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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.
This story has been covered on /. at least three times, as noted in the post itself. There are really no new solutions offered here. Comments in the previous post have revolved around setting up alternate root notes for each country which may result in conflicts or fracturing, setting the root nodes to point to some authoritative German node for .de, Japanese node for .jp etc, but this still allows the controller of the root to start 'war'... where are the solutions? I don't see any coming down the pipe - this seems to be the political equivalent of an 'NP-hard' problem, and until someone proves otherwise with a feasible solution, can't we stop re-hashing old news? (Granted, there were a few more ideas offered in the comments to previous posts, but none of them really seem to solve the fundamental issue of decentralized control while maintaining a single Internet that uses DNS.)
DNS be damned 66.35.250.150 forever!
"Imagine the Brazilians or the Chinese doing their own internet. That would be the end of the story.
No, it would be the end of spam!
Just put Google in charge. It'll be that way in 5 years at the current rate.
... I'm going back to running a Wildcat BBS on a USR Courier 14.4 modem & a 386... who wants a login?
That no single organization runs it? That destroying pieces of it will not disrupt the rest?
Yes, and then DNS was invented.
Yeah, just like we joined them in using the metric system.
Great, you've just slashdotted 66.35.250.150.
I've seen the problem described as "Teh US h4xx0r administration can cut off a country from the rest of the Internet". Pray tell, how? Block a range of IPs from making DNS requests? All it takes is one server in a neutral country to forward / cache those requests. If this did happen, you'd likely have about a million sysadmins jump to the task.
Like many political problems, the description is a lie. These countries want to be able to control the Internet (at least within their borders) themselves. They want to engage in suppression of free speech, and create impediments to global commerce. You can love or hate the US and the current administration, but over the last two-plus centuries, pray tell what other major country has done more to promote free speech? If you had to trust one other country or organization in this matter, which one would it be? The UN, where every crackpot dictator and totalitarian asshole is given a voice alongside the democratically elected crackpots and assholes? The EU, which doesn't even have a constitution yet? Russia? China? Iran? Yeah, right!
Yes, in theory, no one organization should control DNS and we should all join hands around the campfire and sing 'Kumbaya', but the real world is a rather fucked up place, and the US is probably the least of all evils in this case.
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
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.
I know a lot of the leftist Euro slashdot readers currently have a great disdain for America,
What you don't know is that a lot of rightish, centerish and otherwiseish Euros, Africans, Asians, South-Americans, Australians and pretty much everyone else in the world also has a very dim view of America. Some other comment explained quite well why, the point here is that absolutely everyone outside your borders doesn't know whether to laugh or cry anymore when you run around claiming that whoever doesn't totally love you must be a communist, a terrorist or just plain crazy. In fact, aside from the communist part the rest of the world thinks that pretty much describes you.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org