control of the internet, it should be Vint Cerf, UCLA, Stanford, University of Utah, and UC Santa Barbara. _NOT_ the US government. Let's ask them: Who should control the DNS servers? Eh?
A bunch of people got a bright (read "fucking retarded") idea and told their relative heads of state that we need to take control of the internet away from the US because that way we'll look important and stuff. Then the politician does what they say because they truly believe (read "were bribed/threatened") that the idea is a good one. Don't take into account that the UN is involved in a multi-billion dollar oil scandal that it still hasn't answered for (not to mention Kofi's son is involved in a nice little scandal of his own). The US is far from perfect, but the thought of handing control (if we even could) to another controlling body that's just as, if not more, corrupt and has ZERO experience in running these kinds of things just seems Special Ed retarded. I mean....it's like retarded on a whole other level....you'd have to combine Downs syndrome with autism and a couple others just to get up to that level of retardedness. Then again, I just like saying retarded. Boobs
But the CRT was invented in Europe! As was packet switching! DNS is not TCP/IP in any case. Your argument is like saying that because Bell invented the phone in the US, the US should have control of all telephone numbers. An American might be quite happy with that but a country that had a revolution over opposition to abolition of taxes on tea should understand that other countries might be uncomfortable with such an arrangement. Really it looks a natural for a UN outfit like the ITU.
http://aa.usno.navy.mil/faq/docs/international_dat e.html
No, the difference accross the International Date Line is always 1 day (24hours) apart.
Can't believe no one jumped on this.
"Wrest": http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=wrest
"Wrestle": http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=wrestle
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
The United Nations has been bitching about gaining control of the internet. Funny how they chose to have their conference on the subject in a country that has strict controls on media and internet access. No big surprise, members of their committee on human rights reads like a who's-who of the worse human rights violators in the world, so to them, it makes since to put countries with the most censorship in charge of the free exchange of digital information.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Hey, why not turn the land back to the Brittish and French? They colonized it. Heck, they even PAID for discovering it.
Please don't take this the wrong way, I intend no implication as to the rightness or wrongness of the EU's desired goals with this post, but how the hell are they going to force the US to relinquish control of the DNS root again?
The best they can possibly hope to acheive is to splinter DNS by erecting an alternate root, and compelling they're ISPs by force of law to use that root. Somehow, that just doesn't seem constructive to me.
Please also don't take this the wrong way, but I expect most American's wouldn't notice such a split. The American root would continue to point to the top level country code servers that are already legitimately in place, the American roots would keep pointing to the same contract holders for the other tlds (com,edu,org,net, etc). If the EU root tried to force a new EU com contract holder, most international businesses would just pay to be in both (the US market being to large to walk away from). It's pretty much an exercise in futility to go the splitting route.
So what exactly does the EU think it is going to accomplish here, other than the emotional satisfaction of railing against the US?
I don't see a problem with ICANN controlling the Internet, if they could remain a seperate entity not affiliated with a government. When governments get involved is when things get scary. How could we guarantee that a root server in a locked-down country (ie. China) isn't censored to some degree? I for one welcome our new UN/EU overlords.
Although the US has the biggest financial markets, the biggest international and currency markets are in London.
And that's still the case.
But apparently when it comes to the top-level organisation, this 'share and share alike' policy goes out the window, and it's all "We invented it! Get lost!"
There's a difference between sharing, joining, and controlling. The US has always graciously allowed anyone to join the networks. We've always controlled it - we're not trying to take something away. It's still the same policies that somehow weren't onerous before. And going from sharing to ceding control is a stretch.
Should Tim Berners-Lee take his web and ban the US from using it
He developed a protocol, not a network. The difference is one of intellectual vs. real property.
It all seems rather childish.
Yes, it does. The internet works fine. The UN has a way of making things not work. From the US's point of view, the way to ensure that the internet works best for Americans is to keep control of it. I don't know what's so hard to understand about that. If Europe wants the US to give up control of something that's vital to our national interests, we should get something in return. Europe wants something for free, and that's not the way the world works.
In short, what do we get out of it?
Sorry guys, when it comes to something this important, I just don't trust the UN. They have a very bad track record. Perhaps a more segmented system would be best. With each country getting its own domain in order to run as they wish. US would get .com, .net, and .us, the EU would get .eu, and each individual country would get their own. Perhaps some root servers could sync the data between them.
But I'm sorry anytime anyone mentions having the UN run things, it just turns me off. The orginization has not done anything well since it was created. Maybe a government independent orginization should run the root servers, but if the UN ran it, you would see politics begin to be injected into the root servers( for example every muslim country would get together and have porn sites blacklisted, china could get a coalition of dictators together to have every site that mentions freedom blacklists, it goes on and on).
my ancestors, the Mayans, want their royalties for the use of number 0. Thank you :)
That George Bush and his cronies are eagerly sucking on it's teats? The US does far more to prop up that corrupt regime than any other country in the world.
Thank you for making my argument for me. He was involved in the early design of WHAT? ARPANET!!!! A wholly US Government entity.
When was the last time you worked on a project for some Corporate entity where YOU ended up owning the work? I'll help you out with that one, never. The company owns it.
I think one of the main arguments for turning this over, is an example of how some countries were initially blind to who "owns" the internet in the first place. Brazil could still continue on collecting taxes online without being part of the larger internet community as a whole, that is obvious. But to me it shows some sort of incompetence to put your national revenue stream onto a platform that you don't own. At any time the ICANN and US could say "screw you, we're taking our ball and going home," then *poof* no more internet and there would be a massive scramble to get something in place to prevent a financial crisis in this instance.
Basically, american tax dollars funded and built this network, other countries were invited into it voluntarily, and are not being forced to stay into this network. It is of course in the interests of the people to stay on the network for educational and humanitarian reasons. I don't think that the US has shown any cause or reason (shutting people out) that the UN or EU has any standing to present this to anyone.
As an American, I would honestly like to know, "what has the UN done for the USA?" Then I would, in the same vain ask, "What has the USA done for teh UN?"
How does a post that speaks of the UN levying taxes get modded insightful?
I have to say I laughed at the idea of the UN wresting control of the internet from the US in the first place. The UN doesn't have much power, and most that it does have comes from the point of US guns and G7 financial levers. I just don't see the UN succeeding here. Now, the EU has more capability to at least attempt something like this.
If you want to worry about international "government" taking money from you personally, worry more about international treaty organizations, like trade organizations and such. Those organizations have some power, they are written in to the Constutition.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
UN partners want content control.
http://www.wgig.org/June-scriptmorning.html
Syria: "There's more and more spam every day. Who are the victims? Developing and least-developed countries, too. There is no serious intention to stop this spam by those who are the transporters of the spam, because they benefit...The only solution is for us to buy equipment from the countries which send this spam in order to deal with spam. However, this, we believe, is not acceptable."
Brazil, responding to ICANN's approval of .xxx domains: "For those that are still wondering what Triple-X means, let's be specific, Mr. Chairman. They are talking about pornography. These are things that go very deep in our values in many of our countries. In my country, Brazil, we are very worried about this kind of decision-making process where they simply decide upon creating such new top-level generic domain names."
What the hell is the problem with people extrapolating things like that? Have you gone mental? How many math classes have you failed to get where you are?
You're basing a prediction THIRTY YEARS FROM NOW based on current growth. That's like predicting a car's position an hour from now based solely on velocity and disregarding any notion of the idea of acceleration. Can you see now how mind-bogglingly stupid that is?
News flash - Japan was set to overtake the world during their boom years. If you look at Firefox's early growth, it was set to dominate the internet. MASSIVE GROWTH IS RARELY, IF EVER, SUSTAINED.
Are people just addicted to making sensationalist predictions?
Yes, let's see...
Without the WWW, I can still email, chat, use VoIP, FTP, play WoW, download music and pr0n etc. with P2P apps, and lots more not mentioned. It's not that bad of a loss come to think of it.
... see any attempts of overt centralized control as damage and route around it.
I won't get into the political discussion here, but I do sympathize with the idea that the "public information highways" should not be under the control of any government. I am also somewhat disturbed by the propensity of some Americans to automatically imagine that their "benevolent dictatorship" should be any more acceptable to foreigners than they seem to be accepting of what they see as the "malevolent dictatorship" of the UN... get along, people.
Fortunately, the Internet was designed as a distributed system and a network of networks from the beginning, so I think this discussion is a bit silly and the threats to "wrestle control" from the USA to just show ignorance from the part of our politicians.
As the net is a system of peers of networks that exchange traffic, it should be easy to create a parallel system, should some entity involved in the Internet to become too overbearing. Of course this means giving up of the large-scale benefits of communicating with anybody anywhere, but that would be the price you pay for your control. It is the benefits of being peers that makes the Internet possible in the first place, and to realize those benefits for yourself, you must learn to play together.
The big issue is of course that of the root servers... well... let's set up our own then. Shouldn't be too difficult to isolate America if that is what it gets to. I'm not saying it should be done, but it certainly could be done.
The technological aspects are not really interesting, as there is no centralized control to wrestle from anyone... but it does worry me that there is so little trust going on in the world these days. Everyone seems to be very wary of the other. We haven't progressed that far from the Cold War, and the tensions seem to have shifted where they didn't exist (to this degree) before.
That is why I tend to believe in the need for open, neutral controlling bodies for abstract resources such as DNS that benefit everyone if access is kept open at all costs. The US side of the argument seems to always take the form of "well we want to hold a shotgun to your head just in case we feel like pulling the trigger, but don't worry, we're Good, Godly People and won't do it..." which is hardly convincing... pooling things like this ensures mutual benefit without need for such fears.
I want to play Free Market with a drowning Libertarian.
Here in America, I was able to write an article criticizing Microsoft for their stance on Office, with regards to OpenDocument support. Would I be able to criticize the largest software company in China, for example? I doubt I would have the right (or the expectation to not suffer the repurcussions of angering one of the largest companies) merely for speaking out.
I can stand up and voice an opinion that goes against "the party line." (valid in more than just Communist China) If I were to do this in China, or any of the other listed countries, I would face prison, at the least, if not death.
I'm sorry, I'll stick with the US being in control. What's broke about it? What has the US done wrong with regards to controlling the internet? Up until now we've let ICANN run things how they want...the "hands-off" approach has worked well. We would be among the first to complain should the US administration start exerting control, as that would be censorship, and against our Constitution. The UN does not recogonize the right of free speech as a right member countries citizens have.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
What is all this talk about "handling the internet"? Handle what? The US isn't imposing taxes on other countries, or laws that hamper their use of the internet. When this topic comes up I wonder just what do they want?
Q.E.D.
Your reply sums up my point perfectly.
Not to mention that it's almost word-for-word the answer I'd been expecting.
Were it not for the signature, there'd be no 'almost'.
Ignore this signature. By order.
The US funded the research which created the protocols upon which the Internet is based. The Internet first existed in the US, but it wasn't invented, it evolved.
The Internet itself is simply a bunch of individual networks which have agreed to connect together using those protocols. For that reason, any attempt to "control" it is fatally flawed. There's nothing to control. One can presume to "take control" of the DNS "root servers," but there's nothing preventing someone else from creating their own set. Who wins depends strictly upon which set the individual networks point to, and no one has control over that decision except the individual network admins.
Let the Euros piss and moan, after which if they don't like the US influence over the Internet, they can instead join Fidonet http://www.fidonet.us/joinfido.htm :)
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Any nation that signs this resolution, cut them off on the router level to all traffic to US servers.
There isn't even the ability to get an excellent idea put in place because of the changes required.
Let the nations of the world own their own DNS. Who cares.
- real hackers don't have sigs -
If, indeed, there are only two sides to this issue, here are your choices:
1. Allow the US, a country "comprised of tech-ignorant people with vested corporate interests" (your words), to control the root domain servers
OR
2. Allow the, UN, an organization prone to infighting and which is essentially powerless, to control the root domain servers.
Considering that the internet has been running fine, I'm inclined to go with option #1. We don't have any evidence that the UN would do a better job. I suspect that they would do a worse job (what, exactly needs to be changed, here? Will the internet be "better" if they change things that are "running fine"?). Sure, it would be nice, in the spirit of international cooperation, if there was a truly international organization (read: not ICANN) running the show. But I don't think the UN is it. The US is, by far, the lesser of the two evils.
Set up your own root servers and get everyone to point at them instead of the ones in the US.
:)
Then we have two internets and chaos ensues
> "We" (Americans) didn't invent it.
Are you trying to tell me that Al Gore isn't American???
-- The Genesis project? What's that?
Of course not. I was simply disagreeing with a common fallacy -- that the Web is the Internet. That's not to say the Web isn't important. Duh, of course it is. But so are other applications, do I really have to list them?
This is admittedly tangential to the original topic of which group of venal self-serving politicians should control an international resource they don't even understand. But isn't Slashdot all about going off on tangents?
Close to insane?
What if they do overtake everyone else? Maybe it won't be 30 years, maybe it won't be at 11% growth. Even so, it might happen. What's our plan for that, do we even have one?
Welcome to Tortoise vs. Hare, round 2, and this time around the Hare is narcoleptic.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
hint: http://www.darpa.mil/
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Only a tiny fraction of U.S. peacekeeping forces are categorized as "U.N. forces". The major military powers command their own operations, with U.N. personnel working in parallel. Do you honestly believe that the list you cited reflects the nations that do the most to keep international order?
Face it, the U.N. doesn't do jack as far as "peacekeeping" is concerned, because it doesn't have any authority to do so. Anything at all controversial (meaning nearly all military operations) has to be done outside of the U.N. framework by the U.S. or some other nation. The "U.N. Forces" help out with strictly humanitarian support.
...we wouldn't be having this discussion. At least not in public, if we had any hopes of living or remaining "free*."
*As free as one living in China, or under Chinese rule, actually is free.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Dear, Old World
Our Legal department has recieved your letter. Please be advised we stopped using that particular form of government in 1861. We are now using a form of governance known as the Military Industrial Complex (M.I.C.). This form of government is run by monied individuals while preserving the illusion of choice for the common citizen.
Please be advised that we would be willing to dismiss our counter claims of infringement for your use of M.I.C. in the entity known as the European Union, if you would remove and relocate the United Nations from our shores.
"In the case of the domain name system, that is payed for by the owners of domain names. Year after year they pay for it through their registrars. That doesn't entitle us to something?"
Yes, so here is a clue. Set up your own root DNS servers, then register your names through them. It all comes down to money, and I'm willing to bet the current registrars get a heck of alot more money from U.S. companies and individuals than they do from European ones. Until that changes the existing registrars won't change.
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
"A number of countries represented in Geneva, including Brazil, China, Cuba, Iran and several African states, insisted the US give up control, but it refused."
Yeah, sure. Except for Brazil, let's put the 5 or 10 countries with the worst f***ing human rights records on the planet in charge. That'll be a big step forward.
This is going to end up with China running their own root servers, for themselves, Saudia Arabia, Zimbabwe, Iran, and other lovers of free speech, and ICANN will just move its offices to Geneva so it can satisfy the EU's demands by hiring a bloated staff of lazy, incompetent, and overpaid bureaucrats.
Well, it was that or Verisign. I hope we'll like paying $100/yr to register our domains.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
We are talking about taking over management of ICANN & IETF (and ARIN), and not the Internet, since it exists as a collective. The Internet is a loose collection of LANs and WANs owned by a great many corporations (and individuals) who agree to use common standards and services.
.goo TLD. It just wouldn't be useful to non-GoogleNet users, if other computers and networks around the world couldn't route to it, or resolve addresses.
The most important of these are the TCP/IP & DNS standards, and the and the root domain servers which provide the DNS service. There is nothing stopping Google from creating the great GoogleNet, and setting up root servers to host the
That is where ICANN comes in, and allows all these LANs and WANs to recognise common root servers (which host the TLDs), IETF which sets the standards for interoperability with RFC for TCP/IP, DNS & HTTP, and ARIN which actually manages address spaces. The routing or interconnection are not handled by ICANN, the IETF or even ARIN, but by the ISPs.
And lets not forget that X.25 and telephony networks (POTS, ISDN, GSM & CDMA standards) exist globally. What is to stop someone like Google or heaven forbid M$ from setting up a private global network (GoogleNet or MSN++), and start signing up ISPs? In 5-10 years they could have 10-50 million users, and how is that different than the "Internet" was in the 90's?
I think the Internet really needs to self-govern, and not in an anarchic or syndicaloanarchic fashion. The Net could do with a governing body, from a social standpoint. The reason I say this is that the Net is no longer a part of any particular culture or government; it's truly global. Therefore, we need a body with jurisdiction that specifically includes the net, not a bunch of other entities trying to establish control by grabbing its balls/infrastructure.
So it can't be a consortium of other governments because their jurisdiction and interests aren't global. It also can't be a corporation, and I think you guys can agree with me for hours on the reasons behind that.
So the Internet needs to establish itself as a political entity. Seriously, how kick ass would that be? Who's with me?
I never knew that. Thanks for the insight! =)
. Wouldn't it make more sense for GMT to be based on New York (the center of the World Financial System and headquarters of the United Nations)?
:-)
Woulnd't that then be GVMT ? (Greenwich Village Mean Time)
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
You're a moron. It's your prerogative to be flabbergastingly ignorant, but don't go correcting people who're right.
There is an entire day between being on one side of the line and the other. This is why we call it the Date Line. If you're on the GMT/UTC+12 side of the line, you are exactly one day ahead of the people on GMT/UTC-12 side of the line.
As of this post, the time was about 5:30 AM on Friday in Wellington and 8:30 AM on Thursday in Anchorage, Alaska.
Dear Old Europe,
No problem, Republic is being dismantled as we speak.
Signed,
George Bush.
I encourage you to try to convince us, the rest of the world, that your control over our -read again, ***OUR*** "speech rights" is better than the proposed UN-based body. The point is not about whether north-americans like it or not, it doesn't matter at this point. It WILL be that way. Period.
he simple fact of the matter is that the United States could destroy most of the economies in the World simply by telling our citizens not to buy or sell things from/to them
Now, that's a rather (delusional) American thing to say. You have no idea just how fragile and dependent on other countries the US is. Foreign countries are basically funding the US government. Where do you think the US gets the money for its little projects (like the Iraq war, or the Katrina recovery)? It's not from the US taxpayers, not yet anyway. It's by borrowing, and borrowing big. Who are the lenders do you think? And what would happen if they stopped lending?
Oh, and then there is the foreign oil issue. If The World gets pissed at the US, and stops selling it to the US, well, your economy goes down the tube. The US is getting a little taste of that, and it's purely due to domestic disruptions.
Let's not forget all the huge US multinational companies that do business worldwide. There are just too many to list. The US economy would be in a serious pickle if they were all boycotted.
The truth of the matter is that a boycott of the EU by the US would hurt the US at least as much as it would hurt the EU. Which is really the point of the having the EU to begin with - it was created for the very purpose of having a bigger bargaining chip for dealing with big economic bullies (it is not yet able to deal with big military bullies though).
The UN does a lot of good? I doubt anybody living in Sudan would agree with you. I seriously dislike Dubya but he and his cronies are dead right about the UN
Hardly a perfect organization (which one is? The US government? HA!) but at this time it is the only organization considered neutral enough on this matter because it is funded internationally, it can claim to represent the world. The US represents itself.
I think the best way for everything to work would be to have the root name servers be controlled internationally, but have every page prefixed by the country in which it resides. For instance, to the rest of the worlds, all pages would be http:us//www.google.com or something like that (I'm not sure of the appropriate way to fit that into the current naming system.). This would be a lot like our modern country code stuff.
Not only did we invent and build it -- we paid for it. That doesn't entitle us to something?
Let's see, the Internet infrastructure that is sitting on U.S soil is clearly going to remain the property of its existing owners, no-one is going to steal the boxes. As for the e DNS system, this was arguably largely the vision of John Postel at the University of Southern California ISI (not overlooking the work of Zaw-Sing Su of SRI) In terms of "we paid for it" well, yes the U.S tax payer did fund Postel's seminal work; but at the end of the day, how much did he get paid for that work, not much and the work was clearly meant to be open and free for all.
It is not as if a physical asset or intellectual property is being stolen then. So what is at threat? The ability for the U.S to have single handed control over an international communication system - including the parts that it did not build
The British got to define the Prime Meridian based on their global empire. Subsequently this has defined GMT.
Indeed but there is a difference here - does the fact that the prime meridian runs though east London actually allow the British Government to exercise meaningful control over the other nations' clocks and ability to measure time? No. Does the fact that the standard kilogram sat in a French vault for a long time give the French government veto over other countries ability to weigh things, no.
One is 'control' over an arbitrary, mutually agreed international standard. The other is control over an an important operational system in use by all countries, and built by all countries.
--------
h e_United_States
R J8OVF&b=122948
"Agreed. Now find me a "time of need" in this situation. All I see is a bunch of member countries who want control of the toys, and have no clear direction on why or how they need them."
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Unfortunately they have extremely clear national security reasons to take it out of US hands since it seems the US has moved in the direction of unilateralism. cough cough Iraq cough.
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"we're censured as being an "empire builders" or "warmongerers". Isn't it nice that so many countries can tell us what to do while they sit on their high horses?""
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"empire builders" or "warmongerers". The US? Never. Cough Neocon philosophy, cough cough Ummm. Do Americans actually read the details of what GB conservatives support? I would suggest you turn off Rupert Murdock's mindnumbing propaganda machine and start here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism_in_t
(Here's Rupert's real opinions)
http://www.weeklystandard.com/default.asp
http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJ
--------
"Again, the US doesn't "control" the internet. ICANN does. Check the first letter there: International"
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If the Internet was completely internationalized this thread would be a non-issue. Apparently you found something important enough to bring out your flag and undermine the UN. True the UN ain't perfect (even Democratic values aren't) but here is a history lesson for you before you continue to shoot your own interests in the foot.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_First
--------
"Because you may be surprised at what you find in the history of the internet's invention."
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True Darpa got the ball rolling but it was a tiny propriatary network until the World Wide Web fixed things up. Berners Lee I seem to recall.
Anyhow I'm not really trying to put down the US here (you guys do lots of great stuff too). More like ignorant idiotic nationalistic flag waving (too much of that going on in the world already).
The rest of us (You know the other 5 billion or so that inhabit the rest of the world) will accept you warmly if you stop being a dick and put down your flag, fighting words and most importantly your tanks. Otherwise unfortunately balance of power theory suggests the world will engage in rearming itself to protect itself against aggressive expansionist interests (regardless the nation).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_power
Do you realy want to create another cold war--this time with America against the rest of the world? My suggestion is that continuing to gamble on unilateralism in a world of nukes is very risky. It seems more advisably and more profitable to join the rest of the human race as partners.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon
So make no mistake, without US backing, the UN would be nothing.
So, does that mean we should obey the US just because they got more money than us?
Fine! Let Bill Gates control the internet because he's got more money than everybody else. After all, Bill Gates has donated lots of money to charity! All welcome our Microsoft Overlord!
I hope this sarcasm exposes the logical flaw in your argument. Just because the US gives more money to the UN, doesn't give them the rights to CONTROL what the UN do. Is there a law in the UN that say that whoever gives more money, can buy the wills of the other countries?
Chapter and page, please?
Second, know that democracy in the US is a fallacy.
[begin premise]
A bipartisan system which replaces popular votes with electoral votes controls the way in which future governors and presidents will be elected. If I were a US citizen, I'd know that I might have the right to vote for an independent candidate, but I'd know also, that my vote will be worth NOTHING unless i can convince 51% of my state to vote for that candidate. Why can't I choose someone who's _NOT_ democrat nor republican? The US govt. has stolen the control from the people they should serve.
[end premise]
Now, how does that matter to us the world? Simple! If the US citizens aren't able to effectively choose who will rule them, how dare some americans, tell the United Nations who will rule a GLOBAL resource such as the internet? Huh?
Third, if the UN is corrupted, that's because of the people currently in charge, _NOT_ because of the UN per-se. Otherwise, why not declare the US law as invalid, just because judges and presidents are corrupted?
Fourth and Finally,the UN is composed of 191 countries, don't you think those countries have the RIGHT to decide who will rule over a network they will use?
I rest my case.
Uh, what about Time-Warner and AOL ISPs filtering the DNS of a couple of real news websites?
o ld=-1&commentsort=1&tid=95&mode=thread&pid=1372760 2#13727627
www.infowars.com or www.prisonplanet.com
Slashdotters confirmed it http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=164421&thresh
Found that out using tracert. The Internet didn't route around the blockage. (Fancy that.) Those ISPs prevented any re-routing. That's a fatal flaw in your argument. The only remedy is to avoid those ISPs, but as ISPs become more and more centralized, this will no longer be possible.
infowars.net wasn't blocked, though, because the powers that be overlooked it.
Go to infowars.net to get free movies and info-links about real issues as reported in major news media. Links to articles listed with AP, Reuters, and The London Guardian will bring up mainstream news articles that will tell you why we need to watch what ALL governments (foreign and domestic) are doing.
This is only true if you want .com, .org or .net. If you want a .uk domain, you pay the United Kingdom. If you want a .ch domain, you pay Switzerland. And if you want .cx, you pay the Christmas Islands.
I have no problem with an international body controlling the root servers. I just can't think of one that I would be willing to hand them over to. I can think of the last body I would hand it over to though: the UN.
One attribute I notice of people that come from the US or the EU, is that they think the UN is a noble institution. It's easy to think the UN is noble if you aren't paying attention, or just listen to the media, or if you don't do business with them.
The reality is that the UN is the largest, most corrupt institution in the world. It is run by the scions of dictators and fascists, who get their positions because of the power and the money they can steal. The UN is implicated in multiple genocides, and in embezzlement of at least 10s and maybe 100s of billions of US dollars in the last decade alone.
There are one or two parts of the UN that may be worth saving, like the World Health Organisation. UNICEF too, maybe, if we can shut down the UN child prositution rings running in Africa.
Think Enron, with the combined corruption of every third world country you know, and vested interests that have everything to do with prolonging war, dictatorship, and famine. Add hundreds of billions of dollars of money that isn't audited, and a media that gives you a free pass. That is the UN.
If the UN disappeared tomorrow, the world would be a better place.
The worlds DNS servers are WAY better off being controlled by the USA. Americans who think otherwise should travel a little more widely.
-- Nurf, who is not a US citizen.
---
"then you'll have to pay for your own messes when you invade sovereign nations under false pretences."
The US has not done this sort of thing for decades. If you are referring to Iraq, you are repeating the same old lie. Either you are ignorant of the facts, or you are mean-spirited.
1) Sovereignty. A pointless word in the argument. Iraq gave up its sovereignty in these affairs when it attacked Kuwait.
2) "False Pretenses". The allies told the truth about Iraq. Up until the very day of the invasion, the Iraqi government was still resisting inspections, and new "undiscovered" WMD violations were being discovered.
The allies told the truth about Iraq's aggression and violations, and acted on it.
Maybe we get two nets, USANet, which is the current Internet, and UNNet, which is a new one run by the UN. Maybe UNNet is so much better run that lots of ISPs start being parts of it instead of USANet. If that happens, they two will figure out ways to talk to each other. There will be a way developed to deal with IP and name space conflicts. Maybe is you are on UNNet and you want to access a USANet domain you do it in the form of thedomain.com.usa whereas thedomain.com would access the UNNet version.
Indeed there are microcosims of this already. Some companies have networks that are totally firewalled off from the Internet. There are a few, maybe even just one, addresses used for NAT. The internal network structure and numbering is entirelly irrelivant to the outside world, it's not directly accessable. What's more, many of them use a Windows Active Directory that uses bogus DNS names for their systems. MS actually suggests this as a way to set it up. You then have names you can use, but that are only local in scope. Only machines that use your DNS servers will resolve them.
Doing all that, you literally have a seperate network. You cannot directly connect it to the Internet, your numbers are non-routable, and nobody is going to listen to your DNS. Instead, you have a router somewhere that is trained to handle all the conversions. It maps whatever public IPs you ahve to your private space as you instruct, knows who to talk to for your public DNS information if you do that, and so on.
This could be made to work on a larger scale. I'm not saying it's efficient, but it's not a real problem either. You could have two (or more) networks with clashing IP spaces, DNS spaces and so on. You'd then just have to have the connections between them able to translate, and get data to where it needs to go.
However personally, I'd like to stay on the Internet as it is now. I think it works pretty well, and I'm not up for one with UN regulation.
I see the EU telling the US to play ball, for the good of everyone.
Wrestling control from the USand having the US play fair are two very different concepts.
Which brings up a question; who really controls the TLDs? I was under the understanding that it was an American based company and not an actual US Government entity. If this is the case I don't see what the Bush administration has to do with any of this. Granted, Bush & co. may have an opinion on the issue but if they really don't have final say I don't see it as a governmental problem.
I offer my opinon to people pretty frequently but does that make me liable in the case they actually follow it?
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Nowhere! We never said it did!
China has already figured this problem out.
The "EU" can set up it's own DNS servers. The EU servers and ISPs can decide by choice or by EU law to use American or EU DNS servers. Problem solved! Brazil can set their own DNS stystem up and police their citizens all they want. Brazil doesn't want an XXX domain? Well then they can simply not have it.
How about you just go do whatever the F you have to do and stop all the America bashing talk? Or does that smack of "effort"?!?!?
Think this is a scheme to re-distribute prime domain names? That's the first thing that came to my mind.
That's why, three days after Hitler took over the #2 slot in a democratic German government (the chancellorship) and only a minority of the cabinet, he had control of all German broadcasting. German broadcasting was controlled (not merely mildly regulated like our FCC) by the Prussian Interior Minister, who was Goring, a Nazi. Imagine all the DNS servers in similar French or German hands. Overnight all dissident web sites could disappear, email would get lost etc. That's the European way of keeping order and insuring political stability. That's why they want to end the free-wheeling days of the U.S. managed Internet.
Remember too that the country pushing the hardest for this is China, whose zeal to regulate the Internet is even more aggressive and whose history of repressing dissent is even more deeply ingrained than that in Europe. Continential Europe, I hope I don't need to remind you, has never shown much political sense. The U.S. is the world's oldest and most stable democracy, in part, because we have the good sense to give dissent a free reign. Virtually all of Europe has, within living memory, been under one, two, or even three or more brutal dictatorships. Europe is still learning how to create stable democracies and, given the behavior of the EU bureaucracy, it isn't learning very well. It still thinks the few should decide what the many can say and do. And it doesn't even repress very intelligently.
Germany today bans the sale of all but scholarly editions of Hitler's Mein Kampf, but does nothing about the sale Karl Marx's Das Kapital. Why? Communism killed more people and Marx's writings clearly have more appeal. Hitler's writing style is so dreadful, even top Nazis didn't read Mein Kampf. Do we really want an Internet run by that sort of stupidity? We will if the Germans and the regulation-crazed EU has a say. And if China has a say, matters will get even worse.
The only way to keep the Internet free of that sort of control is to leave it the hands of the only country that has a long history of placing the minimum possible restrictions on dissent. The EU is not to be trusted. China is not to be trusted. The UN, dominated by repressive dictatorships and run by incompetents, certainly isn't to be trusted.
--Mike Perry, editor, Dachau Liberated
P.S. Note too how Microsoft, Google, and Cisco are aiding and abetting Chinese censorship merely for a few dollars more profit. Put the Internet in the hands of regulators heavily influenced by China, and the big players in the U.S. hardware and software industry will aid and abet that censorship and regulation even more.
Of the 13 nominal dns root servers, 5 are distributed using anycast, and a further one is run by WIDE in Tokyo. For this reason most of the physical root servers (as opposed to nominal servers) are already outside the US.
Of the anycast servers, one is run by RIPE from London, another by AUTONOMICA from Sweden.
To all those people saying "build your own" - a lot of the infrastructure is already in place - it wouldn't take much to bring it up to speed.
Find Japanese addresses in English on Google Maps Japan: http://diddlefinger.com/
You don't reward criminal idiots with giving them more power and money and influence. The current regime is rife with old meddlers who actually helped and encouraged saddam into power. this is DATA, not "opinion".
These are not the people to espouse 'democracy' as they are only interested in global business, profits at any cost, and it doesn't matter who gets screwed. these guys are in it for power and profits, because they are insane.the word is megalomania. When Saddam was useful to them, he got TONS of support-even when he was the same murderous slimeball dictator. Then later on they changed their minds (after he was going to switch from dollars to euros for oil). Then we invaded. do you GET the timeline now?
Aw heck, it's been posted here before, they planned this whole scheme out years in advance, go recheck all the PNAC docs and references.
These guys are goons, and incompetent to boot, a bad combination.
I'm an old traditional nationalist and conservative. These morons in charge now are *neither*. They are lying scum. Scum. Pigs. Oinkers. They are globalist grunting pigs in way over their intellectual heads, and have screwed up constantly, in regards to iraq and iran for years and years. constantly blundered. They whacked the real leader of iran and stuck the shah in, who created support for the fundy mullahs because he was a tortur8ng goon.. THIS WAS A BIG FAT BLUNDER. They did similar in iraq with saddam. ANOTHER BIG FAT BLUNDER. They have CREATED more terrorists.
They are the fundy mullahs wetdream recruitment boys.. They don't even listen to their own military advisors. That is insane, crazy, retarded, and proves their megalomania.
Liars, thieves, scoundrels, and they and their anglo globalist banker allies in years past have been meddling over there and propping up dictators and whatnot for generations now, let alone years. the entire 20th century all they did was screw over them folks over there, OF COURSE THEY FINALLY GOT ANNOYED. Wouldn't YOU? Read some dang history books.
They keep making the situation worse, not better,so it's just time to just stop with that noise. It was time a few years ago in fact, it never would have gotten this bad. We don't need to "stay the course" with incompetent buffoons. That is just a bad idea.
al queda = joint US/UK Saudi fatcat invention and creation, do you GET IT?
saddam-CIA asset in early years, used in a coup, then gone rogue, ARE YOU UNDERSTANDING YET?
This is just RAW DATA, go look it up
We have the freaking mob running the government, for a long time now, they are NOT GOOD GUYS. They are FASCISTS. WAKE UP. YES, INDEED, ONE FASCIST MAY INVADE ANOTHER, that doesn't make the new fascist goons any better, that just makes them the new pigs on the ground, can you get it? They aren't "instilling democracy" into iraq, they turned it into a big base for permanent middle east military presence on the ground and as a huge cash cow for a few selected industries, EGADS this is so easy to see. Iraq is STILL A POLICE STATE. Not ONE thing has changed, just as many people being killed as before. WAKE THE FREAK UP. AGAIN, GO BACK READ THE PNAC DOCs. They spell it out in plain English what they were going to do and how they were going to do it, and THEY DID IT.
WHY you need something more than an outright confession, which they PROVIDE in the PNAC docs, is beyond me, some political party DROOLING fanatical belief or something.
You have been CONNED, just admit reality and get on with thinking more. MOST of the US got conned, it shouldn't be embarassing unless you continue to believe the lies despite overwhelming evidence of "what is" as opposed to "what they say".
Well i never trusted the rest of the world much either.
The part about eliminating the rest of the world was the sarcasm part i believe, not that th rest of the world matters any, just that its destruction was a joke.
I could be wrong too, i didnt make the post and dont know the guy.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
As an american who dislikes and wishes we would get out of the UN, I say let them(UN/EU) take control the root servers. If things go OK, then there is no problem. If things start screwing up, don't come whining to us. As long as the US part of the internet works, thats OK with me.
That's easy to solve.
"The web isn't DNS." DNS isn't a "DNS root server". DNS root servers can use whatever naming they want. No one is telling anyone they can't use the DNS protocol (which was invented in the US.) No one is telling anyone they can't USE an alternate root server. No one is telling anyone they cannot RUN an alternate root server. We simply are not ceding control of our root servers to another country because they are ours. I love how others want something we have, based on something we invented, because it's useful. And yet it's construed as about America's desire for power.
As a personal aside, I liked another poster's comment: that a distributed naming system of some kind that doesn't require a central authority would be much preferred. I don't particularly care about US "hegemony", but they are our damn root servers. It is very, very simple. No one has the right to tell us how to run our own root servers. If we can be convinced to share control of them, fine. If not, get your own. Which is what is being talked about.
... and remove the references to the toplevel EU countires domains from it's root servers. Let them figure it out. Problem solved.
That kind of stuff is standard, however it doesn't stop the internet from fragmenting, which is why there is a root, which still has some considerable sway in how things are setup. So to have a non fragmenting root at this moment of time there needs to be a root DNS and this jsut so happens to be in the US. Obviously with communal things like this, the other parts of the community started objecting.
Oh dear. Who created the letters of the alphabet that those socket libraries, RFC systems, programming languages. The United States?
It's not so black-and-white.
Seems like a lot of time/energy is being wasted 'discussing' something that may or may not happen, into which we have no input and over which we have little control.
Governments (world, continental, national, etc...) do not want input from the masses other than in the form of money.
You folks must have a lot of excess time on your hands.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
Call me when you graduate highschool and better your reasoning capabilities.
Or if you have graduated, get your ass into a recruitment center.
Blar.
...then I will just point my resolv.conf at some public nameservers in USA.
I do not trust UN or EU to run the DNS properly. They are both corrupt root and branch, and the UN is deliberately built to treat dictators and free countries as equals.
Why would they want control of the internet? When right now, the only thing that's being done with that control is "laissez faire"?
Obvious answer: they want to stop the laissez faire. Consider a UN internet, where China would demand the de-listing of Tibetan independence and Falun Gong sites, Germany would demand takedown of neonazi sites, The arab nations would demand takedown of Israeli sites... you get the picture.
These people want to wreck the freedom of the internet. For all this is couched in the langauge of "balance", it's a direct attempt to stuff the information genie back in its bottle.
If you care for your freedom, don't let them get away with it.
Oh, yeah, pointing out that America is going to have to address the fact that it isn't going to be the dominant world power forever is soo anti-American. Face it, throughout history no dominant power has remained dominant for very long. Obviously linear extrapolation is a shitty economic forecasting technique, which is partly why I paid so little attention to providing any kind of accurate figures. But there are other reasons than current economic growth rates to suppose that China (and, for that matter, India) will be key world economic powers by the middle of the century. I'm not sure that your "the people will want freedom" argument holds either; there have been plenty of successful powers in history where people haven't had much freedom yet haven't revolted in a catastrophic way, and even if they do revolt and kick out the current administration, who's to say that it would harm the country economically? I don't see that it's beyond the realms of possibility that a quick bloodless coup followed by an economically prudent government could actually accelerate economic growth. Also, I don't see what your argument about China's regrettable gender imbalance has to do with the economy. It's certainly a problem, but I don't see that it is primarily an economic one.
Note that were China or India to become an economic superpower in the timeframe I mentioned, it would almost certainly be a very different one to the current USA; most of its power would come through size, with the per capita GNP being lower than in current western countries. But the probable effects of such a country being dominant are either huge trade wars and Western isolationism or a considerable lowering of per capita GNP in western countries as we struggle to compete in a free(ish) market.
I can't really be bothered to argue the point further, particularly with someone who takes such a mild comment as damning evidence of my total anti-USianism (?!?? heck, I'm probably a damn pinko (NOT!)), but I suspect that the world of 2100 will look surprisingly different to that of 1900 or 2000.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
Critical part of its infrastructure huh? You mean like, oh I dunno, OIL?!
useless sig advice - Read Nabokov.
I for one welcome our new european overlords. As a north-american/europeon hybrid I can assist in translating communications from ameri-english to the queen's english and vice-versa.
>>Btw., I'd really like to hear some examples of the US carrying out UN resolutions and then getting blamed for it. Thanks in advance.
I'll take "War in Iraq" for 100, Alex.
Probably not, considering Graham Bell was born in Scotland before moving to Canada (where he invented the telephone).
We build the wonder in the US, are kind enough to let people interface with it, and they still decide to demand control over it. Yeah, whatever. You don't have to use it if you don't want to..hell..cut yourself off if you feel that we're that big of an internet threat to your country.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
The U.S. controls the internet.
Nobody controls the internet. If the U.S. were to sever all data connections with the rest of the world, all non-U.S. sites would still be accessible from outside the U.S. because packets would just route around the severed connections.
The U.S. controls DNS.
NOBODY forcibly controls the Domain Name System. Anybody is free to set up their own DNS hierarchy and work off of that. To establish universal access and provide deconfliction, DNS follows a standard CONVENTION, in which we have a number of top level domains which are adminstered by ICANN.
ICANN is a private-sector non-profit organization based in the U.S. The U.S. federal government has no more control over it than it does the Red Cross.
These are the root servers and their location (from root-servers.org):
A VeriSign Naming and Directory Services Dulles VA
B Information Sciences Institute Marina Del Rey CA
C Cogent Communications Herndon VA; Los Angeles; New York City; Chicago
D University of Maryland College Park MD
E NASA Ames Research Center Mountain View CA
F Internet Systems Consortium, Inc. Ottawa; Palo Alto; San Jose CA;New York City; San Francisco;Madrid; Hong Kong; Los Angeles;Rome; Auckland; Sao Paulo;Beijing; Seoul; Moscow; Taipei;Dubai; Paris; Singapore; Brisbane;Toronto; Monterrey; Lisbon;Johannesburg; Tel Aviv; Jakarta;Munich; Osaka; Prague;Amsterdam;Barcelona; Nairobi;Chennai; London
G U.S. DOD Network Information Center Vienna VA
H U.S. Army Research Lab Aberdeen MD
I Autonomica/NORDUnet Stockholm; Helsinki; Milan;London; Geneva; Amsterdam;Oslo; Bangkok; Hong Kong;Brussels; Frankfurt;Ankara; Bucharest;Chicago; Washington DC;Tokyo; Kuala Lumpur;Palo Alto; Jakarta;Wellington; Johannesburg;Perth; San Francisco;New York; Singapore;Miami; Ashburn (US);Mumbai
J VeriSign Naming and Directory Services Dulles VA (4 locations); Mountain View CA;Seattle WA; Atlanta GA; Los Angeles CA;Miami FL; Sunnyvale CA;Amsterdam; Stockholm; London;Tokyo; Seoul; Singapore
K Reseaux IP Europeens -Network Coordination Centre London (UK); Amsterdam (NL);Frankfurt (DE); Athens (GR);Doha (QA); Milan (IT);Reykjavik (IS); Helsinki (FI);Geneva (CH); Poznan (PL); Budapest (HU); Abu Dhabi (AE); Tokyo (JP); Brisbane (AU); Miami (US)
L Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers Los Angeles
M WIDE Project Tokyo; Seoul (KR); Paris (FR)
Note that only one root server is actually operated by ICANN. Most of the servers are based around Washington D.C. and San Francisco, but they are also spread around the world and primarily operated by non-government entities.
THE SYSTEM IS ALREADY ABOUT AS APOLITICAL AS ONE COULD HOPE IT TO BE!
If the internet fragments with multiple top-level domains, it won't be the end of the world. We could see domain names with location specific context: for instance, amazon.com may be an internet retailer in the U.S., while amazon.com in Brazil could be a site about the rainforests. But if politics stays out of it, the top level domains would essentially be mirrors of each other.
The U.S. can't be trusted because it may act unilaterally.
The U.S. does not control the internet, period. Bush cannot decide one day to change the DNS. There is always the possibility that Congress could pass a law nationalizing ICANN, but then again there's a chance the UN could pass a resolution that, say, punishes Israel by taking away their ccTLD.
Speaking as an American, I can understand why the rest of the world would be wary of U.S. government control. But we're not talking about moving control from one political body to another. We're talking about moving it from a non-government apolitical body into a bloated bureaucracy. Very rarely does that move ever improve things.
http://www.state.gov/p/io/fs/2004/36416.htm= 328791
http://www.unausa.org/site/pp.asp?c=fvKRI8MPJpF&b
http://www.mikenew.com/un-debt.html
It seems the US financial contributions to the UN are (and have been) nontrivial over the past 50 years, and it also seems that the question of "UN debt" is a contested issue.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
The key word here is "if", meaning that the poster was describing a hypothetical situation.
No thanks, we'll keep our government, as it in no way requires you to give up any resources for us to have. We'll also keep our DNS. You are more than welcome to have your own, however. If you want, you can set it up as a redundant backup, one that takes the ICANN list and caches it locally. That way, should ICANN go nuts and do something you don't want, your roots can ignore the change. You can even set it up to directly compete with ICANN. ICANN has no legal status, they are just the people that all the roots listen to, and the roots are who most DNS servers listen to.
Please feel free to setup your own roots and try to encourage people to use them instead. Heck, you can try and get RIPE to mandidate that K use your system instead if you want. There is absolutly nothing we can or will do to stop you. However, don't bitch and say that we need to give you control of infastructure fully paid for by US companies and tax dollars, located in the US, and developed by the US.
Sincerely,
The USA
This is what annoys me about this anti-US Euro centric attutude that seems to get displayed here by some posters. As though the US owes the world something in regards to DNS. Hey, you chose to use our system. Nobody made you, nobody continues to make you. There are already other roots out there (like OpenNIC) you can use those, or you can make your own. Yes you as an individual can make your own root(s). Nobody, not the US not the UN, not anyone is compeilling you to use the US system. Everyone who hopppen on the net decided to because, all said and done, it works very well.
No problem with that, the US is happy to provide it, and happy to pay almost all of the costs relating ot it (of the roots, only K and M are not run by a US entity) but that means it's ours to do what we want with. You have no authority, legal or moral, to tell us that we should give up the system we developed, paid for, and maintain. You are free to setup your own, either cooperating or competing, but don't demand that we give ours over to you.
"We invented the type of government where the people are represented by representatives in a legislative body, separate from an executive branch, commonly known as the Republic. Your use of the aforementioned type of government infringes on our Intellectual Property rights. Please cease to use the aforementioned type of government within 30 days."
We stopped using this form of government years ago, I don't know what you're talking about.
Alas, Babylon.
The United States invented the internet. If it wasn't for our funding, our know how, and our research, it simply would not exist. It is ours. WE MADE IT. The only reason other countries are connected to it is because they wanted to be. We didn't force anyone to connect to our network. They saw the benefits, and plugged in. As a previous poster said - Don't come to a party in our backyard and then start telling us how to do the landscaping. It would have been very easy for the other countries to create their own network. They could have created WWW-US (That's WWW minus US) and let everyone connect but us. That would be fine. Even now they could disconnect from the US and create their own network. But it's OUR PARTY. They're lucky we even gave them all their TLD's like co.uk and co.jp and all that junk. Ungrateful pricks. So yea, let's turn over control of the internet to the UN. The body of politicians and countries who has for so long done nothing about anything. Then they can pass all sorts of unenforcable sanctions and laws and rules regarding the internet that nobody will ever follow except the US (yea, we're the only ones who - for the most part - obey treaties and international laws). Screw the other countries. I hereby submit that we move the united states, brick by brick, to the moon. Furthermore, I submit that we disconnect immediately from the internet and see how the world likes WWW-US before they make any rash decisions. Furthermore, I submit that we pull ALL funding from any country participating in anti us controlled internet. So what if other countries depend heavily on the internet? That's their own fault. They made the decision to build their countries networks on a US controlled system. They could have just as easily built their own intranet. Idiots.
or else!
Old allies in world politics, representatives from OPEC and US sat just feet away from each other, but all looked straight ahead as Hendon explained the US had decided to end OPEC's unilateral control of the world's energy supply and put in place a new body that would now run the lifeblood of the petroleum economy. The issue of who should control oil had proved an extremely divisive issue, and for 11 days the world's governments traded blows. For the vast majority of people who use oil, the only real concern is getting it. But with energy now essential to countries' basic infrastructure - Brazil relies on it for 90% of its fuel supply - the question of who has control has become critical.
Oil is finite, yes. However, so are IP addresses and Domain names.
You CAN create more addresses (IPv6), and you can reclaim domains, but you CAN also synthesize fuels from (Free-as-in-beer) sunlight.
One could re-write the above paragraph for a number of other markets, as well. Currency. Gold. Diamonds. Steel. Pharmaceuticals. Intellectual property in general.
Why did I write this? To demonstrate that the U.S. should retain control of the internet?
No.
To demonstrate that the U.S. should 'liberate' every OPEC nation?
No.
I write it so that people will get off their patriotic, nationalistic thrones, and consider both historical context and the needs of the future.
Quite literally, the U.S. did develop the internet. At the same time, it probably is time for a distributed system of control.
For one, I welcome the 'fractionalization' of the domain naming scheme. I don't care if various organizations maintain different DNS records for various IP address-> markets and competition may end up developing better systems, and I haven't been perfectly happy with ICANN, or Verizon, etc. . .
On the other hand, fractionalization of the IP address space is a huge problem. If we need an international organization, it should exist within the ITU, and it should, quite simply, allocate IP address to providers based upon geographical location.
Will this sane conculsion ever happen? Most likely not.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Growth rate of US economy: not much. A few percent possibly.
Growth rate of China's economy: huge. About 11% IIRC.
Which means China is on course to become the largest economy in the world in about 30 years' time. (Figures all OTOH, but there or thereabouts.)
My car can go from 0-60mph in 5.3 seconds. That's an acceleration of 4.9m/s/s. Therefore, my car can travel from New York to Los Angeles in about 23 minutes.
I mean, come on, that's just moronic.
>>Well, have fun then, cause a global network is sure going to be useful when it's not global.
How true. The internet just won't be the same without money scams from Africa, enormous quantities of porm spam from Europe, and beheading videos from the middle east.
Gee, why didn't we think of this sooner?
If you have a reliable source of information to counter it, please provide a link or cite a formal source.
Otherwise, I have to conclude that you're simply blowing smoke.
This link (provided elsewhere in this discussion) also seems to indicate that the US is in fact directly providing funds, not just materials as you indicate above. A quote from this site:
"Total UN and MDB-Related Contributions Would Reach Almost $4 Billion
In the context of the budget request and subject to congressional approval, total US contributions to the organizations in the United Nations system and peacekeeping could total over $2.2 billion in FY2005. The principal components include: UN regular budget, $362.2 million; specialized agencies, $420 million; war crimes tribunals, $66 million; Capital Master Plan loan guarantee, $6 million; peacekeeping, $650 million; voluntary programs, approximately $700 million to organizations such as UNICEF, UNDP, UNHCR, and UNRWA, among others. With the inclusion of US commitments to the multilateral development banks, the total would increase to about $3.7 billion in FY2005."
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Personally, I don't think that a body that can be controlled by China is an organization I want to rely on to run the net. If cute, cuddly, don't-be-evil Google can't withstand China, who the hell thinks the U.N. can?
The British got to define the Prime Meridian based on their global empire. Subsequently this has defined GMT. Wouldn't it make more sense for GMT to be based on New York (the center of the World Financial System and headquarters of the United Nations)?
You want Greenwich Mean Time to be based in New York? It always seemed to make more sense to be based in Greenwich.
Who ordered that?
The problem for the instigators if this happens is probably the same problem that the Gallileo project currently has: Nobody wants to pay for it. So the european countries involved with the project are in the process of passing laws in their respective countries to force their citizens to use this duplicate service and to fund it with tax levies on the products. Remember in Europe, TV and Radio taxes are common, and I suspect a Internet access tax will be shortly coming to bear (to allegedly support the infrastructure)...
Here's a quick link to a short description about television taxes, maybe we should start one up for the up and coming internet access tax/license...
This is how governments really flex their muscle, they are pissed that they can't control something enough to tax their citizenry, so they interpose themselves into the loop and charge their populace for the privledge.
I for one welcome the new tax regime that will sweep the rest of the world and help hold back our economic competitors... ;^)
... is a replacement for DNS that distributes the root in a peer-to-peer way. Then the countries can all bugger off, and the internet will contain whatever sites people feel inclined to add.
When governments get involved (regardless of what government or governmental body it is) things get screwed up!
It really doesn't matter what the EU/UN/US has or hasn't done or what behind the scene issues have forced the politics behind this. Government(s) interfering with ICANN = Bad News for everyone!
I honestly can't see how anyone could dispute this.
I don't get what the big deal is. It would seem only prudent that the UN, the worlds formost international body, should perform whatever administration functions that the internet requires. It's not as if the DoC is heavily involved in the day to day runnings of ICANN is it?
Is this a prestiege thing? I can't see any real benefit for any country controlling the root DNS servers. Beyond being able to say "Boo! We're not listing your countries sites anymore!", which would be pointless anyway as then the root level servers would quickly cease being root level servers as admins the world over quickly stopped trusting them.
The UN is quite a competant body when it comes to a lot of things. Don't let its military incompetance in Darfur or Kosovo distract you too much. Consider the World Health Organisation, UNICEF, UNESCO or the like. Yes they are not perfect, but try and imagine the world without them. You'll find that when it comes to things big countries don't have a vested reason to oppose, the UN is quite a useful organisation for the world to have.
Ask yourself this. Who is more likely to abuse the root servers, for ANY reason? And remember, once the root servers are abused once, that's it. No more centralised DNS.
May the Maths Be with you!
If the U.N. represents the "world opinion" I say fuck the rest of the world. You heard me. These are people that constantly push for the United States to accept a treaty that would have it to disarm it's civilian population (and the bearing of arms is a protected right, so they are pushing for us to violate our people's civil rights), has pushed to have roughly 50% of this nations land seized from it's owners and turned into untouchable wilderness areas, and constantly badmouths us for enforcing things it tells us to enforce. And now, they want to take our Internet (which is already under the administration of a private, international organization)...by force.
Seems world opinion is...socialism, oppression, and theft. Gee what a wonderful world we live in. But it's all for our own good right? Fucking nanny States....not even our Nanny State!
Fuck them. Fuck them up their stupid asses.
The arguement is that the EU does not want one country to control the root servers. The only problem is that the US has done a very good job with maintaining the openness and freedom of the internet. To a huge extent , the Internet's growth is due to the way it was managed. More specifically, the way in which it was not managed by huge multinational committees who want to impose all sorts of strange rules. Thomas Jefferson said something along the lines of "the government that is best is that that governs least". I think that this is the US' line of thinking. Then, contrast this with most everything that the UN has done. You can see why the US is very very weary of letting the UN control ANYTHING.
Hey, Dumbass, who paid for all this? The U.S.! Those are schools in the U.S. that are subsidized by tax dollars. So, yeah, the U.S. should control it. BTW: The backbone at the time was part of the military. No backbone, now place to hone your new technologies. The EU and UN should piss off! Let them create their own closed networks then vai for a "trust" relationship to ours. Problem solved. This idea that there's a one-world government called the U.N. is horrifying. The U.N. is a front for corruption and a tolerator or terrorism. The EU is just trying to be relevant.
"All" the UN needs to do is to get every country to agree about using different root DNS servers. Anyone can form their own namespace. If the majority of the world forms their own namespace, USA will have to go along with it, or face isolation.
I find that a very interesting idea... It's pretty clean and more or less solves this whole argument (as I understand it, anyway).
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
...the UN should have abolished all human rights abuses in the world, prevented wars, etc. Or at least gotten them under control once identified. Yet they continue to happen, often in the lands of their own members.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
1) We invented it- Its ours. On that train of thought, move the UN headquarters to Europe and let the Europeans pay to run their "invention"
2) Sharing obviously is making problems. Fine, close in/out of US routes, and allow countries to "buy in". Countries can then set up their own "internets" and route to the US and we'll route back.. for a modest fee of course.
3)UN can grab control of whatever European "internets" it wants to, but don't fuck with ICANN's
Will be ran by European phone companies. It will take you days to connect to a dns server and they'll charge you per connection.
The internet is now a key part of the infrastructure of many countries and no matter if you like it or not, nations don't like it when a critical part of their infrastructure is controlled by a foreign government.
Does this apply to everything? Should foreign governments also have a controlling interest in the U.S. GPS system because it's a key part of their infrastructure?
You were our friends when the Nazis were breathing down your neck. You were our friends when the Soviets were breathing down yours neck. Now that everything's fine (largely thanks to the U.S.), you don't need us anymore and suddenly we're the one you fear.
I'm a big tall mofo.
The US only contributes 2.53% more to the UN the Japan.
Look
They also haven't fully paid thier dues since Bush came into Office. ~5 years or so.
Look
The UN coudl survive just fine without the US Jerason.
Your "military might makes right" attitude is why the rets of the worlds hates us. (the us)
But if Europe did take away the WWW (providing it was possible, which it is not), what would you do with your internet? The entire point of my post was that it was stupid. Here are some words for you to look up and expand your vocabulary: facetious, satirical , mocking
Maybe you should just obliterate the rest of the world so that there will be no problem after that with any foreign entity. What do you think?
Interesting idea, but I don't think the US has enough firepower and weaponry to completely obliterate the rest of the world.
My Little Pony would become a political force!
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
Both of them built their version of the first gasoline powered automobile at the same time less than a 100miles apart and finished roughly at the same time. Which is why both of them usually share the credit. They later merged into one company named Daimler-Benz (now Daimler-Chrysler). And yeah they were German.
"Nimis exaltatus rex sedet in vertice - caveat ruinam!"
Railroads were started in England. Let's surrender control of our railroads to Britain.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
That just what the internet needs, UN Corruptible Incompetence, Euro-Liberal Control or Chinese Xenophobic Censorship!
A once famous mans words come to mind again- "we gave you the internet, we can take it away"!
Take a quick look at the 5 members of the security council, arguably the most important decision making body of the UN, and consider that China is known for its rampant censorship of the internet and other materials and that Russia certainly isn't a bastion for free speech (take a long look at Putin's policies and who owns media in Russia). Not to mention Russia's problems with policing its networks.
The EU? What Kissinger (not the most popular name, I realize) said about Europe decades ago is still true - "Europe? What's the phone number?" The EU is a strong financial union, to be sure, but it lacks a great most of the rest.
As it is right now, the internet is governed from a country known for its fierce - though not necessarily perfect - defense of free speech. I'd rather keep it that way than hand it over to the UN and let China play with it, or share power with the EU and its poor ability to make effective decisions.
Even if you can successfully make the case that some body more "international" than ICANN should be running things, I wonder *why* you would want that body to be under the control of the UN.
The UN! Where China has a veto and counties led by dictators are known to work as a block and try to pass resolutions that attact democracies. Isn't China exerting enough influence already (getting Google, MSN, et al. to block news about "democracy" and "freedom")?
The UN! Yes, lets give our free-est form of communication over to a government representing other governments to control.
FTA: "Governments will only be involved where they need to be and only on issues setting the top-level framework."
*where they need to be* that sounds reassuring.
That is interesting, but there are flaws... first is that no existing software will work with that. Second is that you now need to know what country your site is in. It is much easier to do it the way we do it now, and can be made a lot more robust.
(I'm sure there are a lot of other reasons that I didn't think of)
Why should it only be the US that can stop imposition of regulations that the national government does not like? What then is th method for every national government to stop impositions of regulations they dislike? It is international law-not law in specific sense but collectively the traditions and negotiations that successfully reached a point agreed to by all involved parties among the involved nations. Why is this frightening to you; is it because it terminates the potential for aggressive response US to a nation's action and reduces it the same status in respect to the Internet as every other nation?
To the mods who decided this was insightful. Go research some news articles from early 1980's. Pull up repotrs on Japanese economic growth. Replace ever instance of 'Japan' with 'China'. You will get parent post.
Then research early 90's to today. Take a look at why Japan did not grow past a certain point. Why the marriage between business and government allowed the country to expand rapidly originally, but ended up choking. Then research how restrictive and centrally planned the Chinese markets really are.
Folks forget history so quickly it is pathetic.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
HTTP and "the web" are not the Internet.
You just added country codes to HTTP.
What about NNTP, SMPT, POP, etc.
Some "US is right cause we have the best army" and "War against Iraq is good" posts got 5, replies got 1.
Maybe UN should take over slashdot.
This is pure political BS. ICANN is, as many have said, a private institution. Besides that, the structure of the internet is such that every country (or the EU) could implement their own pseudo-root servers that governs all national traffic. That way if some foreign power decides to do something that really hurts them, they just stop communicating with the rest of the internet and have a national setwork until they get things resolved. To my understanding, China does something similar (albeit for entirely different motives). There is nothing wrong with the Internet, and these countries should firmly be told to figure it out on their own. I lived in Europe for a while and whereas here might not be the place to get into it, they couldn't even keep their postal systems running 100% of the time. They have a great system, just very succeptible to strikes, etc. I shudder to imagine what the internet would be like in their hands, sometimes a capitalist mentality is just better when it concerns services that everyone relies on. ICANN has a proven track record, let them keep it.
I am not sure how the UN actually works, but doesnt the United States have veto power over any decisions, just like the other original members? Wouldnt any decision the UN maks be ultimatly vetoes by the US?
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Face it, throughout history no dominant power has remained dominant for very long.
Really? The Romans controled most of the known World for about 600 years. And they didn't have nuclear weapons.
If you think the US is going anywhere or won't always be a superpower of one shape or another then you don't have a firm grasp on geopolitics.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Wow, that is a truly great idea. I wonder if anyone at EU/UN reads slashdot?
Simple. Look at "speech and press (what we should really be discussing anyway) rights" around the world and compare them to the United States. In many countries around the world, including modern nations in the EU, books are banned, political party affiliation is outlawed and certain political speech in public is banned. In France certain forms of religious expression in public have been banned. In Germany various books about Nazis or even just WWII are outlawed. In many countries speech and written works viewed as "offensive" in some way or another are banned. In the US? The government has no right to ban books, ban any form of political speech or party affiliation, I can say or write truely offensive things without it being illegal. I have Freedom of speech and Press. Turn control of the internet to the EU and UN? What happens to my basic civil rights when I go online? Do they get raped by you jack-booted, authoritarian, sons of bitches? As it stands...at least with them in US control...unless your nation builds it's own private internet (like China) you get to enjoy much the same online freedom we do.
EU declares war on US
My car can go from 0-60mph in 5.3 seconds. That's an acceleration of 4.9m/s/s. Therefore, my car can travel from New York to Los Angeles in about 23 minutes.
I hope your car has a good inertial damping system installed.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
ok this is /. where are the comments about google? ...hand dns control over to google and everybody will be happy...they do no evil so we'll be allll set
shanegrant.com
In this above post (the one I'm responding to right now). Including that I shouldn't have dumped on the moderation of the article. That was off track, I'm sorry. I should stick to the content.
BTW, it wasn't flamebait when I posted. Is it now?
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
>I'm surprised that nobody has bothered to explain to you yet that the web isn't the internet.
I am sure you will be more surprised that a lot of people on the internet (you know those who aren't techy like yourself) think the WWW is the internet.
Btw, DNS is not the Internet either.
Common arguments I've read in the comments:
The US invented it
The US paid for it
The US doesn't actually control it, ICANN, a private organization does.
.xxx domains" doesn't give me a warm fuzzy. If the US doesn't control the 'net, how come the administration is firmly stating "We will not give it up?" Face it, the US Government does have control of the internet.
Well, to address the third issue, seeing headlines like "Bush administration objects to
Other than that, what the hell does it matter who paid for or "invented" it? It's become used globally, countries depend on it. Our government is acting childish, very much of a "my ball" attitude. I really dislike the idea of our government having such direct control over the internet if they were so inclined. You're all geeks, how can you not support having a system distributed to prevent a single point of control? If the US were so inclined, it could shut off an entire country from the web. This is unacceptable.
But that's not really the issue. The real issue is political. The USA has the capability to turn off DNS service for non-US domains, or for chunks if ip address space. Turning off DNS service to a country would seriously disrupt economic activity. That capability might not be a problem if they could trust the US government. The real, political issue is that they don't trust the US government.
Can't really say I blame them. I don't trust the current US government, either.
News at 8:00 all your genes belong to Africa!*
Documented proof of first prostitution!
"Hey guys, we invented it, we paid for it!"
Patent Pending
Just a point. There are a few hundred million people in the US. All of them are not arrogant and conceited
Unfortunately when the ones that are arrogant and conceited are so good at pulling off grabbing the FP post on slashdot, it can perhaps become understandable if others are to make mistakes.
Yes, there are legitimate grievances against the US. But much or what is perceived as US arrogance is merely the US attempting to retain it's own constitutional structure.
As an American, I would gently suggest that the majority of what is perceived as US arrogance would be comprised by decades of frequently illegal covert interference by the U.S. intelligence agencies and military in the internal functions of other countries; unjustified invasions of other countries with the opposition of the entire world and many of America's own citizens; economic tendencies wherein Americans are perceived to be gradually beginning to own practically everything in certain foreign countries; frequent international trade dealings wherein America demands other countries stick to the trade treaties they have signed, yet America ignores those same treaties as it see fit on whims as small as the sale of lumber; seeming insistence that when American forces are abroad, international rules, such as the Geneva Convention or the U.N. convention against torture, apply to everyone but America; and actions like the decision by the Bush Administration, the one the events in this article are occuring in response to, to keep the DNS root servers used by the entire world under U.S. Department of Commerce control rather than handing them over to an international body (ICANN) as was originally promised under the previous president.
None of these things have to do with the U.S. "retaining it's [sic] constitutional structure".
A large portion of the world wants the US to tear up our constitution and remake ourselves in the image of the EU.
I would also gently suggest no one, anywhere, is seriously suggesting the U.S. do this.
You could, I'm sure, locate some small number of specific criticisms where expressed displeasure with U.S. actions that essentially are a matter of the U.S. protecting its own sovereignity. These are not the criticisms that are important. The actions that have earned America its reputation of international arrogance have nothing, nothing whatsoever, to do with the U.S. protecting its sovereignity and "constitutional structure". In fact I would posit practically all sentiment of U.S. arrogance in civilized foreign countries could be eliminated if America would just respect the sovereignity of others.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I think this has been said here before, but I'll put it in plain english...
The US Gov't no longer has control of the internet...ICANN does...which is a non-profit corporation...
How exactly are they going to about "forcibly" removing the established governing body from control? There are quite a few alt-root DNSes out there, but they aren't widely used...and they are for TLDs not governed by the ICANN...if the US companies like Google refuse to use these alt-roots, then how are they going to "force" this on us at all??? Remove our routes to Australia...UK...China??? Maybe that would be good for our infrastructure...
These people are trying to turn what is now a private venture (ICANN) into a political issue...
I say let em cut themselves off from the US...they were begging to be added to "our" network a few years back and now they're taking it from us...
Seriously, this really is the whole control issue that's at the heart of most proprietary/open source battles.
While there may be good reasons for there to be a set of root DNS servers (what's in a name anyway?) independent of a U.S. company, that does not mean that said company can not continue to do business: It's not like you can't invent your own names and numbers in your namespace.
Over time, this might lead to "well-known" top level codes being country codes, with interoperability between .ab and .cd via proxies (oh, how the walls go up), with .com, .net, and .org becomming anachronisms of a pre-balkanized 'net. Nations do tend to get protective of their interests (well, those of their governments if not their citizens, anyway).
Perhaps we should see a silver lining to this cloud: the creation of the first cyberspace nation, owning the non-national domains, with laws of it's own regarding what happens in it's corner of cyberspace. Peering 'd be a bit of a hassle, but I don't see it as insurmountable. I can certainly envision a black market in the tunnelling of the "free internet" traffic to and through certain countries, though.
You could've hired me.
$150,000 per person that we owe the rest of the world? The US debt currently stands at about $8 trillion. Of that about $3.4 trillion is intragovernmental holdings (look it up and learn). Out of the remaining $4.6 trillion, only about $2 trillion is actually held abroad. So per American, we only owe roughly $667 per person to the rest of the world.
Want to start counting European unpaid debts from the Marshall Plan and factor in inflation and interest?
..after all he did invent the internet
If you ask me the EU can screw off, their starting to soound alot like the RIAA. EU,"Give me money, Give me control." Next they'll be asking for our nuclear stockpile.
http://theworkaround.com/
["aye not"]
Perhaps, but it's not that simple. In various pockets of England and America, speakers in the 18th through 20th centuries contracted "have not", "are not" and "am not" into "ain't" also.
And it really misses the point of a colloquialism to insist that it be grammatically correct. A colloquialism by definition is outside the official rules of the language. "Ain't", however, is so thorougly established and understood that only the most small-minded grammarians (such as those often found teaching public school) reject it.
It happens that my use of it *was* ungrammatical, in the small-minded sense. That was because the line "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" is itself a well-known expression. "Broke", being the past participle of "to break", should have been conjugated as "broken". Colloquial speakers in that context consider it needlessly polysyllabic, hence the expression.
sigs, as if you care.
I'm confused. Which physical network did the US government build? The earliest Internet connections were acoustic coupler / modem connections via the existing phone network between universities. These copper wires were laid by the US government in the form of AT&T, so perhaps that's what you mean? The modern backbones were all built by private companies. The modern customer connections were all built by private companies. When I connect to an Internet server, I often don't use any infrastructure in the US at all, and when I do it I very much doubt that it was government funded.
The US Government (via ARPA funding) developed TCP/IP (a seriously flawed protocol[1] in many ways, but one which took off since it was license-free). Note, this is a protocol, not a physical network.
DNS, which is really in question here, was invented by Paul Mockapetris while at the University of Southern California. Perhaps this means that the root servers should all be controlled by the University of Southern California? After all, they invented it...
[1] TCP/IP was designed for connecting networks, not computers, and it was designed to work over very unreliable, slow, links. This is a very different picture to the current Internet.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Do we really want the Internet managed (and TAXED which is what it will be) by the same people who brought us the Oil-for-Palaces and Food-for-nookie programs?
I don't think so. I wouldn't trust the U.N. to haul out my garbage much less mange the network.
The bigger issue these people seem to be discussing is one that plauges the U.S. how responsible/proud should U.S. citizens be of the work of their corperations.
U.S. corperations have been key in laying cables FOR OTHER COUNTRIES which the other countries paid them to do.
As far as having the initial idea it was a business decision and one which has been enormously profitable for U.S. corperations and their nation in General but the fact of the matter is that the internet is too ubiqutous for one nation to profit from it in the way the U.S. has been doing any longer.
Likely it will become very difficult for ANYONE to profit from it, it's simply too stable a system with too much importance for it to be controlled by a corperation or even a single government.
There is a reason that other countries seem socialist to people in the U.S. and that is because we'd like to see the internet solidified and essentially have the problems it poses solved whereas the U.S. wants corperations to keep fighting within it because they think it will make things better.
As far as the U.S.s faith in their corperations it usually stems from a huge perceptional divide in what a corperation is. In the U.S. it's a logo in other countries a subsidary of the government tasked with fulfilling a role in society (one of which is to make money for shareholders) and policed by the government.
U.S. citizens outside of the business community don't understand that their government is to blame for Mont Santo, Enron, Nike and other corperations which are destroying people's lives in other countries.
The U.S. has let their corperations get out of hand and to me at least it seems like their huge millitary might exist to keep their corperations in check not other nations.
When your insurance company doesn't pay and the judge rules against you you'll understand why the U.N. and not the U.S. deserves to be in charge.
For some they'll figure it out with their U.S. credit card which charge the highest interest rates in the world (Usury) and apply massive fees to those who default despite the governments ruling that such actions are blatantly illegal.
The three biggest corperations in the U.S. are getting fat from credit card debt and the government seems TOTALLY incapable of doing anything about it.
I believe this is what is being proposed. Different countries set up their own root servers. ISPs receive government recommendations that they use ones other than the US ones (probably in addition to, rather than instead of). Then, if the US or any other country decides to play silly buggers with the DNS infrastructure then ISPs simply removes that root server from the list, and there is no interruption.
I would probably recommend that any response other than NXDOMAIN be validated by other root servers controlled by a different country before being entered into a DNS cache. 90%+ of DNS queries that hit the root servers are miss-typed top level domains which return NXDOMAIN, so this wouldn't add much load to the system, and would provide extra protection from unilateral action by anyone.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I wish I had mod points now, your comment is the only one worth reading in this discussion.
As I've said, ITU IP address allocation is fine.
Can you *imagine* if the EU was responsible for root DNS?
EU engineers would take the root servers on strike!
Let the DNS system fractionalize! Information anarchy for all!
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
But dicks also fuck assholes.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Well, political affiliation can also be a problem in the US. In the naturalization form (available at http://uscis.gov/graphics/formsfee/forms/files/N-
Similar questions appear on most immigration forms (green card, H1B visa, ...). Having been a member of the communist party can bar you from working in the US or becoming a US citizen...
And add to it this one please:e form/paying_dues.html
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/international/un_r
Jho
Sorry man... the Internet pooped on me.
The U.S. government doesn't pay for any maintenance of backbones. All of the backbones in the US are owned by private companies (MCI, ATT, Sprint, L3, etc).
"This would allow them control, as well as decentralize the net even more."
The Internet is already about as decentralized is it's going to get (I assume we talking about placements of the DNS root servers). Here's a list of cities/countries that have a root server: Ottawa; Palo Alto; San Jose CA; New York City; San Francisco; Madrid; Hong Kong; Los Angeles; Rome; Auckland; Sao Paulo; Beijing; Seoul; Moscow; Taipei; Dubai; Paris; Singapore; Brisbane; Toronto; Monterrey; Lisbon; Johannesburg; Tel Aviv; Jakarta; Munich; Osaka; Prague; Amsterdam; Barcelona; Nairobi; Chennai; London.....just to name a few. For a complete list go to http://www.root-servers.org/.
"The largest logistic in this endeavour would be an accepted system of standards which would have to be adhered to and enforced by a coalition of countries, so that again no one country was in complete control."
I'd like to know what country has complete control right now? There isn't any. There's ICANN, but that's not apart of any government. ICANN does have people from all over the world.
The people that are demanding "control" of the Internet don't even know what they want control of.
-Nick
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Lot's of networks use TCP/IP that are not part of the Internet but everything on the Internet uses TCP/IP which was invented in the US. 'The Internet' is just a specific large network that communicates using TCP/IP. Thus, 'The Internet' was invented in the US.
Repeat after me 'The internet' is just a network. Sure other places have added innovations on top of that network, but when you talk about 'The Internet' your really only talking about the network on top of which people send all those packets.
Anyway, 'The Internet' and DNS (which is what this is really about) have little to do with each other. DNS is just another protocol sitting on top the network. The funny thing is if you where to turn off these 'core' servers that the UN is complaining about not much would happen. All there data is cashed on other systems around the world and the UN could easily setup UN-DNS with all the correct data with little difficulty. The way I see it if they knew what they where talking about they would know it's not really an issue. However, as they clearly don't have a clue what there talking about they should leave it the fuck alone.
PS: HTML is just SGML (invented in the US) with a few extra tag definitions. "1989: Tim Berners-Lee invents the Web with HTML as its publishing language" He basically extended SGML to include a hypertext tag (already established as a concept by academics as early as the 1940s).
Vint Cerf did his part, but it's silly to say the Internet would not have had hypertext without him. Hell, I know someone that was on the STML standards committee that wanted to add that feature but it kept getting shot down...
This comment is idiotic for two reasons (besides the factually inacruate statement about the US's current dues):
1. This is the age of American hegemony. From a foreign policy perspective, most foreign countries see the UN's most important purpose today as providing a forum through which they can use the weight of world opinion to check the actions of the Hegemon. Without US participation, this role would be fatally compromised. If the US ceases to be part of the UN, and there is a world crisis, the key diplomatic action will not be in the open halls of the UN, but in the closed corridors of Washington, DC. This would surely not be to the benefit of the world community.
2. The United States has alawys provided an enormous portion of the funds required to run the UN (it remains over 20% today), far in excess of its share of control over the institution. Without the money from the US, a small army of diplomats and bureacrats would become unemployed. Financially, keeping the US paying its dues (without laying off the bureacrats that the US has deemed unnecessary) is the single most important task the UN bureacracy has. In short, the US is their gravy train and they know it.
As far as the UN paying for US messes, that would be nice, but its never happened. Since WW2, we've been paying the lions share of the UN's messes. Only in the first Gulf war did the rest of the world pay a reasonable share of the costs, and even that calculation is dependent on ignoring the vast trillions that the US has invested in a millitary that it uses primarilly for the benefit of others.
Were you trying for the Ironic Statement Of The Day trophy, or was that unintentionally idiotic? Yeah, Miami is packed with people who paddled from the People's Paradise because of their irrational desire to obtain less freedom.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Tim Berners-Lee is British. Do you think you could get off our World Wide Web please?
I think //www.google.com.us would be a little less of a departure from the current way of doing things. Besides, you could make the country code optional if you access a site in the same country.
//www.google.com.us.earth.milkyway.universe2.42 :)
;)
Heck, it's even scaleable! When we have servers on other planets we can tack on some more (again, optional unless you are in a different zone) to be able to access anything anywhere, ex.:
Now we just have to figure out how to convince all the Universes to use the illogical English language for addresses
- The Greenwhich meridian was agreed on by 25 nations.
- The meeting that agreed it was at the behest of an American president (Chester A. Arthur).
- France used the Paris Meridian (which is only a little way of the Greenwich Meridian) for several decades after it was agreed.
If the US retained control of the DNS root servers:- As a result of an agreement of 25 countries.
- At a meeting called by the EU / UN.
- And others also ran their own for a while as a fall-back.
I can't see anyone complaining.I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Your exactly right, but everyone needs to understand something here. The USA doesnt trust the EU or the UN or any other governing body with this thing. Sure, England may do a good job with it, or Spain. But ICANN has already been set up with that task in mind, if anything goes wrong the USA can easily remedy it. Trying to prove this point with the argument that the USA invented it, or owns it is wrong. The USA doesnt control the signals of Japan or Belgium, thats their own responsiblity. Wha I see it basically coming down to is a hatred of the US by foreign leaders, and "they want to play with our toys" kinda mentallity. i think URL's were retarded anyway, we have had hyperlinks and bookmarks, no need to memorize crap like del.icio.us or www..com. besides if you went to 66.35.250.150 every day, you would be able to memorize it. (i go there everyday!)
> What is about to happen is that the Silver Age of the Internet is about to end. The Golden Age was
> before the web; the Silver age has lasted since '91 or so. Now we'll see fragmentation and
> provincialism. Whether that is good or bad is an open question, but it will surely be different.
I don't even see that. In the end all these calls for 'wresting control from the EVIL Americans' boil down to requests for us to screw the Internet ourselves and we don't seem inclined to do that so the Internet will rumble along as it has, mowing down all before it. And in the end THAT is what these calls are all about anyway, they want the power to slow down this jugernaught called the Internet before it sweeps away the entire notion of a nation state.
But really, if the US ignores the deranged ravings of the children, what happens? They keep right on assigning domain names under their country TLD, they keep right on assigning IP addresses from their ICANN, ARIN, RIPE, etc assigned pools and the root name servers, while under nominal US control, keep right on gluing the whole thing together. Routing and connectivity are decisions totally under each nation's control. The only potential problem is the root servers and if the US ever used them for political advantage they could be replaced fairly quickly.
Just for giggles, lets examine these 'arguments' about the wisdom of sharing control over the Internet with either the EU or the UN.
The EU is, by any rational observer, a most unfree instituition when it comes to the issues that matter to the Internet. Neither the member states or the emerging single nation state has any concept of a fundamental Right to free speech such as exists in the US under our Consitiuition of clearly defined Rights such as the 1st Amendment. An Internet with EU influence would be a much poorer place for discourse. Plus there is zero chance we could share control with the EU and have any chance of shutting up the rest of the world who would scream for their place at the table. And sorry, if you believe China deserves to say the first fucking word about how a Freedom enhancing thing like the Internet should be ran you aren't the sort of person I want to discuss serious adult subjects with.
Which brings us to the UN. The UN is a a fatally flawed instituition. The design itself was flawed and these flaws have grown over time. Flaw #1 was including unfree societies on a equal basis. Flaw #2 was the idiotic notion that all nations are equal. While the Security Council was a partial attempt to correct for this flaw, in practice it has only meant inaction due to the veto in the hands of the opponents of every principle the UN, in theory at least, professes. The only solution to the UN is to disolve it. Until that happens the serious work on a more capable replacement cannot begin.
Democrat delenda est
Wow, you're incredibly stupid, you know that?
And all those Academics. They were GASP! Government workers. Not necessarily feds, but still.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
I do not believe an International governing body will solve the problem. Case 1. Let's just say the US agrees to relinquish its control over the root servers. Let's just say this organization that will control the root servers is called the UN. Eventually, other countries will disagree with the UN's policies. These disagreeing countries will most likely come to the conclusion that they reserve the right to be able to control the network in their respective countries in entirety. What I think we will see is goverments setting up their own national root servers agreeing to issue ip addresse ranges alloted to them by the UN. Case 2: More realistic. Basically, the world is headed for the ultimate outcome of case 1. But a more realistic approach I think we will see is that the US will not relinquish control. Other countries disagreeing with this policy will setup up their own collective networks or ultimately separate like in case 1. However, collective sub-international networks will be subject to case 1 eventually. Basically, in the end. Each country will control their own root servers and network. Poor countries who cannot afford the technology will have to rely on agreements with other countries to run their root servers for them. International bridges will allow for cross network communication, just like subnets. This is my opinion and belief.
-redptam-
"the EU had decided to end the US government's unilateral control of the internet" All of you pathetic pieces of eurotrash who spout endlessly about the aggression of the US can shut up now. Please be advised, every time you idiots bring up "war in Iraq" you will now be shouted down with "war for the internet". Just remember, you started it. For the rest of you fine euopean citizens, I sincerely hope your governments see the light before they do something truly regrettable.
Back in July the US surprised everyone by saying that despite the previous agreement that ICANN control of root servers would end in Sept 2006, they would instead keep control into the future, not matter what everyone else thought.
Everyone else was understandable miffed, particularly when they saw it was being driven politically, by Bush, and that ICANN continued to be ICANN and were trying to tax domain registrations, including country specific domain registrations (.de, .uk, etc.)
Work was ongoing to redefine things on the run up to the expected ending of ICANN control, including automated management functions and working groups to define future structure. I'm sure Bush and his fundamentalist Christian take on the .XXX domain was just the last straw.
I expect that given the preceeding agreement, and the relative simplicity of changing control of the root servers that live outside the US, the UN, EU, and the rest of the world expected negotiation at the recent PrepCom3 conference. What they got however was arrogance and statements that made it clear the US failed to understand they didn't have the choice to ignore past agreements.
So, the timetable is clear. ICANNs contract ends between March-Sept 2006 and during that time the new body will take control. Given the likelihood that they won't charge the registrar tax (remember that automated system), just about everyone will switch and Bush will end up with egg on his face. Thus I'll bet that in the real summit in November he will have to give in an acceptable change, since he really has no control of the matter.
Not only did we invent and build it -- we paid for it. That doesn't entitle us to something?
You haven't paid your UN dues and are billions of dollars in debt. Think of it as a repossession.
If these nations want to ensure that they will not be "starved" by the US taking away thier rootservers, they should install thier own root server in the default list to handle those necessary dns queries that they cannot live without.
--What, like Cuba? They may be suffering, but last I check there were still there, doing business, living their lives free of US control. Sometimes freedom is more important than money..--
I wouldn't call living under Castro exactly free.
The problem is Freedom of speech, thought, and expression. The free exchange of ideas, the rights of people to express themselves openly and freely with other people around the world.
These are all things the EU and all the other complainers are opposed to. Freedom thwarts their plans, so they need it stamped out.
Okay, while I agree that yes Clinton et al did increase the role the UN plays in US law, the fact of the matter is that US law supersedes all other's in our own country, and for cases where it won't all it would take was an act of Congress making those UN friendly laws null and void. Not that they would do that, but it's still an option. A lot of this seems to be a rehashing of the same thing the world has been saying about the USA since Day 1, and it goes something like "If you people would just see things our way, all would be well". I'm not going to say that we aren't as bad, because in some cases we are. No government or people are perfect, and having made friends with people from all over the world, I've gained a great respect for other cultures and the people in other countries.
All that being said however, I'm very glad that I was born and raised in the US and even though I'm not necessarily a fan of the current government, I wouldn't trade my citizenship for anything. I'm not a "world citizen", I'm an American, and I wouldn't have us give up our culture or our beliefs to please the world.
.How much of our own individual freedoms and beliefs would the UN and EU have us give up in order to blanket the world in a uniform culture? How far do we need to go in the world's eyes in order to be considered "good"? I'm not trying to flame at all, I'm just trying to understand why erasing uniqueness is a good thing?
"The boy is dangerous, they all sense it, why can't you?"
In other news, representatives from the E.U. and U.N. announced that they were ready to introduce a deal in which most of America's 'stuff' is redistributed throughout the world.
"Americans have a lot more 'stuff' than everyone else, and we've only realized recently that, just because Americans happen to reside where most of the 'stuff' is piled up, doesn't mean that it is 'their' stuff. It is immaterial that we simultaneously villify Americans for working too hard, then sneer at them for buying 'stuff' with all that money they earned, while, the French, say, are feeling superior about 35-hour work weeks. Obviously, an international body consisting of member countries who want to slit each other's throats would be a far more effective governing entity than ICANN, the international outfit that has been successfully managing the Internet's root servers for years."
We have a government for it: ICANN
We have an infrastructure for it.
We even have our own unique language.
Monthly bills to our ISPs would just turn into taxes instead.
We would all become dual citizens.
And whats nice about this, is that the Internet can then become a pseudo democracy. For example, instead of TLDs being stopped by special interest groups (.xxx for example), the internet community can vote on them with a few clicks of the mouse.
Who cares who invented what, the internet at this point is an amalgamation of different concepts and ideas invisioned and created by different people of different ethnicity. It's used around the world, by hundreds of millions of people. The internet shouldn't be handled by America, it shouldn't be handled by EU, it shouldn't be handled by the UN. It should be handled by ITSELF.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
The US is a very new country
On July 1, 1867, the British government (under Queen Victoria) approved a plan which allowed Canada to become an independent country with its own government. source
you crazy leafers, i swear...
...because Plutonians are teh suck
I can't believe that no one has mentioned this: Oil for Food.
The UN was in charge of the largest fraud ever. The UN was supposed to oversee the humanitarian efforts of getting food and medicines to the Iraq people, in exchange for some oil coming out.
Instead, billions of dollars were sent to the mass murdering Saddam Hussain, in exchange for the lucrative oil contracts. The top UN executive for the program, Bennon Sevan, was on the take as well. The head of the UN, Kofi Annan, was possibly involved. His son, Kojo was in on the fraud. So, either Kofi is the dumbest person alive, and really did not have anything to do with the corruption, or he was complicit in the scheme.
Any way you look at it, it does not look good for the UN. Why would we want to let this buracracy take any control of the Internet? This is the same organization that puts countries like Zimbabwe, Sudan and Saudi Arabia on the human rights council. The UN can't even formally define terrorism as the killing of non-military persons. Also, it sends "peace keepers" into the Congo that end up raping children!
What exactly can the UN take credit for since it's inception? None of the world's conflicts have been solved by anything the UN has done.
While it is true that the world needs a forum for discussion, it certainly does not need this corrupt organization to actually be in charge of anything.
Wouldn't you know the one of the very few "non-HDMP" aspects of the Internet, the DNS (very centralized), would be sought out and attacked (or be the center of a control struggle, which is the same thing as an attack) by the control freak world governments.
My thinking is this will just likely have the anti-control techies (FOSS people) innovate right around this. Some sort of much more dynamic and P2P-like system will come to be, rendering DNS obsolete at roughly the same rate DNS becomes embroiled and encumbered.
Wow! So much software has the DNS assumption hardwired into it. I see lots and lots of code rework headaches (and it will spill into architecture and design) ahead, regardless of the short-term outcome.
You know, thanks to the MPAA/RIAA, the anonymous and untraceable P2P mechanisms seem like a very natural fit. LOL! The governments will argue over control of a thing that will inevitably be organically abandoned due to its inherent tight-coupling weaknesses. Ah, the incredibly seducive illusion of power of "centralized control and force" versus the "real" power of "HDMP (Highly Distributed and Massively Parallel) and influence".
THE Private Pilot Adventure Guide
For those who want to look it up and learn for themselves a good start is http://www.fms.treas.gov/bulletin/b35.pdf
The amount of the total debt per person is on on the order of $30000. Using the parent poster's figures for "rest of the world debt", it comes out to closer to $7000 a head (not $700). The "persons" included in that figure include children and retirees. If you assume one breadwinner and 3 dependents per household, the numbers become $120000/$28000 per household respectively. Factor in an aging work force and the numbers shift to more dependents and less breadwinners. Social security and other forms of "intragovernmental debt" also become more significant with a smaller tax base. For those looking for a simple explanation between the debt types, a good article is http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7421288/.
Think in terms of not 20 years but 200, 500, or more. British Empire - couple of hundred years really. And China has proved throughout the last 3000 years it can play the long game. So it's worth making sure when power does shift, you are well thought of.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Iraq has nothing to do with terrorism. Nothing. Ever.
Iraq has been paying bounties to the families of Hamas suicide bombers for years.
Iraq invasion plans existed prior to 9-11
Yep.
Just because the war on terror is not being waged on the grounds explicitly stated, does not mean it is not being waged. Saddam had been trying to convince the world that he had weapons of mass destruction for years. Guess what? It worked. We believed him.
Last week, the UKs largest terrorist groups gave up their arms.
First, congratulations on getting that done.
That's how adults deal with conflict.
Compromise and diplomacy are appropriate paths when both sides are partially right, which I think we all agree is the case in the UK/IRA case. Where was Saddam right? There are only two nations that have used weapons of mass destruction since the close of WW1, as far as I can tell. The US is one and Iraq is the other. The US used 2 nukes to close a 5 year war against a foe that attacked us first. Iraq used multiple gas munitions against a neighbor that he had attacked without provocation (Iran) and then again against citizens of his own country to suppress uprisings (the Kurds.) Suggesting that we sit down and have a talk with Saddam after 12 years of inspection baiting is disrespectful to the thousands upon thousands of victims of this tyrant's rule.
This is a good idea, as the Internet should be a true global medium run by a consortium of nations, if not all nations (UN). There's no good rationale for the U.S. to control it. I think the real reason the U.S. government wants to control it is because they want the power to shut it down if it becomes too effective a political tool for American progressives.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
First off, there's no reason why the date line needs to be at 180. Putting it opposite of the Prime Meridian was just convenient, but its position relative to Prime is still ultimately arbitrary. We could have time zones extending from, say, +6 to -18, instead of +12 to -12.
Secondly, in GMT, just as with Julian days, the day starts at noon, not midnight. Midnight is what GMT's successor, UTC, uses.
I'll have you know, I really WAS in the US Naval Reserve, Lubbock, TX. OMFG, my life is such a joke.
Wanting to know about people who enter our own country is not the same as keeping an eye on people who live here, and censoring what they can or cannot say or be.
All we are talking about is where the root hint servers are located and who controls them. Even without root hints at all the internet could and would still function. What we would see is DNS lists being distributed in other ways to be deployed on smaller DNS servers. Even without DNS most things can be done via the Public IP addresses. There would be issues with MX records and such but B-F-DEAL!!!
Just give the root hints to the French, their technological savvy is more superior(just look at their cars) and if you ask them the internet was their idea.
You should read that in the original Klingon...
Sure, get you World Wide Web off our underlying infrastructure.. Oh wait you can't you say? Guess you'll have to stop using it too.
Let the Euros piss and moan, after which if they don't like the US influence over the Internet, they can instead join Fidonet http://www.fidonet.us/joinfido.htm :) ... by joining through a *.us site.
This is not my sig.
george bush and the Us goverment is good propaganda.
US and THEM, why does allmost all of you say that ? don't you see what is happening, nationalisem is growing inside the usa, he can do anything and your mindless sheeps, george bush can just say, o well we tryed blablabla THERE enemies of the free world, and you buy it.
Seems nobody is spelling out exactly what having control means. DNS name resolution is actually a very small part of the problem, even though these root servers seem to be getting all the press. The more contentious issue is really the assignment of IP addresses since they are in limited supply. If two machines on the net end up with the same IP address, how are the routers going to know where to route stuff to?
There are policies related to DNS names that are currently subject to US law. For example, all the cyber-squatting laws that prevent an individual from squatting on a name that is a trademark of a well known company. I know the slashdot crowd would get a chuckle out of this, but what happens if the UN decides that Microsoft is an illegal monopoly and points their DNS resolution to an alternate site as a means of punishment?
Now for the practical matters. Nobody is likely to switch over to a UN DNS system unless the countries involved mandate local ISP's use it by law (which seems fairly likely). In return, the US will likely pass a similar law. Same thing for IP routing. Any router in the US can be required to route using ICANN defined tables.
At that point, the UN is going to realize that in order to wrestle control of the internet from the US, they are going to have to 1) deal with the fact that any IP addresses they assign won't be accessible from inside the USA. There are very few foreign corporations with international asperations who are going to tolerate that. 2) deal with the fact that any IP address assigned to a US company will be inaccessible outside the USA. Same problem, other way...(only American tend not to care).
The biggest problem they have is that the vast majority of the infrastructure for the net routes through US soil.
Ya know... I read through most of the comments on this article. It surprises me that so few people on Slashdot are so unknowning about the history of the Internet and Computers. Y0!!! Last time I checked, DARPA was a division of the United States Military. That is who built the Internet, and we have merely been expanding the uses and innovating it's structure to fit today's growing world. How is that the US didn't create the Internet again? Who is it that paid the billions in research and funding throughout the 70's and 80's? I mean, my father had a Darpa account from 1981 on! I mean, no one else in the world can claim that.
All this BS is is just that, BULLSHIT. The EU and the UN are merely power-grabbing at straws to try to 'wrest power from the US'. Well, that won't happen... the US has never been cowed into giving up anything! They are merely grumpy about the whole War on Terror, and how the US handled it. But that doesn't mean that *gasp* an international body can't continue to support and maitain the DNS Root Servers that have been managed by the US for 20 years. It won't happen, it can't happen, at least not in the form that the UN is conceiving of.
As far as I can see, these two bodies need to look within themselves and resolve their OWN issues internally before trying to take over anything that inherently belongs to a sovereign nation. The EU can't even agree on it's Constitution!!!! They can't bring their Union together and they can't solve their own problems. They have no leadership! How can they be expected to take over something that the entire world depends on, when they haven't the vaguest concept of it in the first place. And when the UN can come clean with all of their corruptions and scandals and prove that they have SUCCESSFULLY REFORMED, maybe only MAYBE can we consider trusting them with some kind of regulatory advisory board for Root DNS. But probably not. If they can bungle aid operations in Darfur by raping children, I doubt SERIOUSLY that they can be trusted to operate the world's root servers.
Just sit back for a minute and think about all the UN has done for the past 10 years. NOTHING. Nothing of *ANY* substance whatsoever. They couldn't even stop genocide in the Balkans or in Africa! And do you really think that the US is that stupid? I have great hopes for the EU. But I don't think it will survive. I don't think it will last, not unless the people stand up and take control of their representatives, and they can't do that. They reject the Constitutions, they are not agreeable to any reforms at all. The Washington Post ran a great article about this today. And they want to tell the US that they are going to FORCE us to hand over control of the Root DNS Servers? MUWHAHAHAHAHAHAHA I don't fucking think so.
Jho
Sorry man... the Internet pooped on me.
Could the idea of taxation or control over a large economic engine be the real driving factor here? Since the internet is is responsible for tremendous amounts of opportunity and economic growth, fundamnetally growing on a daily basis, it seems more realistic to me that the UN underlying concerns here are not so much about "security" but about the implications of being in controlling a vast economic engine, giving them the power to:
1.) Tax commerce (sales, voip, you name it, will they try and take a cut?)
2.) Tax infrastrcture (from wire and fiber to domains)
3.) Control growth in ways the "deem" fit
I'm not saying these reasons are any better or worse or different than those of the US, but I think we fundamentally need to look at what could perhaps be the more realistic driving factor of all this.... control and money... and then discuss who we want in control of our economic engine.... lest we all be saying "Who is John Galt"
This useless bunch of hand-wringers will get as much done on this issue as they did on human rights in Rwanda, Somalia, Iran, Iraq, Afganistan, Cuba and every other place where dictators and assholes have reigned. They are all talk and talk is cheap. You want it? Come get it? Or shut the F up and help BUILD it.
--Somewhere there is a village missing an idiot.
Stop it! Pythagoras invented cool rules and greeks does not try to keep "historical control" over them. Nobody tries to make it private or state property.
:-( "It's mine!" "I invented it!" "I saw it first!" "I bought it!" "I'm the Protector!" "I'm the Owner!"
:-) Where are we living?
Why is the Internet different? It is cool and many people are benefiting form it. Money? Do we speak again about human's greed?
Come on! Are we still those beings that use two legs instead of four and in addition great capacity of our brain? Are we acting in favor of human's good? Or will we eat each other? It looks like discussion of children below 12 that don't want to share control over a newest Toy...
Well, I've got to get back to work. When I stop rowing, the slave ship just goes in circles.
How would the EU/UN wrestle control of the Top Level Domain servers from the United States?
Wrestle the United States for it? Send in the United Nations Peacekeepers? Take it up at the UN Security Council?
(Unfortunately, we seem to have lost our federal aspect in the past 60-90 years or so, and I'd suggest that the BRD is more federally republican than the US right now, but that's just my opinion.)
"The constituing networks are build and paid by their respective owners. Basic property rights."
Then you are free to build and maintain your own root servers, are you not?
Of course it isn't. There are several other internets.
Of course no other country should trust the US to run the internet. Neither should the US trust any other country. Both actions are absurd given even only a nodding acquaintance with history.
Any good solution is going to require distributed control. Centralized control has "sort of" worked, usually, most of the time, unless you were in a country that was being shut out. (I think that's currently limited to Iran...whoever is supposed to run the *.ir registry. But this implies that the disputes could expand.)
The problem is how should the distributed system work? Ideally it would have a resolution method that would be essentially independant of agreement between the parties, as long as the appropriate protocols were honored.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution states that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
Turning the internet over to a non-U.S. body could be seen as "abridging the freedom of speech" of its citizens. Therefore, turning over control to the U.N. or to another entity voluntarily simply can't be done legally.
They'll get my encryption algorithm when they pry it from my cold, dead hard drive.
The only thing that the US has control over is the infrastructure within it's boundaries. Percieved control is based on private parties only, as other commenters have elaborated on in sufficient detail. If other parties want to "make" an internet, let them do it. It's already been demonstrated. If they don't have the resources or willpower to do that, can they convince anyone that they have what it takes to "handle" the existing internet? I think not.
i think the cause of this split has more to do with the rest of the world getting increasingly dissolutioned and pissed with the us than with any specific internet-management issue.
so we've ignored most of the what the world thinks is right and are hell-bent on doing everything our own way. Well, fine - just that we shouldn't be surprised when the rest of the world ceases to cooperate with us.
I mean, he invented the Internet.
Right?
What?
Really? Then what are we even discussing, eh? ICANN is an international organization. If you don't run through a root DNS server sitting in the US, then what complaint have you?
"Schopenhauer did not believe that people had individual wills but were rather simply part of a vast and single will that pervades the universe: that the feeling of separateness that each of has is but an illusion."
l osophy/Schopenhauer.htm
http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Biographies/Phi
Never remove a quote from the context of the individual who made it.
The Internet first existed in the US, but it wasn't invented, it evolved.
But its clear that it must have had some form of intelligent designer...
As far as I'm concerned, every country could have their own root servers, and all domains would have a TLD of the country extension. It's getting to the point that portal and search engine visibility is more important than domain name anyway. Search domains could be set for the TLD in each country, but that could open up phishing like crazy.
AGB was Canadian. All your telephones are belong us, eh?
Not for the subject matter, but the reaction it has created on all sides.
Just goes to show you that you should sneak across the border like everyone else did.
Now let's see you try to use the internet without the web.
I do that every day. Instant messaging, e-mail, VOIP, ping, telnet, ssh, rsh, multiplayer gaming, bittorrent and other P2P, and freedb, just to name a few non-web ways that I have made use of the Internet in the past couple of days.
Even without the web, the Internet would still be extremely useful. Without the Internet, however, surfing the web would be a rather frustrating experience.
Obviously, neither is going away. Hypothetically speaking, however, if such a thing were possible then the WWW would be FAR easier to replace than the Internet. Something like gopher could be evolved into a replacement for the web much more quickly and easily than the physical infrastructure and core protocols of the Internet could be reimplemented.
Toll that bell again! The decline of Rome has begun! Thank you God!
Give them control over the Internet I say.
Let's roll out Internet II in the US alone, with edge tie-ins for the "internet", capped at sub T1 speed for the foreigners.. =D
I'm only partially joking of course. Not sure what the cap would / should be, however, within the US, there's really no "big" reason other than communications companies not wanting to bring all that dark fibre that they've buried to life (due to costs or worries that they won't recoupe their expenses on the older tech still in use now).
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
I think you mean the US.
Not only "land of the free" but "land of the lawyers" who love a good old 1st amendment smackdown. Shihar 153932
Something to consider is that this isn't new news. The Internet did not suddenly come under the "control" of the US. Nations that have become so reliant on it knew from the beginning how much power the US could exert over it. If they were so short-sighted, then that is their problem.
Lets quit all the debate about what the resolutions are or weren't. Go read them for yourselves people.
http://www.un.org/Docs/scres/2002/sc2002.htm
what?
Dear Old World:
We are happy to inform you that we already ceased to use the type of government where the people are represented by representatives in a legislative body, separate from an executive branch, commonly known as the Republic, in November 2000.
Best Regards,
The United States of America.
After troubled negotiations in Geneva, the US may be forced to relinquish control of the internet to a coalition of governments
What are they going to do, send in an invading army to grab control of the root servers?
FalconShould there be a Law?
When every country has thier own unique Internet protocols, name servers etc., no two countries will be able to communicate over the net. This sounds like a plot by the RIAA to keep people from sharing files across national boundries.
You don't own anything you can't show the receipt for.
Which is why you don't own or control HMG, and why your every wish and those of the millions of disgruntled brits is routinely denied with a wave of hands from Bliar and Brown.
Take for example the tax on petrol. The UK pays the most out of all Europeans simply because the tax is so absurdly high. Out of every £50 worth of fuel you pay £37 in pure tax.
If you really owned your 'democratic' government, you would be able to simply demand that the tax on fuel is abolished, OR ask for your money back by presenting your recipt, just like you do at Dixons's when you return a non working CD player you bought the day before.
HMG takes your money, screws you over, murders people with it and there is nothing you can do about it. That's nothing to be proud of.
If they were to promise to build an "Internet 3" with your money, or perhaps pay for some more dentists, nurses, operations etc, well, you would have a point, but the fact is, they will never spend your money on your benefit, and when Europeans do, the best thing they can come up with is Minitel.
The USA has done some bad stuff. Everyone knows this. However, this malarky is just pure spite. Let anyone that wants to have their own internet under their own control go and build it, just like the Saudis have. Whining bellyaching and begging doesn't make networks, or anything for that matter, become real.
ATH0 Bitcoin: 1DnwFLXczVZV8kLJbMYoheUrpqHesjxrSi
So the thing is called "Country Code", then obviously a non-predicted territorial but multi-national entity is NOT allowed to have it, right, since it break rule number...hmmm...I don't quite remember but if it isn't there we may create it. Funny as it may seem, there is absolutely no technical problem in creating the ".eu" as a root domain for all European Union countries TLDs - the system was thought to acommodate this.
As for "unproven reliability and unproven interoperability", this is more bs. The software to do this is free and the hardware is quite standard. Competent technical people to configure and manage the servers exist almost anywere in the world.
What Would Al Gore Do?
My hand touched her hand. Her hand touched her boob. By the transitive property, I got some boob! Algebra is awesome!
How many of the other half that does use the Internet regularly accesses international sites anyway?
I don't know about others but I frequently access AllAfrica and other international websites, especially Chinese and Indian websites. Between China and Formosa, Tiawan, I have 7 news sites bookmarked. Then again I have to admit I pay more attention to international and indigenous issues than most Americans do.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Bad math skills on my part. I lost a zero. Regardless, we don't owe the rest of the world anywhere near $150,000 per person as originally suggested.
Now, the picture would be different if each country had to ask the Royal Academy for English Accreditation for a permission to use the English language, so that other people would recognize that you are indeed speaking English and answer likewise. Then, when the Royal Academy refused to allow for a NAFTA English, what could the NAFTA countries do short of creating the new Office for English?
Al Gore invented the internet he can do what he want with it.
This just sounds like some BS leading the way to internet 2 anyways.
Indeed! What we are really talking about here is that the UN/EU are interested in levying a tax on domain names to pay for network infrastrcture in who knows where.
Like hell that we're going to agree to use their root servers and pay their tax.
Let them create their own closed networks then vai for a "trust" relationship to ours. Problem solved.
That is more or less what is happening. The world "creates a network" and the US can opt to be part of it by merely reconfiguring its DNS servers. The US has no claim to network infrastructure in the rest of the world, and the communication protocols are in the public domain.
Even if the US and the rest of the world would disconnect their Internets, most users would actually hardly notice. Search engines, newspapers, universities, Slashdot, etc. would obviously want to be on both Internets, and email across the boundaries would have to use some kind of remailer. It's awkward, but not a great technical challenge.
The U.N. is a front for corruption and a tolerator or terrorism. The EU is just trying to be relevant.
But the world trusts them more than the US.
There are very, very few nations on Earth who are not UN members. Short of Taiwan and the Vatican, all other 191 countries are UN members.
To set the record strait: I'm from Denmark Why all this anti americanism??? As far as know ICANN have done a good job so far, and if you look at ICANNs website you will see that: ICANN's Board has included citizens of Australia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, China, France, Germany, Ghana, Japan, Kenya, Korea, Mexico, the Netherlands, Portugal, Senegal, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. So I would say that it's international already. Why can't we view this, as we do with open source? It's an international effort. Or should we say that any LAMP server must only be used in Finland, USA, Sweden and Denmark? No I don't think so.....
I seem to be coming to this conversation pretty late, but I'm curious to hear what you think of my interpretation.
You are arguing that control of the root servers should not be touched, because the US is a reliable guardian, whereas a UN-based organization would be drowned in bureaucracy and be ineffective.
I can't tell if you think the current situation is the *best* situation. So far you've just been reacting to the news article. That's not a criticism, but I'd like to hear what you think the America *should* do with regards to root server control.
Personally, I can understand why the other nations of the world would be uncomfortable with the current situation. Sure, ICANN is nominally independant, but if the US govt in wartime decided to (for instance) take down or subvert an entire country's internet-based infrastructure, from what I understand they could (if the US *isn't* in control, what exactly is the EU arguing with the US about now?). It's easy to see why this is an untenable position for the rest of the world as economies and governments become increasingly reliant on internet communication.
Think about how nervous the US is about control of the world's oil resources being limited mostly to a handful of countries. Now imagine that this control over resources was NOT connected to the physical location of the oil, but to the fact that that's where the oil "started".
Remember too that this control is not vested in "America" including the actual technical people and scientists in the US. They might actually be a fairly reliable guardian, but the control ultimately is in the US govt. Even in a democracy, getting power in the government has much more to do with your money, your connections, your ambition, and how good you are at manipulating people than anything else... unfortunately, this doesn't correlate well with actual ability to run a country, or wisdom of any kind.
It seems to me (and this may be what we end up with) there should be a fully independant organization that isn't even *located* physically in any one country permanently, that would control the root servers scattered throughout the world, and would operate under a very strict charter. No one country should have total veto power, but the organization itself should be very limited in what it can do, and taking any action that is country-specific should be almost impossible. There should be strict requirements about the technical qualifications for all representatives. Its actions and its charter will need to be enforced; by the UN? I'm not sure what the options are here, but you get the point.
It can be pretty simple -- after all, there's very little it actually has to DO. The main point is about the things we DON'T want it to do.
Thoughts?
Here is the thing how are you going to take the web away from us? It seems like it's out there and their is shite you or anyone can do to stop us from using it. Just like we can't stop the rest of the world from creating their own root servers and using those, it's two completely different things.
a. The Communist Party? Yes No
b. Any other totalitarian party? Yes No
c. A terrorist organization?
Holy crap, is that the best you can do? That the U.S. (gasp) doesn't like people who support the governments that fueled the slaughter of tens of millions in the last century? Whoop tee do. Now, I like the U.S., but even I admit there're worse problems than that. Not to mention the other replier's point about the widespread acceptance of immigration restrictions by every nation. As a U.S. citizen, I can support the Commies till the cows come home.
Stop learning! Only you can prevent esoterrorism.
"If this is your "reasoning" that the EU should own the Internet..."
You obviously didn't bother to read the second part of GP: "Either way, this is irrelevent. [sic]"
this isn't about the technologies, we aren't saying people can't create their own root servers and use them, we are saying you can't control our root servers that we have and still are sharing nicely with you.
Saddam Hussein was blatantly, publicly supporting each suicide bombing in Israel with $25k to the family. That's simply state sponsored terrorism
So what does it make the US when while Saddam was using chemical weapons against Kurds and others he didn't like inside Iraq? Then Assistant Secretary of State John Kelly told congress in June 1990 sanctions "would hurt U.S. exporters and worsen our trade deficit." These sanctions were proposed because he was using WMDs against civilians and weren't nearly the same as the sanctions issued after he invaded Kuwait, instead they "called for a halt to U.S. military aid, commodity credits and loan guarantees and a ban on U.S. imports of Iraqi oil". He said this just six weeks before Kuwait was invaded.
Trade was more important than WMDs used against civilians.
FalconShould there be a Law?
"But the world trusts them more than the US." :)
OH! Another good point for not trusting THEM with the root servers!
So the US creates the Internet through merging collections of government and academic networks, it then shares it's resources to the world (and the world quickly catches onto it), and then now non-elected, self-appointed "independent" groups want to "assume ownership" over ICANN and the DNS root servers? Considering that these resources are private property, and that countries control their own DNS hierarchies, there's one quote that comes to mind right away:
"In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property." - Carl Marx, The Communist Manifesto.
Just like when the Supreme Court recently ruled that local governments can seize private property such as homes for private development, these "independent" groups are now demanding the ability to seize private property at an international level.
This part's interesting too:
"6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state." - Communist Manifesto
In this Internet issue, the "state" would refer to the globalist independent groups that are assuming the role of leaders of a global "state".
Next we'll see these same organizations claiming that web servers and their content are all "global property" and not private.
-eventhorizon
#Secret Windows Source Code, in MS C% - if (uptime >= "24 hours") then bsod() else print "Windows License Violation!"
Exactly, this is the root of the argument that everyone is missing. The internet to me is all about the free exchange of ideas. It seems like that is what is happening now. What if the UN is in control, will Security Council member veto wielding China start flexing its muscle to make sure everyone is PC with them in no voices of dissent?
If Brazil is truly worried about redundancy and fail-safes for their country they can have a plan and backup root servers to handle their own inter-country communication in case of problems outside of their control. The US's plan seems to be to have control of the root servers the internet was built on remain in their control and have them scattered about the country.
The rest of the world connected to our internet, I don't lay claim to their equipment, why should they lay claim to ours? If they want to create competing root servers let them, but they can't get upset when our capitalist society keeps using what we got instead of switching over to them, and if they prove to have a better solution then we will probably start using their stuff.
In A.D. 2005, war was beginning.
BUSH : What happen ?
ICANN : Somebody set up us the root
AMBASSADOR : We get signal
BUSH : What !!
BUSH : Main screen turn on
BUSH : Its you !!
E.U. : How are you gentlemen !!
E.U. : All your domain are belong to us
E.U. : You are on the way to destruction
BUSH : What you say !!
E.U. : You have no chance to survive make your time
E.U. : Ha ha ha ha ....
AMBASSADOR : President !!
BUSH : Take off every 'Zig'
BUSH : You know what you doing
BUSH : Move 'Zig'
BUSH : For great justice
RUMSFELD : THEY'RE CALLED F-16'S, DUMBASS
Ok, I have an empirical proof for you. Write something nasty about every major religion, every ethnicity, and every world government. Post it on a web server in the U.S. and in Europe countries, then inform the relevant law enforcement part of the governments. Go ahead, and then tell us what happens.
Oh, and don't try to order me to convince you of anything. The game is already being played on my field. If you want us to voluntarily move it, you're going to need to be the one doing the convincing.
And while you're at it, I advise against playing the historical inevitability card. A large number of different groups have tried to explain to the U.S. people why they are on the wrong side of historical inevitability, and we remember how few of those predictions have been accurate. The only thing inevitable is change.
Stop learning! Only you can prevent esoterrorism.
It's not that people trust the US Government so much as they distrust the EU and the UN. For several excellent reasons:
(1) The UN at least has committed appalling deeds of omission and commission over the past decades in their core mission of keeping the peace. Rwanda, anyone? Srebenica? The sex-for-food deals between peacekeepers in Africa and the local 12-year-old girls? And so forth. Simply put, the UN record on their core functions is abysmal. With rare exception (WHO comes to mind), the UN in the past 60 years has succeeded at nothing and failed at many things (Korea in the 50s, N. Korea in the 90s, Iraq, Africa, the former Yugoslavia -- ach, the list goes on and on).
So, based on their historical record of spectacular incompetence, one could be forgiven for suspecting it would not be wise to trust the UN to manage a taco stand, let alone anything as mission-critical as the Internet.
(2) The EU is an unknown agency in rapid flux. No one really knows whether the EU as a quasi-government is going to be effective, because no one really knows what the heck it is, yet. This is purely the fault of the folks in Europe who have set up (or tried to set up) the beast, and who not only can't make a plain statement of what the EU government is, and is not, but also can't even convince their own citizens to vote for it in referenda. Not what I'd call a very encouraging sign.
(3) Both the UN and EU are highly undemocratic. No population directly elects representatives to the UN. Representatives aren't subject to recall, they don't have a fixed term of office, and there is no constitutional check on their powers, enforced by some kind of judiciary. (On the bright side, they also don't have much of an executive to enforce their will.) People aren't represented in the UN in proportion to their numbers (e.g. Iceland has just as many votes in the General Assembly as does the United States). And so on. Hence people very reasonably fear that the UN is too insulated from the will of the people to be trusted not to exercise any power it is given tyrannically.
(4) Neither the UN nor the EU is (yet) chartered as a regulatory body. The UN is charged essentially with keeping international peace and with voluntary efforts at promoting international welfare (like WHO and UNESCO). It was never imagined as a regulatory body, and it just isn't set up to do it at present. The EU is a better case, but only within the confines of Europe, because, of course, no one imagined it would be a regulatory body for the world. Furthermore, vide supra, the EU has not yet managed to convince Europeans that it can function as a European regulatory body. Why on Earth should Americans or Asians be convinced it can be a world regulatory body??
(5) One can be rightly suspicious that this is merely a grandstanding effort by the UN and EU and their apologists to distract the world -- or more importantly their own constituents -- from their rather substantial failures at their existing chartered missions. The UN royally upgefuckt in Iraq, and is presently doing so in the Sudan and former Yugoslavia. They have failed and continue to fail in their core mission -- keeping international peace -- with which they have been charged since 1945. Naturally they would love to see debate about the UN refocussed away from those hideous pratfalls and onto the question of whether they should manage the 'Net. Especially if the basis of the argument is "moral authority" as opposed to "competence."
Similarly, the EU is in deep doo-doo over the core missions it has already accepted from the European governments. It can't convince Europeans it should function as a government. It can't convince Britons that the Eurozone is a better deal than the pound, even with years of empirical experience to mine for evidence. It can't convince the Eastern European developing nations that its position on tax structure and investment incentives makes any damn sense fo
People vote on the DNS root, when they decide whose servers to have their machine point to. People vote on the numbering scheme, whenever they connect to someone else's network and decide to use the addresses the other network's dudes told them to use.
It's already perfectly democratic. I guess UN and EU can try to overthrow this democracy, but they will fail miserably and they'll be lucky to get 1% of the users. If EU doesn't like how their own people are voting, then they should educate people, instead of pretending that they or any other government (e.g. US) has some kind of authority over the matter. I know people are in love with communism these days, but there are some things that governments just can't plan for its little people.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Can someone explain how this will not cripple offshoring of outsourced jobs to any country that doesn't recognize the US network? If China has a seperate network, can a software company still send work to its offices there? Can they communicate besides telephone?
here:
http://www.littleitalymd.com/columbus_day.htm
you can see the ships with the Italian flag arraiving to America
I'm really confused to the specifics... what exactly does the US control? Are we talking about domain name policies?
Why do you think all these issues are popping up all of a sudden? It's because the US has been sticking its nose where it does not belong for quite some time now - even going to the extent of occupying other countries. What's to prevent them from doing a similar thing electronically? Do you seriously think that if the US held its position as the no. 1 superpower in the world responsibly, that anyone would have a problem with them controlling the internet?
Would you let someone with a history of frequent abuse baby sit your kids? Would you let a bully of a company control the supply of power to your house?
Think people! THINK!
Don't go get all patriotic about it. When you get angry about it, you stop thinking straight.
Yeh, it hurts your national pride, but there is a reason behind it and a damn good one at that.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
"The Guardian is reporting that the EU, obviously unimpressed with Linus Torvalds' and the OSDL's refusal to relinguish control of the Linux operating system, will be forming several comittees and forums with a mind to forcibly remove control of Linux from Torvalds and the OSDL." From the article: "Old allies in world politics, representatives from the UK and US sat just feet away from each other, but all looked straight ahead as Hendon explained the EU had decided to end Torvald's unilateral control of the Linux kernel and put in place a new body that would now develop this revolutionary operating system. The issue of who should control Linux had proved an extremely divisive issue, and for 11 days the world's governments traded blows. For the vast majority of people who use Linux, the only real concern is obtaining it. But with Linux now being essential to countries' basic infrastructures - the question of who has control has become critical."
This should bring a unique perspective to the situation. Taking into account that the Internet was originally a collection of US government and academic networks, was created and merged at the cost of US taxpayers, and that things like ICANN are private entities (of which the UN/EU want to take ownership over), this should be somewhat similar.
-eventhorizon
#Secret Windows Source Code, in MS C% - if (uptime >= "24 hours") then bsod() else print "Windows License Violation!"
I can't believe that ANYBODY thinks a government beaurocracy is the most efficient way to administer a resource like the Internet? Quoted from the article:
Hendon is also adamant: "The really important point is that the EU doesn't want to see this change as bringing new government control over the internet. Governments will only be involved where they need to be and only on issues setting the top-level framework."
Since when do governments "only [get] involved where they need to be"??? Is that the lesson that history teaches? Can we point to other examples of grass-roots resources like this where they were working fine, but some top-level coalition of governmental entities took control and things got even better? Or even just didn't get worse?? I think not! What is the problem they are wanting to solve? What have these other countries not been able to do because of ICANN? It's just a power grab of the most egregious kind. Should UPS or FedEx be taken over by the UN or the EU? They are also critical services to business. Think about this, people!!
Some days it's just not worth chewing through the restraints.
Sometimes freedom is more important than money..
Your use of the word freedom to describe Cuba without irony makes it pretty hard to take anything else you have to say seriously.
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
XML Tools for Mac OS X
The Internet is the result of the voluntary interconnection of a bunch of independent networks, based upon a.common set of protocols. It's the closest the modern world has come to anarchy - there is a hierarchy of technology which supports it, but real control is dispersed, because participation is by voluntary consent. Someone doesn't like the way it works - fine, here's some tools, they can go off and build their own. And that can even work, if enough people agree that's what is useful to them ( http://www.internet2.org/ ). But more likely, they'll quickly come to the realization that the Internet isn't technology or even a network, it's communications amongst consenting peers. It's part of the evolutionary path human communications has taken.
Yes, cars were invented. They myriad ways we use cars evolved from that invention.
Or maybe it's more like Myxomycophyta ( http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/protista/slimemolds.h tml ), in that the most interesting thing is the sum of the whole, not the components.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
As a European, I just wanted to say that I don't care at all where the Internet root servers are, as long as they work. While I see many Americans here reacting in anger with hurt pride, I think I should say that there are both advatages and disadvantages to the root servers being hosted internationally.
Firstly, while I doubt it would be in the US' business interest to say threaten some country with cutting off their access to the root servers, and I seriously doubt that the US would do it to developed countries, I could for instance see China or more likely North Korea getting either spotty access when relations are bad, and added to that the fact that DNS lookups would be easier to trace if the servers were in the US etc.
Secondly, I don't see any technical advantage to hosting the root servers outside the US, but I do see disadvantages in places where the level of competence is bad.
Thirdly, apart from the obviously political side of this decision (the fact that some places want to "own" their own root server and not have to wait for the US to say ok to changes etc), I think there ight be financial motives as well. The battle between Airbus and Boeing is a good example of what would be simply two companies angry because the other is successful getting taken to the highest level of government because of the amounts of money involved, and the amount of nationalistic hubris it invokes is similar to this decision, because people mistake a company in their country as somehow being symbolic of their country. In other words I suspect that there is suspicion at certain levels that the US might try to use its dominance in the internet to further its businesses (see which company is communicating to which other through DNS lookups etc) much as the US claims that its defense spending on Boeing is not subsidies but Europe's spending on Airbus is subsidies.
Sadly, I doubt that a matter as nationalistically chared as this will be able to get reasonably discussed.
A fun article from Time tells about those altruistic folks when they got hungry at the UN cafeteria one day.
Illi mors gravis incubat qui notus nimis omnibus ignotus moritur sibi.
Okay, my turn! RE the U.N. The U.N. is a political smoke and mirrors act. It is structured to give a few "enlightened" countries power (the big bad veto countries) while at the same time spouting the rhetoric of international cooperation. It's a colosseum where we can watch realpolitikal gladiators without worrying about the knife turning in our direction. Whether it should or shouldn't be this way is a separate arguement, but let's not pretend that the UN represents any kind of international consensus. RE "the internet" It's amazing what wisdom lies in fiction. "Control of a thing lies in the ability to destroy it" (give you three guesses). As seen in all these other posts, no country can do more than give the internet a temporary black eye and lose all credibility. No nation-state, company, or any other organization currently has or ever will have "control" of the internet. RE ICANN ICANN is a business. Period. The laws of economics and the trend toward globalization will rend this arguement moot in another decade. ICANN evolves too slowly, it will fade away in favor of something better - maybe "open" root servers?! (Anarchy! Anarchy! People can't be trusted with such a large project - we need big business! Who will pay my campaign fees?! Vote as you're told! umm.... hello?.....anybody listening anymore?) ...........the remainder of this post was lost after TUX took over the world and the internet died from lack of governmental support.............
He who would be a man, must be a nonconformist. -- Emerson
US Americans shouldn't be wondering why "the world" doesn't like you, because their current government pulls those stunts regularly, with blatant disregard for other nations interests and souvereignity and treaties with them, while demanding them to not interfere with the interests of the US ruling class (you should always ask yourself if you would be happy if that happened to you - from getting invaded over having your president imprisoned [or whatever you have as head of government] to being randomly shot on the street). Eg. the invasion in Iraq was for oil only. Sure, the US as a nation did earn nothing but the hatred of the international community due to illegaly violating another nations sovereignity, but do you really think that the corporations and their puppet government care about their reputation more than it brings them money?
The US promised to relinquish control over the root servers to an international body. Bush doesn't want to do that. Therefore, the international community is pissed. The issue is only about the control of the servers, i.e. new TLDs and all the other stuff ICANN currently does. No one asks the US to physically hand over the servers, but that everyone has a say in what is going to be done (okay, so in a sense the US has to hand over ICANN...). As it stands, the US could bring down the internet in part or completely at a whim, which is to be considered dangerous for such an important infrastructure. That couldn't happen in an internationally controlled environment, because everyone would block what isn't to their liking - of course, that would make improvements harder, but it is often stressed by posters in favor of the status quo, that under the US the internet already works good. Or they just keep the ICANN or make a similar institution, except that it answers to the UN instead of the US - changing nothing but making it to nothing more than a question of power for everyone, but especially for the current imperialistic US government (btw, imperialism can be limited to influence [in contrast to actual occupation (eg. Iraq)], so don't tell me that you aren't imperialistic).
If somebody says, the EU should build their own root servers, I would say, nothing better than that (you can be sure that such a system would be rapidly adopted, in contrast to DNS-servers of individuals etc.). But the primary interest of the EU/UN is to find a solution together with the US, something the current US government can't deal with, because they don't understand consensus but only "either for me or against me". If the EU/UN has to go on their own, a system deployed by them without the US would be a superset of the current root servers, therefore EU citizens wouldn't note the existence of two different systems (until the US decides not to coexist, eg. when a site is registered in the EU, but the registration is not accepted by the US and subsequently given to another person/corporation/etc. in the US, creating conflicting registrations), while US citizens would have an internet which would be significantly smaller with time and would steadily encounter broken links and similar problems - therefore, "we" wouldn't have a problem, but "you" would.
This sentiment might not be popular but well I see it like this.... If Europe really wants to get control of the DNS root servers from the US let them... If they actually not only talk about it but do it... some control of the DNS root servers could be a reward fo getting off their butts and doing something instead of talking about it. Realization that doing stuff instead of talking about doing stuff could change Europe forever.
Without France the US may not have existed but then you Yanks find it convenient to forget this just because they wouldn't kiss your ass over the unnecessary war in Iraq.
Actually it was people like Thomas Paine, an American, who inspired revolutionaries in both the US and France, especially his "Common Sense" and "Rights of Man". And at least the US didn't have a Maximilien Robespierre and didn't go through The Reign of Terror.
FalconOoh and btw, like France I was against the US invading Iraq, at least without UN support.
Should there be a Law?
I'm not sure if the author of this article has been following the political situation here in the US that well
The British got to define the Prime Meridian based on their global empire. Subsequently this has defined GMT. Wouldn't it make more sense for GMT to be based on New York (the center of the World Financial System and headquarters of the United Nations)?
They defined their own meridian and everyone else decided to use it.
I'm glad that GMT doesn't get turned over to anyone else; at least half of Americans (and many Europeans, and Microsoft) don't even know what GMT is (they think it is British local time). On one web server I use that gives event times in GMT and a US timezone, there were endless problems because people turned up an hour late for events during the northern summer. Eventually they solved the problem by only using the US timezone and not offering times in GMT.
thank god
Crisis is the rule, not the exception.
Hmmm ... that didn't make sense. Do you even know what 'OTOH' stands for?
Check this out:
1) The crusades - all about ethnic and religous cleansing to such a degree that centuries later, the entire middle east is still pissed of about it.
2) When the europeans came to the americas they killed the natives by sending blankets laced with smallpox. Genocide on a continental scale!
3) Stalin - Ask the Ukranians what a nice guy he was!
4) H*tler - well, you know
5) The colonization of Africa and apartheid - The dutch and germans speak so funny!
This is just the tip of the iceburg and I've listed some of the atrocities in history that make you ashamed to be human.
So please don't moralize to anybody. About anything. I would go down to the bunkers, turn out the lights and hope the rest of the world forgets about you forever. You've done enough damage here already.
Want to start counting European unpaid debts from the Marshall Plan and factor in inflation and interest?
The Marshall plan was the equivalent of Microsoft giving out free copies of Windows and Office to school boards. Yes, it helps out, but it also gets them hooked on Microsoft product and the upgrades aren't free.
You may consider the Marshall Plan "unpaid debt", but the massive economic hooks it latched into Europe have brought back untold profits.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
" but the EU will not accept the current situation anymore "
What *is* the current situation?
Its not clear what you mean. Simply the root servers? That's easy. Set up your own root servers. Congratulations. You just need to convince ISP's to pay attention to those servers.
IP allocation? Go to IPV6 and we don't need to have this conversation anymore.
I suspect this is all about control of content and or some sort of levy/fee system, not about anything technical. The U.S. has a much different view on free speech than the EU and most of the rest of the world, one that can't be easily reconciled. There are probably some financial implications that are playing a role as well.
I'd like to understand what "control" means before anything is changed.
But the bottom line to me is if the EU would take the technical lead by heavily promoting IPV6 and all associated protocols, they might gain control the old fashioned way: innovate your way to the top.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
And I just can't wait until the UN/EU tries to impose a "Root Fee" to pay for managing it
Then I'll set up my own root server and your welcome to join me or use your own! Either way it doesnt matter in the slightest as the internet cannot be controlled. It isnt controled by the US (who doesnt even control the root servers seeing alot of them are in other countries!)
This whole issue is a hodgepodge of bad reporting, inflamatory comments, and worse desisions (on the part of the UN's WGIG).
USA never actually having had the idea of changing they government type or ways of working never needed to trash their constitution and get a new one.
Actually some revolutionaries, Founding Fathers, believed a new constitution should be written every so often. Thomas Jefferson once said "God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion."
FalconShould there be a Law?
We are discussing this because the US government is not allowing ICANN to administer the root servers, it is keeping them itself. I don't really know why this is such an issue though. I don't see why other countries don't just set up their own DNS root servers, and have the IETF publish a new RFC suggesting that queries to root DNS servers are validated by root servers controlled by multiple entities.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You don't get it. If Bell did not come up with the basic foundation, you wouldnt have the ability to have any different sets of numbers. Plus, analogies go only so far. The way the internet works, we have root servers. They have to be situated somewhere. In this case, they are situated in the US where the base technology was invented. DNS does NOT work without TCP/IP. TCP/IP works without DNS.
As for where the CRT was made, yea, everyone can go look it up at good ole wikipedia. But in your fervor you seem to have missed the big "if" and that I was making a hypothetical to demonstrate a point. Where the CRT was actually developed totally is not the point.
Interesting. Thanks!
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
One question:
Can you trust places like Iran and China controlling your access to information?
the post said invented, not implemented. Read Montesquieu , Voltaire, Locke et al. if you want to see where the idea came from.
The US constitution may be a marvellous document, but it was not dreamed up from scratch by a bunch of hick plantation owners and yankee merchants (aka founding fathers). It's more of a greatest hits compilation of 18th century European social philosophy.
The author of this post asserts his moral rights.
We should already be out. It's not like the whole world doesn't hate us anyway. "Force" control? LoL. Good luck fuckers!
Since when does America control the Internet?
You don't trust the EU, fine, but why should the EU rely on a bunch of pro-military freaks for key communication systems ?
ICANN are a bunch of pro-military freaks? The US Department of Commerce are a bunch of pro-military freaks? WTF?
And if you are going to throw flamebaiting insults then let me add one to the pile: Why should we trust a bunch of appeasing buracractic cheese-eating surrender monkey's with vital communication systems?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
*sighs*
.GOV, .US, .EDU, .MIL domains plus any new ones that may be added. And now someone else will have the final word on domain naming in the rest of the world, and will decide if domains like .EU, and .UN will be added or not, and if so who gets which name.
... IPv6 will add so many more addresses that this problem disappears.
... where is the big US interest in all this? The Internet is nothing if not modular. And as far as I can see, nothing the proposed new root servers can do will impinge on the US. Why? Because all US users and all US DNS servers will continue to take their cue from a US root server. They will never even need to connect to a non-US DNS server. And when others want to access US servers ..., if they want a connection, they will just have to follow the directions handed to them by US DNS servers.
... how problematic is that?
Why is everyone suddenly so excited about this development?
As others said, the US will retain control of those parts in the DNS servers that relate to US servers: the
Now there might be a bone of contention with IP addresses because they are getting scarce. However
So err
It's only when clients from inside the US want to access outside servers (e.g. those of US companies abroad) that domains under foreign control will play a role.
Now err
A separate executive outside of the legislature came about not from republican examples from history, but from the British monarchy and its distinction from Parliament.
Actually, the British Monarch by tradition is not separate from Parliament, but part of Parliament. That's a little known fact - Parliament officially consists of three parts, the House of Commons, the House of Lords, and the King/Queen.
Of course, in reality, the distinction of executive and legislative power has been established for ages. However, the monarch could still, in theory, withhold the Royal Assent to any bill that has passed the two houses, and without the Royal Assent, it does not become law. This power of the monarch has not been invoked since the 18th century.
Nah, why bother? EU and rest of the world should just set up their DNS servers and do bussines as usual (yes, this is one of the proposed measures, make their own and leave US to have its own). Since US is now problematic to work with, you know, e-mail is a little problematic when two sets of dns servers do their job, they should concentrate their trading to those who are internet accessible.
Problem for US is that US is not a good buyer, but they are happy to sell or enforce. So deduct EU and rest of the world export trade, and US has all: "zero export", "recession" and "their own internet". Still happy with your proposal?
Now there is a problem for your logic. No invasion where army would be included, but no way of defending against it. Actualy EU and the rest are giving you whole internet (which is used in US as "International Net", and the rest on some UNnet as "united nations net", funny thing is that now "international means america only"), they are not taking something away. Will America attack the world and enforce their internet on them, like first they don't want to give now they would like the rest to use it?
p.s. Reason why UN is taking these steps is to avoid any such future, but world economy is too dependant on Interrnet to be in the hands of one coutry. I just hope that small number of US people is as stupid as you.
Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
Something most people don't know, at one tyme Hamas was officially registered and recognized within Israel. As a counter to Fatah specifically and the PLO in general Israel supported Hamas.
Should there be a Law?
Sometimes freedom is more important than money..
Amusing that you say this in relation to Cuba, a country which has neither freedom nor money.
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
Slashdot will be the first among many websites the Chinese/Iranians/Africans remove from the root servers if they get control. The Chinese do not want anyone to criticize them, or proliferate the concept of freedom or democracy among their people. And, they'd love to have the ability to remove that right from everyone else on the Internet. The muslims are intolerant of other people and religions in the world, and they'll act on that discrimination the moment they get this kind of control. Africa is a conglomerate of warlords at the moment, raping and pillaging villages and creating widespread disease and poverty, who knows what they desire with this kind of control. As for Europe, I sincerely believe that their differences of opinion country to country can hardly be represented by a federation as is represented in the European Union.
I believe that it is time for many people, the world over, to start memorizing IPs before the freedom of thought we enjoy today is rolled over like people standing before tanks. By the very people intended to be its caretakers, just as the firefighters in Fahrenheit 451 later became the arsonists of free thought.
My feelings toward the U.N. right now are this; if you want to control the Internet, that is fine, but we'll take our military elsewhere. In all of the battles the U.N. has fought, the U.S. military took the brunt of the cost in men and greenbacks. We never complained, and we were always there to kick butt for justice and peace. We were there for the U.N. in Iraq in the '90s when they were invading some neighbors, launching missiles at Israel, and gasses others. We were there when the U.N. needed help in Kosovo, when Milosevic was crushing his people and threatening peace in Europe itself. We were even there in Somalia, during a time rife with the same kind of pillaging and raping occuring more frequently today in Africa. We've participated in missions for them that have never been publicized, for the sake of stability in the world.
Right now the U.N. needs us more than we need it, and this kind of political action against the U.S. is just going to create a division between us at a time when we are needed more than ever. The U.S. has proven that it is highly capable of engaging in and successfully completing missions abroad without guidance or control from the U.N., we do not simply exist to be bodies for their wars. I for one will not miss having our soldiers do battle on behalf of the U.N.
What have you become when your ranks are filled with Chinese, EU, Iranian and African soldiers? You are what you eat, and what you've eaten is communism, socialism, capitalism, totalitarianism, fascism, and despotism. The U.N. is becoming an -ism, and those are never good for a majority of the people, only ever an elite miniority. And, if I may finally invoke Godwin's law and render my contribution to this conversation useless. It's existance was only ever meant to be a collaboration of allies to prevent what Hitler brought about with his own form of fascism from ever happening again. That same need drove the action against Kosovo, even though many Americans wondered why their sons and daughters were being sent to a country that no one here knew nor cared about.
Keep your berets U.N., we are still the home of the brave and land of the free.
And here I am stuck without mod points again...
Many Bothans died to bring you this sig.
They should build their OWN DNS inafstructure if it's that important. It is not only unfair but stupid to demand that you are dependant on the ifastructure of a foriegn country so they should give you control. The US depends on Saudi oil. Should Saudi be required to give the US control of the oil wells there? Hell no.
If DNS is an important resoruce to your nation, and you don't want it in the hands of the US, make your own. You can setup your own roots. They are even free to use ICANN's zone file. Then, if they do something you don't like, you can split. But to say that because YOU need it the US should give it to you when you didn't spend a dime on it is just stupid.
Due to recent events in politics, it's safe to move away from US dependencies. After attack to iraq, holding illegal prisoners from other countries in Guantanamo, torturing prisoners (arar maher), trying to ban abortion, trying to stop teaching of evolution, cheap rhetorics (if you're not with us you are against us, "dead or alive", or "axis of evil"), a president who needs to advertise he reads books at vacations, total information awareness program, faith based initiatives, religious fanatics in power, banning stem cell research, denying global warming, lousy diebold voting machines, rejecting Kioto treaty, rejecting evidence on environmental decay, fake school essays motivating war to iraq, countless outright lies, billions of dollars lost from Iraq oil revenue, project for new american century, two party system bullying, and of course jeff gannon, it seems to be very rational to lose dependencies.
Perhaps US people should just live their own lives, and accept that others do not want to have the same problems!
No. Because then the date line (meridian opposite of the prime meridian) would pass through heavily inhabited zones (Asia) rather than through the Pacific, which would be kind of disruptive.
The date line is not entirely a meridian... it jumps around a bit to accomodate islands and nations that insist on celebrating the New Year before everyone else.
And there's no need for it to be 180 degrees opposite universal time (~ GMT). It just worked out that way.
It would actually be simpler if time zone offsets were measured from the eastern side of the date line instead of from GMT. Then you would only have to add time offsets to get local time from universal time (unless I've switched it around).
Not that it makes any difference, really. Like the root servers, the important thing is that it exists. Its actual location is not really that important, except to the sort of bureaucratic busybodies found in abundance at the UN.
Karl Auerbach, who served on the ICANN board as the first (and last) North American representative for the short period that ICANN allowed elected representatives on their board, basically (with the help of the Electronic Frontier Foundation) had to sue ICANN to get access to ICANN records so he could perform his board duties. Archives on that legal fight are here:
http://www.eff.org/Infrastructure/DNS_control/ICAN N_IANA_IAHC/Auerbach_v_ICANN/
Karl's opinions (and blog) may be found on his web site:
http://www.cavebear.com/
While I don't agree with Karl on several issues, I agree with his general assessment that ICANN is not looking after your (or my) interests. Karl has written on ICANN's abuse and misuse of their status many times - browse his blog. So long as the U.S. government, and the root name servers it controls, continues the accepted convention in following ICANN there is no good end in sight to its misuse of its position.
Now compare ICANN with the ITU. The ITU (International Telecommunications Union, formerly CCITT) has been around over 100 years and has members from just about every country on the globe. (ITU lineage predates the UN by many decades.) The ITU define standards (a.k.a. "recommendations") that have made it possible for you to pick up your phone and be able to call anyone else anywhere in the world who has a dialable phone number. Without them, the global telephone system and the global Internet almost certainly wouldn't exist as we know it.
If no harm or censor of content has come to the global telephone system under the gentle auspices of the ITU, then I think fretting over ITU control of the Internet root domain name servers is probably misplaced.
"Europe designed and built the world wide web and should control it."
Great. You can have it.
By the way, you do realize that the WWW is independent of the internet, correct? Or perhaps its more accurate to say that the WWW is like telnet, only prettier but less useful.
Psh as long as they're using ASCII it's all good. =)
Oh dear. Who created the letters of the alphabet that those socket libraries, RFC systems, programming languages. The United States?
Actually, the alphabet they usually used is American in immediate origin.
Meet ASCII:
!"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;?
@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_
`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~
Programmers who are not native English speakers are well aware of ASCII and its limitations.
Of course, ASCII is based on Arabic numerals and Roman (+ Carolingian) letters, and so on back to the Phoenicians and before.
International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
http://icann.org/faq/#WhatisICANN
not uscann
not uncann
even if they got control, they couldn't control shit.
if they sucked, another icann would be started.
..we should control the worlds phone lines!
(He was born in Edinburgh. If an American invented something in another country, you can bet anything that it would be trumpeted as a US invention. And before any Americans complain: We gave you refrigeration, antibiotics, television, pneumatic tyres, waterproof clothing, tarmac, percussion cap firearms, bicycles and the template for your Declaration of Independence (See Declaration of Arbroath 1320). Oh, and we founded your Navy too.)
What kind of idiot would make a foriegn controlled network an intergral part of their government infrasturcture? Every country should maintain their own secure mirror of the DNS if they are that worried about it. So what if no one outside of Brazil can access the Brazilian taxation system, that kind of Internet fracturing doesn't bother me. The USA has ours, you should have your own.
We are all just people.
I can't wait till the 'net becomes even more partitioned. I'm already enjoying the fruits of the Cogent/Level3 hissy fight.
"34. Decides to remain seized of the matter and to take such further steps as may be required for the implementation of the present resolution and to secure peace and security in the area."
All your above quoting does nothing to change the fact that it is the *UN* that 'decides', and the UN which has to determine the 'further steps'. It *nowhere* says a member state is automatically and unilaterally allowed to invade Iraq, as the parent poster said.
Thus, it was for the UN to decide, not for the US... a difference that many USA-citizens don't seem to realise. And, as we all know, the UN (as determined by the vast majority of its members) did NOT agree with an invasion. Thus, trying to portray as if the USA did what the UN had ordained, while the UN itself was of a totally other opinion, just shows how arogant the US really is. The UN is *not* the US, and doesn't have to do what the US thinks it should do, and when the UN does not do what you want, don't pretend that you are still doing something in accordance with the UN.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
How to Revoke Control from ICANN for Dummies
.com requests to the new name assignment server
1. setup new servers with the same info as the current root servers.
2. setup a new body to handle name allocation etc.
3. pass an agreement between UN nations to start using these servers at a specific time
4. have UN nations pass laws that ISP must use the new servers no later than some specific date
5. have the new servers automatically redirect the
- done
If the US doesn't play along, their web sites are no longer accessible on the UN network unless they also register on the UN network. After a while, some sites on the UN network would not be accessible to US residents w/o using the IP address.
Basically, the UN network would be the biggest darknet out there.
Before you go trying to wrest control of anything consider http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montana_Freemen Taking things from governments gets you dead.
We are all just people.
We're going as fast as we can. Be patient.
We are all just people.
This leaving the US in control of the forwarding, so if for example the US decided to rough up Venezuala a little they can stop forwarding
A few things, but foremost, lets get rid of this charade that the UN is a democracy. Name one country where the people of that country vote for their UN representative. Sure, the reps vote, but who votes for them? No one. People who are appointed to their post voting amongst themselves is an extremely loose definition of democracy.
Next, Democracy does not equal freedom. Many posters on here seem to think that the result of a democratic vote is 'people choosing for themselves'. This is rediculous. When people are free to choose for themselves, no one is free to vote on something. The result of a democratic vote is one group of people choosing for everyone else, thus violating the minorities right to decide for themselves. If everyone is free to choose for themselves, then no one has the right to vote on it.
Next, one HUGE difference between the US and many other countries that just makes all of this worse is the fundamental difference between the US legal system and many others: in the US, you are free to do anything unless there is a law prohibiting it, whereas for example in Britain from what I understand you are not free to do something unless there is a law allowing it. To americans it makes absolutely no sense to talk of democracy in the context of 'increasing' rights; when you vote in the US, unless youre voting to do away with or modify an exising law, by default you are ~decreasing~ the amount of rights people had before the vote. Sometimes its a necessary trade off, such as welfare; but make no mistake that the enactment of welfare was a ~decrease~ in americans rights to keep the fruits of their labor (and no, Im not anti-welfare per se, its just an example). Minimum wage laws remove the right to work from people who's labor is worth less than the minimum wage, etc.
Next, the majority does ~not~ rule, no. If no single individual has the right to dictate to you the choices you have to make in life, then niether does a group of individuals. If a person alone tells you you have to do something, you laugh and say whatever, then that individual goes and stands in a group with others and they all vote to have you do that thing, there is ~no~ difference. Merely because one is among a group, ones rights do not increase. New rights dont magically appear. No group has any more or less rights than an individual. There is ~No Such Thing~ as a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Euros rightfully complain about the influence of religon in the current US admin all the while most european countries poltical systems are based on the secular religous belief of a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Well, fuck that religon just as strongly as organized religon.
Next, democracy is a means to an end, not an end in itself. That end is individual freedom. It does no good to do away with a monarch without doing away with the authority the monarch had. If you remove a monarch and just transfer his authority to 'the people', youre just creating multiple monarchs. Its not how one weilds control over others that is right or wrong, its the fact that one ~has~ control over others that is just plain wrong.
Next, a free country is not a country that is just not 'beholden' to another. A free country is a country where individuals are free to live their lives as they wish, without a govt or their neighbors deciding for them. Some shleprock called Cuba a free country; thats fucking rediculous, and yes Ive been there. If you arent free to keep the fruits of your labor, youre not free. Americans are very sensative to that, perhaps having to do with a little civil war we had a while back you may have heard of.
Lastly, govt legislation is not some 'will of the people/society'. First, that limits society to only those eligible to vote. Second, unless your country has laws that require representatives to vote the way a majority of their constituents tell them to vote, you have no guarantee that the constituents agree. It would be absolutely rediculous for example to claim that american
Who has the most to gain from UN control of the internet?
WIPO.
with control of the root DNS wipo and their allies could effectively govern the internet on behalf of the **AA's, erasing web pages at will without accountability, implementing "filtering" and "great firewalls" to isolate traffic between nations for the sake of their all mighty content monopolies.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Def. == Sentiments == A personal belief that is not founded on proof or certainty. I am a lurker. I often feel challenged in my grasp of some of the issues you /.'rs get into, and I learn a lot.
HOWEVER in this instance I see little fire tons of smoke and a bad smell. Everyone (mostly) concerned owuld be likely to agree gov't is not *wanted* however in the case of china frinstance maybe they will have to be put up with (kinda).
The last thing then that 'we' would want is to let our subliminal, kneejerk, flag saluting childhood (and beyond) conditioning to interfere with what is essentialy a people on the street vs "the man" type issue. Which point I'm sure is *clear* to all but the most immersed participants in this most caninely characterised event (anybdynoticethe s?)
So not to belabour a point, but buck up boys and girls, get it straight, Nations feed on cities feed on towns feed on countrysides. PEOPLE get short changed unless they *act* . And nature, the only really negentropic phenomenae in the visible universe has time on its side...
"No, as far as I understand it, the US maintains that it is a sovereign nation which does not require authorization from the UN to act."
And , by the some token (and logic) any other country can maintain it is a sovereign nation, which does not require authorization from the UN to act - even if that 'act' is an invasion of another sovereign country.
So, in fact, you are claiming that might = right?
Strange, the purpose of the UN was exactly to avoid this reasoning between countries, I thought.
But basically, it follows that, if China becomes a superpower in 20 years, and the USA has become weaker, it would be ok for china to invade the USA, and the UN should just let it happen and say nothing about it?
I mean, China is a sovereign country, no? Thus, it's not bound by the UN, correct? Thus, if it disagrees with the UN 'now and then', and decides to invade the USA or another country, that would be in full accordance with your reasoning, not?
Well, if one subscribes to that sort of viewpoint and reasoning, then why bother making international rules anyway? You are entitled to break them anyway when it fits you, apparently.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
For all intents and purposes, we did that yesterday.
HAND,
George
1. If they need control, what do they plan to change?
2. Who's going to make me change the root.cache on my nameservers? Because until I do, Euro roots don't and won't exist for my users.
As admins, control of the Internet goes to those we route to, and those roots we cache. If Euro server admins go along with this power grab and split the namespace by changing their root caches, that's their call I guess. But I can't see American operators joining them, or US Telcos siding with the EU.
The real power is still the root.cache file. I won't be pointing to the EU/UN.
Simply put it is because of how the US courts and laws protect the accused and freedoms. In other countries or even in the UN there are leaders and groups that dislike total freedom of information. Such places as china have shown they block information that is negative towards the way their country is run. It is imparative that the US keep control of the DNS root servers so that people will not be denyed a domain or have one taken away for actions that are purely distributing safe public information that everyone should have.
If not to gather information, learn, and help other people what do we do in life?
If you're going to use bold capitalized letters surrounded by underscores to make your points, please have a clue about what you are talking about before you say the U.S. government has nothing to do with the Internet.
Please watch this interview with Robert Kahn, the other co-inventor of TCP/IP and the originator of DARPA's Internet Program:
http://qanda.org/Program/?ProgramID=1036
Fuck'em. Cut our links, let them have it. Just opens up more TLDs/IPs for us. It will suck being cut off from BBC.com, but other than that, I think I will survive.
-William
God is everything science has yet to explain.
Well, whatever.
But....
You're not in a hurry?! Have you looked at European demographics lately? Calculated what a 1.2 children/woman birthrate does for your population, long-term? Figured out how many 55-year-old full-medical-benefits retirees each European worker is expected to support in 15 years (after 15 more years of 1% annual economic growth rate, I might add)? Or thought fully through the implications of that burgeoning and wholly unassimilated Islamic subculture?
I find it actually plausible that the Eurozone and the EU Constitution referenda this year will prove to be the high-water mark of classical European governance. That is, I think there's a good chance it's now too late for a pan-European government within traditional post-war European secular socialist values. It's going to be either Balkanization and lifeboat-running-out-of-food mutual cannibalism or the Islamic deluge.
Either way, good luck. Got a feeling y'all are going to need it.
Alright, sounds good. I will not use HTTP, if you will not use TCP/IP.
-William
God is everything science has yet to explain.
any idiot knows you don't pay for something unless you'll get a return-- preferably a big fat filthy rich return. (isn't that the american way? where you been?)
and, hey, whaddya know, how often does big american money go toward any horror show any where when there wouldn't be a big fat geopolitical return, in the form of material wealth or in the form of a puppet-government that actually established resources and infrastructure to control?
which includes.... most of sub-saharan africa, rwanda when it mattered, timor when it mattered. you think we gave war machines to colombia, stinger missiles to taliban "freedom fighters", spend billions of dollars liberating/killing iraqi citizens, and tried "cleaning up" french indochina because we just love to spend money lending a nice big helping hand?
i'm sure i sound cynical, maybe i'll even get modded down by the jingo squad, but pick up a history book sometime. or read the CIA world factbook-- it's great.
now i'm going to put it simply in a way that i think everyone might be able to understand: money. and. power. motivates. the bulk. of global politics. and "mess" management.
anyway, half of "America" despises where the nation is heading. dear rest of the world: please keep that in mind. don't be a fool. thank you.
The Russians were the first to put satellites in space. Would the US prefer that regulation of space-related issues be managed by Russia, or by an independent international body ?
Utter Hogwash
You have summed it up right there. Anyone bright enough to look at the underlying issues here will see that for the last few years, (while the EU has been organizing), countries have been trying to 'take on the super-power' to establish their political clout with the international community. France and Germany have been the biggest 'Veto-holders,' in both the UN and EU - where they hope to (as every country would like to be) take a major, if not top, seat in the 'union' that could potentially challenge the US as the world super-power. Don't forget that the leaders of these countries have been elected or stay elected and popular on little merit besides their 'ability' to stand up to the US in the UN.
The truth is that there is nothing wrong with how the internet is currently administered; the UN has lost all credibility to the US populace (who wonders why boatloads of our tax money is sent to them while they don't thank us for our contribution, but expect it and ask for more. i.e. 'Let's eradicate world hunger and poverty with your money, your citizens love taxes, we know this').
The UN is a wonderful idea and its aims are usually morally sound and just; but too many times they have been inept in practice and completely butcher justice and 'peace-keeping' efforts.
While I can't see it happening, I have long awaited the day when the US ditches the UN in an empty parking lot like the whiny and expensive tag-along poser it is. What would happen? I dare the WTO to place embargo's and trade bans on the US. It would hurt our economy, yes, but the rest of the world would scream and crumble without sucking on the tit of the American consumer. The US is still the major trade hub of the world. Need proof? Look to 9/11, look to history. Every American economic recession since WW1 has been magnified in other countries.
All of this political noise is saber-shaking, and nothing more. We don't need, nor do I support military action to get our way. We vote in this country, and under the system of capitalism, the world still bows to the all-mighty dollar. Not because it is so strong, but because so many consumers are holding it.
"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to govern any other" -John Ada
While I believe that some antagonistic feelings for the US are founded; most are incredibly hypocritical and convoluted when one removes the labels and names to look at the situations. Why? Because every other country in the world would have acted just as bad or honorable as the US has throughout history.
When it comes to the 'big game' the 'coach' always puts in the best players, those with the best 'record.'
How is this any different?
"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to govern any other" -John Ada
The only thing that still keeps the US economy afloat is the fact that for most countries is US a primary export partner. If you decided to boycott for example EU or China, they would have no reason to prop US economy by holding the US dollar in reserves. So they would release the extremly large quantities of US dollars that they hold in their national banks. Either one of them doing this would bring the dollar to half its worth instantly and this would trigger other countries getting rid of it.
Not only would that instantly ground the US economy to halt and create extrem e shortages of goods and sky rocketing prices on everything, it would constantly cancel your country's credit rating and anything you would want would need to be domestically produced. And while most of military contractors are by law local companies, the lack of credit and inability to get deficit budget, would make you sacrifice quite a lot of social, educational and infrastructure programs spiraling your economy further down by ever increasing pace.
I don't say the rest of the world would not feel it, China could say good bye to an economic growth for a decade and Europe would be hard pressed to find alternative markets, the world economy would go into a recession for quite some time, but the rest of the world would get eventually out of it, but I doubt the US would be ever again a power of any sort.
The only diplomatic reason I see for this not happening at this time is that the world has enough problems to deal with one country being so poor that they have to sell all their nukes on the black market. Nobody needs another Russia right now.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
1. I think the centralization of root servers in the US is a problem.
.br, make it the primary record of .br domains,
2. It's hard to define which entity is most suitable to handle global TLDs.
So why not start by doing something everyone would agree?
Passing controls of ccTLDs back to such country if she wish to.
Let Brazil handle the their own
then the blash blash 90% tax collection issue is gone.
> Let's see how long your dad holds together without the monetary support of my
> dad.
Just a point; if anyone tried to destroy my dad monetarily, the effect on your dad would be easily as bad. The dependency works both ways. Yes, my dad is dependent of foreign trade, but most of the dads we trade with are dependent on it as well. Some dads would just suffer loss of income and products, but many would suffer pains equal to some of the worst natural disasters.
> And people with your attitude wonder why there is so much rampant
> anti-Your-dadism around the world today. You're too arrogant and conceited
> to see it.
Just a point. My dad knows a few hundred million people. All of them are not arrogant and conceited, any more than all the people your dad knows are rude and smelly, all people knowing arab-dad are terrorists, or all people knowing asian-dad are great at math.
Yes, there are legitimate grievances against my dad. But much or what is perceived as arrogance from my dad is merely my dad's attempting to retain his own constitutional structure. A large portion of your dads want my dad to tear up our constitution and remake ourselves in the image of your dad. And we aren't interested, now or ever.
> Thank goodness 99% of the people who know your dad are fantastic people and
> don't live up to this stereotype.
Good to hear it. But stereotypes are like that. Most of the what your dad knows about my dad is garbage, heavily influenced by actor-dad. Just as most of what my dad knows about his dad is from actor-dad bull and news-dad showing scenes of war and terror.
Thanks for your observations.
My UID is prime. Hah!
I'm sorry but you'll need to change www.whitehouse.gov to www.usa.gov, since there are other white houses owned by various governments all over world. Shurely you understand, mr. bland-of-free?
How long until the DoD starts to ban some zones based on "security concerns"? I can see mid-east zones out of reach because they were "supporting terrorism"...
Now it may be good for you, because you were attacked by some people related to, but for the rest of the world, that is just innaceptable, because you would be doing the exact same thing you are criticizing: banning something based on their ideas (like some europeans countrys do with nazis). Don't tell me "that's not going to happen!!", you live in a country where that's exactly the kind of things that happens (McCarthy anyone?)...
And is not like I don't want to convince you, is that I don't need to convince you of anything...
Insightful, informative, call it what you want, but it's nice to see an accurate portrayal of the situation. As a Canadian citizen, I've had the next-door-neighbor view of the United States. The truth is, I don't trust your administration. I have no qualms with the American people by and large, except that they don't seem interested in holding their administration accountable for lies, lies and damn lies.
Many people in this thread are saying that 'the US doesn't have control, the companies do'. Sorry if that doesn't exactly put my mind at ease. Most of these companies are based out of the US. What if the administration decides that country X is a threat, and demands that all communications (including DNS resolution for domains under that suffix) be blocked? Do you really think those companies are going to go against the government? Failure to do so would surely be treason, and I don't think they're interested in opening that can of worms.
Perhaps some people missed that article on CNN the other day regarding Bush's proposal to be granted the ability to call the military into a policing role on American soil 'in case of a flu pandemic'. In other words, he wants the ability to call martial law into effect by himself, without the approval of Congress or any others. The way your government positions themselves, the way they deal with foreign countries... it doesn't make me feel inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt.
I don't have a grudge against Americans. I don't hate or despise Americans. But I do fear them. I'm afraid of what the government might do on a whim. They invaded foreign countries under false premise. They seek more and more power. They cut funding where it's needed and appoint morons to important roles (New Orleans levee & FEMA director, anyone?). They make me fear for my freedom and the safety of myself and my fellow Canadians.
I completely understand why the rest of the world is unwilling to leave sole power over the internet's inner working in the hands of the USA. At the same time, I don't believe the UN is the body to take control. They're broken, and I don't know if they can be fixed. As for the EU, I'm not entirely certain that they are the body to seek ownership of this either. I still feel unnerved about the USA, but lacking any other organized, capable body to deal with this, I'm not sure there's an immediate solution in the visible future.
Shame then, that he's quoted as saying "I am not one of those hyphenated Americans that claims allegiance to two countries" and had on his tombstone enscribed "died a citizen of the United States".
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
> Well, since your #2 already includes and goes beyond this point (because it doesn't
> matter if they are free or not, they shouldn't be treated equal anyway), your point
> 1 is irrelevant.
You missed the point, so apparenly I didn't explain it well enough. The UN (on paper at least) is dedicated to the basic values of Western Civilization; Individual Liberty, Representive Government, the Rule of Law instead of Men, Freedom of Speech and Thought, etc. But in practice the majority of the voting members in the General Assembly are dead set against all of those core values. Seating dictators, despots and barbarians in larger numbers than the civilized nations was a fatal flaw of a totally different order than the serious but more managable flaw of equating every nation regardless of level of development, population, natural resources, land area, etc.
> Ah yes, because, according to the USA some countries are more equal then others.
> Especially those that do the bidding of the USA.
Come again? Booting out unfree nations would still leave plenty of sworn enemies of US policy (if not the US itself) such as France and Germany. But while we can (and obviously do) disagree with France, they are at least worthy of expending the effort to disagree with. On the other hand, of what possible weight are the views of Castro's Cuba in the councils of civilized nations? Their vote at the UN represents the view of exactly ONE wicked old man. And that is the problem with the UN.
> Now, who will decide which one is less?
Which IS the million dollar question. And which is why I wasn't outlining what the replacement for the UN would look like, only that the the current incarnation is so fatally flawed that it should be discarded and efforts to formulate a replacement should commence. The negotiations will doubtless be long, fractious and could lead to war. But the alternative is anarchy so it is a risk that must be borne.
The current UN reality holds something like this:
USA == France == China == Russia == Great Britian (Security Council)
India == Morocco == Cuba == Canada == Libya == Iceland
If you actually believe a billion, if almost totally unfree, Chinese are exactly equal to a few million effete Frenchmen, who are exactly equal to three hundren million Americans, etc....
Or even worse, if you belive one man, Col. Kadaffi (sp) as absolute dictator of Libya, is and should be exactly equal to almost a billion Indians with a growing economy and a flourishing representive government then I really don't think we are speaking the same language.
Democrat delenda est
We built it first, we own it. Enough said. The UN is a really big piece of shit now of days...
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Speech law in the U.S. is quite different than it was 50 years ago, or even 30. That possibility isn't particularly high anymore. Besides, I'd rather deal with the possibility in the U.S. than the reality of speech control in, well, pretty much the whole rest of the world.
And is not like I don't want to convince you, is that I don't need to convince you of anything...
Is this that historical inevitability argument again? Fine, we'll just have to agree to disagree. Like I said, the people of the U.S. have been listening to the "this can't possibly work" argument since 1776, and it's only rarely been accurate.
I understand not trusting the U.S., but trusting an international body with China and Russia represented instead? Think about that one. Think real hard. Free people only get to make some mistakes once.
Stop learning! Only you can prevent esoterrorism.
I'm pretty sure Thomas Paine was English, and got chased out of the country because of his dangerous ideas (The Rights of Man, etc).
Thomas Paine was English, and American. His saying "These are the times that try men's souls" he wrote in his "The American Crisis" collection while serving under George Washington. The first pamphlet, which is what he wrote the saying in, Washington had read to the soldiers at Valley Forge. Strictly speaking as he was born in England he was English but he was American by choice.
FalconShould there be a Law?
That's some interresting information sir, thanks a lot (shows that the Founding Fathers were even more insightful than I though.)
Thomas Jefferson wasn't only insightful but also had a contradictory nature. He was both a slave owner and against slavery.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Or hari kari. Not long ago, about a few years ago, I was thinging about just that.
There was no advocacy of having a new Constitution every so often. Thomas Jefferson's advocacy of the occasional rebellion had to do with keeping everyone on their toes, not with changing the form of government.
Agreed. He was concerned about people becoming complacent, which in a way as a society we have.
FalconShould there be a Law?
You know, sometimes the US makes mistakes. Sometimes Israel makes mistakes. This one ranks right up there with firing on the USS Liberty.
What happened to the USS Liberty wasn't an accident, it was intentional, the Israelis knew it was an American ship and that it would be able to monitor the Israelis but they didn't want that to happen so they attacked it.
FalconShould there be a Law?
What policy has been repudiated?
Shall we dress in sackcloth and ashes and withdraw from the world? That's just a guarantee of more Darfur genocides. If the US doesn't lead, nobody steps up in our place.
I am not now and have never been an isolationist. What I advocate is a process of through reviews of the consequences of actiions taken before they are taken as well as a well thought out followup. And for the US to stand up and tell the world it made a mistake when it does. For instance after the Soviet Union was defeated in Afghanistan instead of the US gloating that the SU lost, we should of had people on the ground there who would have helped setup a democratic society and government as well as helped them get on their feet economically. In Iraq, instead of just supporting Saddam in his fighting against Iraq, the US should also have been pushing him to have fair and open elections. And once it was known he was using chemical weapons against civilians aid should have stopped. But no, instead when congress was debating military sanctions against him in 1988-89, the then admins of Reagan and Bush Sr were against this with an official in the admin saying such santions would hurt US trade. Fact is is that until Saddam invaded Kuwait he could do no wrong.
As for how someone dresses, it should be their choice as to how they dress as long as they don't harm another. As long as they aren't harming another, people should be able to do anything they want, and if they do harm to another then charge them with that harm.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Finally got a chance to reply.
...if you're going to make Laws and Morals the same thing,
> I think "Law" and "Morals" are two entirely separate things:
> the Law should specify the basic rules essential for a stable
> society - "no murder", "no theft", "no corruption", etc, since
> without these a society couldn't cohere or function.
I have a few questions on this statement. All the examples you provide are negative, as in "don't do [blank]." Do you feel that all laws are prohibitive?
> "Morals" should be a guideline to good living for each individual,
> and are (roughly) a superset of Law.
Just to clarify, are you stating that all human law should be of the prohibitive form, and morals are a superset that is (largely) positive/exhortative?
> For example, adultery or promiscuity shouldn't be illegal,
> but it's clearly immoral.
If by "illegal" you mean criminal, I agree. If you mean "actionable under the law", I'd tend to push back. Should a person have any avenues of redress under the law for the adulteries of his/her spouse? Should an employer have a right to terminate employees for adultery or promiscuity?
Also, in your statement later:
>
> whose morals do you use?
If morals are always personal rather than universal, on what basis do you state that "...adultery or promiscuity shouldn't be illegal, but it's clearly immoral."
If there is no universal moral law, then to whom and why is adultery or promiscuity immoral?
That said, I never intended to say that law and morals are identical. The law can only coerce, and coercion is simply not a viable way to alter people's hearts or change the nature of a fallen world. If it was that easy, there would have been no need for the crucifixion.
My primary concern is that the law recognizes that it can only recognize a preexisting and universal moral law. That if the law tries to enforce rules created in defiance of or the absense of the moral law, then the law is unjust and must be overturned.
This is why I feel it is important to recognize the moral law when passing laws. Currently there is much chaos and confusion in the US (and elsewhere) where the law tries to eliminate certain of God's laws, and create new commandments based on modern secularism.
Instead of "Thou shalt not commit adultery", we end up with "thou shalt not judge anyone's sexual activities." We end up with a situation where people making foolish and immoral choices want to deal with them privately (with some justification). But once the moral standard is rejected, the idea of "privacy" becomes a substitute standard, and is used by everyone to try to justify their own actions.
Basically, it's alright to say, "this is an area the law shoudn't try to handle," without saying "this is a totally private matter, and any interference is prohibited." We're at that point now.
It is one thing to say, "if John Doe and Richard Roe want to form a sexual relationship, it is outside the legitimate concern of the criminal justice system." It is not the same thing to say, "if John Doe and Richard Roe want to form a sexual relationship, it is the legitimate concern of the legal system to recognize and protect that relationship against any interference or criticism."
Instead of recognizing that "man and woman he created them", and "what God has joined together, no human being must separate", we try to force people in the public sector to pretend that "two men or two women forming a committed relationship is the same thing as a marriage", as a condition of being a public servant.
And it isn't about -forcing- people using the law. It's about being allowed to express the underlying moral truth. I'm fine if the law prohibits picking on the gay community; but not because it's a -valid- moral choice. But because it isn't an appropriate area for the law to coerce, and picking on anyone in the same fashion for any other reason is just as wrong.