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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.
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
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
...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.
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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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 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 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 ----
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.
Something intelligent here.
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.
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.
OK fine, let the US control it.
Oh by the way the UK invented postage stamps. Can we have control of the world's postal system please?
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
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.
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
Neither is DNS, which is what the whole discussion is about.
More to the point, the US doesn't have any control over the Internet it could hand over to the UN even if it wanted to. The article talks about the DNS system - or so I presume anyway, since it mentions root servers; it doesn't actually state anything about DNS. The US currently hosts the root DNS servers. Those root servers are special only in that everyone keeps using them; they have any authority only because everyone agrees that they do. There is nothing whatsoever stopping the UN from making its own root servers and telling everyone to use them; they will be ignored, but that's not US's fault. Such things has been tried in the past ("use our special DNS servers, and you can type keywords into your browsers address bar", and they died off from simple lack of interest.
I don't see how US could hand over something, which, in the end, is authority by being voluntarily recognized as the authoritative data source by everyone. Even if the US would take the root servers offline, there is no reason why everyone would start using UN's brave new root servers. More likely we would get a period of total chaos as several conflicting DNS namespaces would be in competition against each other.
This entire proposition is nonsensical and should be silently ignored.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
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
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).
Is there any kind of equivalent to Gibson's Law which is "when ever Americans get in an argument with Europeans they will bring up WW2 and claim to have 'saved the Europeans arses'"?
If there's not, then I propose one.
Melanie's law states:
That when ever Americans get in an argument with Europeans they will bring up WW2 and claim to have saved the Europeans arses.
Anyone who uses such an argument in a thread is invoking Melanie's law and like Gibson's law, loses the argument by defaulting.
P.S. The Brits prevented the invasion of the UK by themselves before the US was in the fight and the Russians saved our collective arses by bogging down the German army so much that it gave the Allies a chance to fight back.
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.)
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).
The EU does not want a single country to control the root servers anymore. The EU (with the support of most developing nations) is now moving to get the root servers under control of an independent organisation which will be under the UN umbrella. The EU of course wants the change to happen with agreement with all parties, but the EU will not accept the current situation anymore and will go ahead even if the US does not join. And if you follow the debates, most of the world will use the new root servers that will be offered by the UN. Maybe finally the EU will be able to get the .eu domain that ICANN so foolishly have not granted them.
--- guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people ---
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
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.
you're thinking of Godwin's Law:
As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.
if you deny that the US had nothing to do with liberating Europe and saving your "arses", you're delusional. no one has lost this argument - the point still stands that control of the internet (if you can even call it that, considering there are root DNS servers all over the world) belongs in the US, where it originated.
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 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.
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.
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.
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!)
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.
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!
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
I think a lot of people have thought that DNS needs replacing, but I think it's just not going to happen. The fact is DNS works and replacing it would be a massive undertaking -- people just aren't willing to expend that much energy fixing something that works perfectly fine for the most part.
My blog
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
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.
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
hint: http://www.darpa.mil/
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
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.
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Europe has been heavy contributors to networking in general since the early 1970s, and the internet since 1986 (the formation of RARE) (even before then, various national research projects contributed). So what if Europe wasn't involved in the initial formation of the internet? They've been heavily involved in its backbone technologies and its evolution ever since. Would you say that nobody should have the right to control their own zoning laws except Iraq because the first known zoning laws were invented by the Babylonians?
"'If one must live then one must die.' - oh, the truth must be funnier than this..." -- MammÃt
That would be a result of the EU not being a country. ccTLD = *Country Code* Top Level Domain. They can use .uk, .fr, .de, etc, for their sites. I doubt very strongly that you would have people rapidly changing to the EU system, with its unproven reliability and unproven interoperability. I would say that people would likely rapidly switch to using the real root servers that the US oversees.
This doesn't spell the end to ICANN at all. All it does is reinforce the idea that the EU thinks they control the economic members and doesn't really respect member countries, and that the UN is powerless. People bitch and moan that the US tries to take things from other countries, well here is the exact same thing.
To everyone busy paraphrasing the "hey, but you can't actually control something like the WWW because it's not something physical" argument:
Firstly, under current jurisdiction concepts can be owned and controlled - that's the whole idea behind intellectual property. That wasn't my point though - I wasn't thinking about IP, I was just making a purely hypothetical, not based on reality, argument - my point was that saying 'we made it, and this means we should forever control it' is dumb.
I can think of several reasons why the servers should be kept in the US such as stability and lack of censorship (currently; things might change). We were the first to create it, though, is nothing but pure nationalistic dumbness.
"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.
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
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 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
No I wouldn't, but by invoking that comparison, it seems like you have been duped by the rhetoric. The US does not have any claim to the DNS protocol itself, just the root physical servers paid for by US taxpayer dollars. Depsite all the disingenous rhetoric, it is clear that is isn't about control of the internet within their borders.
If control really was the issue, then all the EU would have to do is follow China's lead and go and create their own stuff behind their own gateway and with their own root servers. Whether or not you like "The Great Firewall Of China", China has demonstrated that it is technically feasible to have full control of their own infrastructure without needing to craft some UN resolution demanding that a country fork over their servers and disseminate disingenous rhetoric about "The U$A is controlling the internet"
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.
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.
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.
The United States is the largest financial contributor to the UN
I'm sure the rest of the world would happily lose that financial contribution if they could also have fewer of those pesky vetoes..
They did. Then "they" connected it to "yours" and we have the current system, a system of interconnected networks. Thats why they call it the internet.
This whole issue is bullshit and should be silently ignored. Don't make it worse.
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
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