Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Icann, and you can't.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
But... what will all the Slashdotters do with their time? Surely you can't expect us all to... *gulp* leave our computers?
What can happen is that a bunch of governments set up their own root servers which no ISP in their right mind will direct their DNS servers at. Nothing will change and the world will continue as it was, except someone gets to look a bit silly.
Evil people are out to get you.
...a whole new definition to the term "netslpit"...
There will be Internets after all.
OddManIn: A Game of guns and game theory.
Just to restate - the internet's not going to "fall apart" on it's own. They're planning on breaking it. The terminology they use makes it sound like the network's fragile and about to break. That's not the case.
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.
----
ICANN does not control IP allocation at all. IP blocks are allocated by IANA to regional internet registries (ARIN for the Americas, RIPE for Europe and APNIC for Asia to name a few). The regional registries then allocate smaller blocks to organizations in their area.
Routing is different still. No registry guarantees the IP blocks they allocate will be globally routable. Most network providers have their own criteria for determining which networks they will accept routes for.
So, as you can see, ICANN has no part in the allocation or routing of IP addresses.
Six month's since the Internet fragmented into a thousand separate networks, companies across the globe report an astounding 600% increase in productivity on average. Said one spokeperson, "Not only have computer virus infections fallen to an all time low, we're saving over 98% of our bandwidth costs. Plus, we have so much budget left over each month from our IT operations, we're rolling out a profit sharing plan to all our employees." Numerous businesses report skyrocketing demand. For example, print media said they've seen an explosion in demand for magazines. Of course, all is not good news. Some technology companies have reported a drastic drop in demand for many of their products. "We are having a real tough quarter," said one Symantec sales manager, on condition of anonymity. Cisco also reported much less demand for it's high end networking boxes. "We can't give 'em away. I've never seen anything like it."
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
They are trying to act as brokers between this position, which is not in the interest of the EU, and the maverick US position, which flatly disclaims any notion of international coordination on these issues. Repeat after me: the EU is not trying to split the internet, they are trying to maintain the current cohesion.
They are a broker between two arguments, and should be applauded as such, rather than vilified and slandered as 'splitters' or malcontents.
'The EU does not intend to scrap Icann. It would continue in its current technical role.
Instead Europe is suggesting a way of allowing countries to express their position on internet issues, though the details on how this would happen are vague.
"We have no intention to regulate the internet," said Commissioner Reding, reassuring the US that the EU was not proposing setting up a new global body.
Rather she talked of a "model of cooperation", of an international forum to discuss the internet.'
[Taken from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4327928.stm
Which principle is more important: ICANN remaining a US company; or protecting free speech on the internet?
Is every solution that guarantees free speech dependent on ICANN remaining under US control?
Which principle should be safe-guarded, and which one is negotiable?
If this is really what the debate is about, I can kind of understand the EU's concerns in specific hypothetical circumstances, though I don't understand the intransigence of the US representatives.
I suspect though that this is just a dick-size war, and we'll find out later on that it's really all posturing to show a position of strength for GATT negotiations.
The world has changed and we all have become metal men.
Besides, most people are reasonably happy with ICANN. I wish they were going after Verisign and the root certs instead, those are the real bastards.
I read the internet for the articles.
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
Yep - half of the internet content is not in your language.
But don't be afraid - most of the internet content is not in mine anyway - so I adapted and learned to read and write in other languages.
Which obviously helped me a lot in getting a bigger view of the world.
Have you ever been to wikipedia? Look at the main page at http://www.wikipedia.org/ and note that there are some languages there. And some content. The German has half of the content of the English. If I sum up the other languagees that I can read I almost come to the number of English pages.
Just an example.
Mark
Eternal Battle for the Domination of the Internet begins.
.com domain.
Random target selection: the
Value: one billion, eight hundred seventy million dollars.
Play.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Meh, I don't care if they break the internet. I already have several copies of it on CD kindly provided by AOL.
Part of the problem is that ICANN acts as if it was a sovereign body, or at least one with UN sponsorship. How would you feel some NGO sponsored by Iraq took the .US domain down and refused to assign it to the US Federal government? The .IQ situation is just one of the cases where ICANN has acted in a seemingly-arbitrary manner when dealing with supposedly-sovereign states. ICANN is absolutely begging for an intervention.
.BIZ, .TRAVEL, .XXX, that's the horse of a different color you've heard tell about. But then again, some of us Internet alte cockers think that there was never any need for more than .COM, .EDU, .MIL, and .ORG and that those shouldn't be US-centric.
There's just no way that ICANN should be involved at all in the delegation of the country-code domains. That's a task for a globally-accepted multi-lateral bureaucracy, like the ITU or ISO. Most of those organizations get their legitimacy from the UN, and ICANN doesn't want to go there.
Now
However, this is all academic. It's easy enough to set up your own root servers and just peer into the ICANN ones, append all .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz, .etc entries found there with .us, and go from there. Anyone outside the US then just uses slashdot.org.us instead of slashdot.org, and life goes on as normal. Just like with telephone country codes.
Jesus christ, plenty of the world has equal or better free speech laws than the US - New Zealand, Australia, most of Europe.
Here in NZ, we didn't require the Black Eyed Peas to rename their song "Don't Phunk With my Heart", we don't have a corronary when a breast is exposed on TV (I mean, for fuck's sake!). We have adverts using sware words and lewd humour that wouldn't be played in the US. Actually, the Black Eyed Peas were complaining how conservative the US is in comparison to places like NZ when they were here recently.
You Americans are so blinded by your own hype you think the entire rest of the world is some 3rd world dictatorship. Grow up, actually LOOK at the rest of the world and realise it doesn't match your cardboard cutout preconceptions. The average US slashbot view of the rest of the world is laughably naive.