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EU Claims Internet Could Fall Apart Next Month
freaktheclown writes "The battle for the control of the Internet could hit a climax next month, with the EU saying that it could 'fall apart.' From the article: 'The European commission is warning that if a deal cannot be reached at a meeting in Tunisia next month the Internet will split apart. At issue is the role of the US government in overseeing the Internet's address structure, called the domain name system (DNS), which enables communication between the world's computers. It is managed by the California-based, not-for-profit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) under contract to the US Department of Commerce.'"
This would require everyone in the EU to reconfigure the nameservers to point at a different set of root servers overnight. It's just not going to happen. Speaking as someone in the EU running a number of nameservers I'm not going to do this if it effects my ability to resolve domain names correctly. I might, overtime, add some additional EU nameservers if they are none disruptive but this will be a gradual process.
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A confederation of disgruntled DNS servers, of which OpenNIC is one, has been running an alternative namespace to ICANN for a long time now. Looks like opennic.org and opennic.net have been taken over by evil cybersquatters in the ICANN namespace -- but point to opennic.unrated.net and expand your DNS horizon...
I'm glad that porn is completely legal here. I mean, it's not like Max Hardcore just got raided, or that Red Rose Stories got seized and shutdown by the feds, despite being a not-for-profit textfile archive.
Oh, shit. Wait. Never mind.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
They require the www prefix: www.opennic.unrated.net.
Syria: "There's more and more spam every day. Who are the victims? Developing and least-developed countries, too. There is no serious intention to stop this spam by those who are the transporters of the spam, because they benefit...The only solution is for us to buy equipment from the countries which send this spam in order to deal with spam. However, this, we believe, is not acceptable."
All these comments and more can be found at http://www.wgig.org/June-scriptmorning.html at the fourth meeting of this body on Internet "governance". "Governance" by the way isn't my term, it's theirs.
The fact is that it has done a DAMN good job thus far managing DNS, and despite some hiccups, the First Admendment is still in affect here. Freedom of speech must be absolute short of causing immediate physical threat to people like shouting FIRE in the theater. The only way not to start down the slippery slope of censorship, especially when it's as easy as changing a DNS entry, is to not take that first step.
And who exactly is it that wants control of DNS? France, so they can shut down Nazi websites and threaten E-Bay into removing WWII memorabilia listings? China, so they can be absolutely sure that their population is ignorant of anything the Glorious People's Revolution doesn't want them to know about (like say, Tinamannen Square or the Great Leap Backwards)? Iran and Saudi Arabia, so they can block out the evil west and keep their people from finding out that all Westerners are not, in fact, evil blood-crazed monsters who want to destroy them? Cuba and North Korea, so they can block the websites of the Evil Capitalist Exploiters of the Common Man?
In other words, politicians whose agenda involves using DNS to censor the Internet and pervert it into nothing more than a state-controlled interactive TV. Say what you will, but so far the United States has done a remarkably good, fair, and unbiased job of handling DNS. Those who want to take control hate the fact that it's been fair and unbiased because they want to use it against their 'opponents.'
Dear North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, France, China, Russia and co: Leave your meatspace BS in meatspace. I refuse to let your petty bureaucratic empire-building destroy the greatest medium of information exchange ever to exist.
The latest issue of The Economist had an interesting article on this. A couple key quotes:
"The EU proposal, announced by Britain, which currently holds the EU's rotating presidency, was intended as a compromise between the UN supporters and America. It would create a new organisation to set policies over distributing routing numbers, creating new domains and the like. Because of its role as chair, Britain, usually America's closest ally on internet issues, had to stay neutral and could not beat back calls by Denmark, France, Spain and the Netherlands for greater government influence over the internet. After the announcement, Brazilian and Iranian delegates rushed to congratulate British officials, whose faces dropped when they realised the EU policy was being lauded by America's loudest opponents."
"However, the disingenuousness of the position was made clear during the meeting last month in Geneva. Some countries demanded that groups representing business and public-interest causes be thrown out of the room when governments drafted documents for the summit in November. In one instance, delegates from China and Brazil actually pounded on tables to drown out a speaker from industry."
"The good news from the UN meetings is that governments increasingly understand the importance of technology to society. The bad news is that the internet risks becoming suffocated in their embrace."
And as long as all the other wealthy countries keep lending you money, you can keep pretending to be rich kids and pose as big spenders. But having a federal deficit (getting) close to a trillion dollars will not allow you to pretend forever. Thank you for working your butt off to pay back your IOUs to the rest of the world.
Wrong. It's perfectly ok to be anonymous, as long as you don't do any business over your website. But I agree with the rest.