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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.
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
...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 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.
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.
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.
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.
We should have pulled out of this idiotic thing [UN] a long time ago, and perhaps this will be the final straw
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?
Write boring code, not shiny code!
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.
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 United States will never relinquish control of the internets.
Bush? Is that you?
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
There is no need for the EU and others to hack their way in to our root servers. They can just set up their own root servers, and legally mandate that all their ISPs switch over. It's actually the exact same thing that would happen in a voluntary handover, except for the legal mandate requirement. Technologically, it would be identical, and would have (from the EU perspective) the same desired effect.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
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
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).
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.
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.
Would the EU and others try to take over the root servers by force (hacking their way in)?
.xx country code requests to the international root servers if they want to properly resolve those, and the international root servers will probably refer .everythingelse to the American root, if they want to properly resolve those.
Hacking? Force?
The only reason the root servers are the root servers is because everyone queries them. If the EU or the UN wanted to "take over", all they have to do is establish new servers and ask the ISPs to reconfigure so that all queries go to the new servers and the international registrars to provide updates on domains. No hacking involved, and no american needs to be "forced" to do anything.
The US will probably have a number of ISPs refer
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
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.
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.)
Your argument is a little flawed. This is not about Americans "inventing" the Internet or any related technologies. It is about America building the Internet. Because it was such a good system, the whole world tapped into it. Now they want to take it, not from the inventors, but from the owners and creators. The Internet works great now. There is uncertainty in handing control over to the UN or any other supposedly unified international governing body. Think of it this way. American and the American government built the Internet and have come to rely on its stability for the national infrastructure. So we do not want to relinquish control of anything that we rely on. Now, modern countries all over the world have come to rely on the Internet as much as the US, but they possibly made a poor decision because they are relying on a system that they do not own or control. Should the US have to deal with that same uncertainty? Any US citizen will be resistant of other countries taking control of something that we own. We are very capitalist and tend to resist actions that smell of socialism whether it be national or global.
Here is a Hypothetical for example sake:
Microsoft makes Windows. The US government comes to rely on Windows so much that it decides that the most secure action would be to take control of either Microsoft or the Windows line of products making them property of the US government. Now, the rest of the world has also come to rely on Windows and the UN pushes to take control of the now US owned Microsoft or Windows line of products. This situation is socialist and stupid. It takes away all incentive to try selling anything because at any moment it can be taken away.
Now this last argument is a little extreme, but if the UN took control of the Internet for those reasons what kind of precedence does that set?
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).
Distressingly for everyone, many of your fellow countrymen seem to agree with you, at least in inclination, if not in extent.
And they aren't being sarcastic.
The current brouhaha is merely the first public example of the US coming into conflict with the rest of the world as a result of recent changes in its image.
You (the USA) are currently the only global superpower.
Nobody minded this too much[1] while you were seen as trustworthy, democratic, meritocratic, the least corrupt and the most "free" (libre) society on earth.
In the last two presidential terms, your reputation has become more and more tarnished (sorry, but it's true), to the point that the benefit of the doubt has simply been withdrawn. Please note that I'm not saying whether this is right, wrong, fair or unfair... merely that it is the case.
No, I don't expect you to agree, or even to realise. You're part of the US, famously one of the most insular cultures on earth, and people are always the last to hear gossip about themselves anyway.
Since you are no longer trusted to be trustworthy, democratic, meritocratic, uncorrupt or free, you are no longer adoringly looked up to by other nations. They no longer feel safe banking on your currency, they no longer trust you as an honest broker in international politics, and they sure as hell don't want you in any kind of position of power over them.
For the entire lifetime of the net nobody's cared who ran the root servers. Now, the explosive rise of the internet's importance has met the free-falling reputation of the US, and it's hardly surprising that other countries are getting antsy about your position of "authority" over them in this area.
Short version: You were the Google of international politics, now you're more the Microsoft. Expect a lot more international anti-trust arguments in the future.
Footnotes:
[1] Well, most of the relatively powerless middle east didn't like it much, but the West, the far East and their allies didn't mind, and China (as always) just studiously ignored everyone else.
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
I agree...add to the fact we actually PAID the Americans for their assistance also....we got no free rides from our Yank Buddies and it took a helluva long time to pay it all off but we did. Your help was bought and paid for after you decided to join in late...be thankful we held them off as long as we did otherwise you may have found the US was being blitzzed into the ground before your morning chewing tobacco was all used up.
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Um. No. Not even close. Not even all of the root DNS servers managed by US companies and organisations are located in the US due to the fairly recent attempts to DDoS the root servers. There might only be one IP listed for [A-M].ROOT-SERVERS.NET, but each of those IPs has multiple physical hosts behind it that are distributed across the globe. At the present time, less than half of the actual boxes performing the root DNS service are located within the USA, so I think we can realistically expect one hell of a lot of political posturing over the next several months. Given the importance of the Internet to governments and Big Business, this could well turn out to be a bigger political issue than Kyoto.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
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!)
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'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
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?
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.
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
Speaking as an european in general: Well, the US have been an okay custodian so far. But since they have launched a war of agression against an other country, since they have clearly stated to follow international treaties only if they feel like, other countries are not terribly comfortable with the thougt of prolonged US control of the internet.
On another note: No country will give up national control over its domains. And nobody is asking for that. But regarding international matters, nobody is going to tolerate one nations control over international communication any longer.
Sidenote: US scientists invented the internet. An european one created the WWW - and made it work by giving it as a gift to the world, something an us researcher would be physically unable to do.
The only skin on a computer should be porn.
hint: http://www.darpa.mil/
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
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.
the Russians saved our collective arses by bogging down the German army so much that it gave the Allies a chance to fight back.
Correction. The Russians won the war in Europe. The Allies mearly heckled the German army for about 12 months on the western front, while racing to beat the Soviets to Berlin.
May the Maths Be with you!
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!
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... ;^)
"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.
Sorry, but my radio argument is exactly on the mark. The EU and UN are not as far as anything I have seen demanding that the US hand over any equipment, nor are they demanding that the US hand over complete control of net within the US. Obviously the US would retain control of .gov and .us just as other countries do. What they are proposing is very much along the lines of the current international systems for control of other forms of communication including radio. Those systems have worked quite well for decades.
My point about my US citizenship (which by the way is the one I was born with) was that I am not an inveterate US-hater. The fact that I am also a Canadian citizen doesn't change that. That Canadians are foreigners (from the point of view of an American) is obvious and of no discernible relevance. That Canadians are (in general) socialists, as you assert, merely shows your ignorance. Canada has a few characteristics that Americans, and almost noone but Americans, regard as socialist, notably the health care system. That is one of the nice things about Canada. That a country with the resources of the US would leave a large part of its population without regular decent medical care is just plain indecent. In general, Canadians are not socialists. The party in power at the national level is the Liberal party. The New Democratic Party, which is the democratic socialist party in Canada, has only 19 out of 308 seats and has such little power as it has because the Liberals do not have a majority and need the NDP's support. Until recently the Liberals had formed the government by themselves. Before the Liberals, the Conservatives were in power. The NDP has never formed a national government. At the provincial level, again, NDP governments have been rare.
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
But dicks also fuck assholes.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
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...
Holy crap, it took you guys until the last two presidential terms to stop trusing us?
We've had our fingers in everyone's pies since WWII. We've gone around telling other countries what government they can and can't have. Our little tiff with the Soviet Union caused trouble for all kinds of places that weren't otherwise involved at all.
We've ignored our own constitution and persecuted people's freedom of speech (see the McCarthy trials). We've broken treaty after treaty with the American Indians. We've fueled wars and sold weapons to both sides.
We've funded revolutions, we've changed loyalties (see Vietnam and Cuba), and we've pulled every stop to build U. S. market dominance in the world. We've got a military that we can drop damn near anywhere and if not take over, at least cause a lot of strife.
I wouldn't trust us. Hell, I don't, and I used to be in the U. S. military.
Granted though, in my opinion, you asked for it. We had a policy of letting Europeans kill each other all they wanted without our involvement until Germany dragged us into WWI by trying to get Mexico to attack us. Then, when we decided to go back to our policy of leaving everyone else alone, Germany and Japan dragged us back into it with WWII. It's always one asshole that ruins it for everyone. Saddam dragged us into the gulf war by attacking one of our allies, and good ol' bin Laden, in an attempt to get us out of the middle east, started the current chain of events that led to our invading Afghanistan (personally, I think Iraq was just finishing daddy's work for ol' dubya, but that's just me).
We're the big kid on the block, and if you're tired of our bullying, you're going to have to fight back. And I'm not talking with words, mind you. The American people don't care, by and large, and our politicians have no reason to put an end to it. Until then, you're just going to have to wait until either an economic crisis cripples us, or civil war breaks out. I don't see either happening any time soon.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
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.
I mean, he invented the Internet.
Right?
What?
Tyranny isn't the worst enemy of a democracy. Cynicism is.
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.....
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.
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
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?
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 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
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.
To back that up (for the US nay-sayers):
t m
93% of the losses of the German Armed Forces were on the Eastern Front.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3777161.s
The western front was a mopping up operation only.
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