Internet Power Struggle Reaching Climax

Fredden wrote to mention a BBC piece discussing the U.S.'s poor image when it comes to Internet management. From the article: "It has even lost the support of the European Union. It stands alone as the divisive battle over who runs the internet heads for a showdown at a key UN summit in Tunisia next month. The stakes are high, with the European Commissioner responsible for the net, Viviane Reding, warning of a potential web meltdown. " We've previously covered this story.

Comments

Re:DNS inherently centralized.

[sane?]

A good, reasoned, and informed comment - in marked contrast to most of pointless diatribes here. A few points though, following on from my comment to the last dupe posted.

ICANN isn't viewed particularly fondly by those outside the US, most because it takes almost no notice of the view of the various gTLDs; and because it looks like it wants to tax those gTLD to pay for its existance. You won't have heard this in the US media of course, but are you surprised? You may have heard of the phrase "no taxation without representation" before?

The US had agreed to get the US governments hands off the decision making process, then back tracked and said that no, on balance they would like to go back on that and ignore agreements, keeping the 'authorisation' role. This pissed off lots of people who were waiting for Sept 2006 with gritted teeth. The US misjudged their position.

The US government, and its religious nuts, have already interfered (with .XXX). Most consider this a taste of what it might do in future (eg axis of evil = delete the gTLD from the root so they 'disappear'). In short, nobody trusts them.

A proportion of the root servers are already outside the geographic US. Its not difficult to setup a forum to discuss policy, give an automated mechanism to allow gTLD and other non-gTLD controllers the ability to update the root servers, and cut the US gov out of the process.

The root DNS maybe at the root of everything, but a change of who says what is served and how is not going to bring the walls crumbling down. Nobody is likely to say that .COM DNS is now provided by someone else; unless someone does something stupid. However the ability to opt out of that stupidity is what is being taken and there isn't really much that the US can do to stop it, short of threatening force.

Oh yes, and the reporting on this is really, really bad.