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Senator Wants to Keep U.N. Away From the Internet
Martin Boleman writes "ZDNet reports that Sen. Norm Coleman, a Republican from Minnesota, said his nonbinding resolution would protect the Internet from a takeover by the United Nations that's scheduled to be discussed at a summit in Tunisia next month. "The Internet is likely to face a grave threat, If we fail to respond appropriately, we risk the freedom and enterprise fostered by this informational marvel and end up sacrificing access to information, privacy and protection of intellectual property we have all depended on." he said in a statement."
we risk the freedom and enterprise fostered by this informational marvel and end up sacrificing access to information, privacy and protection of intellectual property we have all depended on.
So his plan is to abolish the RIAA?
Seriously, the US government has been trying to erode protections for online privacy and information access for years, why does he think the UN would be any more dangerous?
We can't stop other countries from setting up their own root servers if they want to, except militarily. Are we really going to go to war to stop them (sadly, in this administration, this is not quite a rhetorical question)?
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Because other countries use the Internet much like we do, as a major component in much of their commerce. They don't like the idea of a major part of their daily economic and personal lives being controlled by another country where they have no say.
If the Internet were developed in, say, Sweden, the US would be the ones complaining that the UN needs to take it over.
Consider first that France demanded that eBay remove auctions of historical WWII Nazi items from their site.
Consider next that Germany outlawed Wolfenstein 3D because it contained various symbols of the WWII Nazi regime, despite the game hardly being sympathetic to the Nazis.
If there's a country that stands for defending freedom of speech, it sure isn't either of them. Perish the day when we can't even register domain names like "naziscansuckmyballs.com" because Europe is too afraid to deal with the realities of its own history.
Bittorrent is an itty-bitty part of the services available on the Internet. And if you let search engines serve as your source for finding the location of resources you need, how is that better than DNS? It seems to me that you're just swapping one directory service for another, the second being corporately owned and changeable at their whim. Besides, without DNS, how are you going to even get to Google? http://64.233.161.99? Or maybe you prefer http://64.233.161.104/ or http://64.233.161.147?
Maybe you don't use DNS a lot, but the rest of the world sure as heck does. It's a basic network service that the Internet is almost useless without. Personally, I think it's pretty scary that one country that, frankly, the world doesn't find very trustworthy right now, controls it.
But I guess that's just me. Oh, and the rest of the world. (And for what it's worth I am American...)
That's fud and simply untrue, no matter how many times people repeat it.
/. falsely reported, but on the contrary the EU is right now trying to find a solution that both sides, the US, that doesn't want to give up control and other nations, the don't want the control in the hands of the US, could live with.
What is happening is that several countries (not the UN) don't want to live with a situation anymore in which only one nation, the US, controls critical parts of their infrastructure. I don't know why such a sentiment should come as a surprise to anybody, I think it's pretty normal and inevitable.
And in case this comes up again:
It's not the EU pushing this, as
Finally, I'm sure we will be treated to about 100 posts whining about how the US invented the internet and the world was so unfair. This is of course utterly laughable, as it simply does not matter who invented what, or how would you react to the Chinese demanding you stop using paper, or, omg, firearms, because they invented the stuff?
But if you want to play this little game anyway, please keep in mind that the world wide web, or rather the technologies necessary for it, were invented in Europe.
Oh, and how was that censored? It got its rating upped to AO, which caused stores to voluntarily drop it until the content was removed, and Rockstar to voluntarily remove the content that upped its rating. It is in no way, shape, or form government sponsored censorship. Period.
I don't know if you've noticed, but the US has earned a reputation for being sort of unstable in their foreign policy decisions lately in the global community.
If one of these countries were to piss us off, and especially if we went to war with them, it's certainly technically feasible for us to disallow them access to our root servers, and even to block all of their IPs from accessing US content.
In addition, organizations like ICANN have already shown that they are prone to cronyism and making decisions based purely on politics and/or profit, and that sort of thing makes other countries nervous.
Countries don't like to be told what to do by other countries. Therefore, it makes sense for a global network to be controlled by a global organization. It doesn't matter that the US built the first part of the Internet. The infrastructure supporting the Internet in these countries was built by them, and they are just as much a part of the global Internet as we are.
No...I prefer the old days, when the ICANN membership was voted in amongst the greatest nerds and hackers in the world. Too bad the ICANN forced the voted-in members out.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
explain me just one thing: why http://www.whitehouse.gov/ points to something that should be http://www.whitehouse.gov.us/ ? If aliens would like to see webpage of WHOLE earth's goverment, where would they go?
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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the power to levy taxes on domain names to pay for "universal access,"
As taken straight from the article.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Disclaimer: This is not a flame or troll, it's simply what I think
The USA seems to be becoming more and more totalitarian in the way it handles things in general. I realise this is less evident for those actually in the USA (the same way most Chinese are oblivious to the same type of government) but for all of us outsiders, your government is increasingly hostile and arrogant, even towards those it deems friends.
What we don't need is the DNS root servers being almost all controlled by this one country. Things could go seriously bad in a shockingly small space of time, and before you know it a key part of the Internet we all rely on is subject to the every whim of a crazy man (not necessarily G W Bush). And considering the Internet is now critical to many industries and governments, any kind of manipulation will be a very bad thing.
Now I'm not saying the UN should take control of this, but why can't we have a collection of countries known for their relatively free nature be in charge of this? USA could take a few servers (with it being so big), Canada could have one, UK have a few (because I'm British and biased), scatter some around France, Germany, maybe even Russia (*gasp*).
Why does this need to be a UN issue? Surely these countries could have come to an agreement with the US.
Although the best course of action would be for the major world players to set up their own root servers, provide incentives for ISPs to use those primarily. I don't know if the root servers have the main configuration files available publicly, but surely there wouldn't be an issue of syncing them to non-US root servers? After all it only benefits everyone, and if the US does turn into a total bastard (pardon my French) at least everything won't crumble and we'd still have unbiased root servers scattered about.
C17H21NO4
> What gives you the right to forbid China from having a say in the administration of the Internet?
i n_mainland_China
The despicable way[1] they currently administer it.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_
The unofficial
By reading these comments it seems that an international body controlling the internet would consist of China, Iran, Cuba, the United States and noone else!
I find this very interesting.
Will code a sig generator for food
Countries control the domains in their national TLD. When you try to get a domain in national TLD, the query first goes to the root DNS servers, which redirect it to the national TLD DNS servers. These national servers are run and controlled by the government of the country in question.
This controversy is about who controls the root servers. However, i think it's absurd. Nothing stops UN, national governments, or Joe Average from setting up new root servers, but you'd need to convince others to use those servers, and that is unlikely to be possible in anywhere but the worst of dictatorships. US has no control over DNS, beyond that everyone voluntarily agree that the US-run root servers are authoritative. This is authority by respect, and it is impossible to give away, even if US wanted to.
Given all this, could we please stop posting stories about this idiocy, it reminds me too much about that incident of a political entity trying to forbid the dangerous substance dihydromonoxide, AKA water.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Please read through the political smoke-and-mirrors.
The aforementioned senator is doing a classic political deceit maneuvre: "if it's not us, it's the non-human enemy monsters!"
It's not that simple. The proposal they really want to combat is meant to give control over the Internet to a commitee of pretty much all countries in the world. It's not like all of a sudden dictatorships such as China will get ultimate power on-line: they will simply be members like anyone else in the commitee.
What the senator really despises is that the control over the Internet will cease to be a 100% american affair and become worldwide instead.
Yes, it would suck if China will get control over the Internet. Fortunately, it's not gonna happen either way.
This is so ignorant, I don't know what part of your "arguments" I should cripple first, but I'll try. 1. Yeah France did that, so what? There are items that cannot be sold on the US Market either. If the US are too afraid that anyone can buy detailed maps of their country online they ban them as well because they are scared of terrorists. Besides - eBay is not exactly the place where i'd measure a country's free speech policies. 2. Yeah Germany banned Wolfenstein from sale in stores - which made it ever more interesting for locals. It's true that it's stupid, but fact is, that showing the swastika symbol in public has been outlawed since the second world war. And nobody here in Germany who has half a brain resents that law. We have seen enough of these symbols for some generations to come. If you care for free speech, fine: In Germany you are allowed to posess and show Swastikas in your Home anywhere you like. You can even knit yourself a blanket with swatikas and wear swastika underwear, when you go to the elections and vote the National socialist party. Former party is not outlawed here simply because of the fact, that WE HAVE FREE SPEECH HERE. It is a small minority party nevertheless. 3. As for the Europeans being "too afraid to deal with the realities of its own history" - this demonstrates about the most disturbing lack of intelligence I have come across in a million slashdot comments. Admittedly, Europe, especially Germany, has a troubled past - that much is true. But do you have any idea how much effort, education, institutionalization and last but not least money is invested to "deal with the realities" ??? I assume that you don't. Every European (at least west europeans that is) who has ever stuck his nose into a school has gotten a real good tasteful of europes past wars. Our cities are plastered with monuments (big ones, like the Stelen right next to the Reichstag in Berlin and small ones, embedded into the sidewalks, bearing the names of jewish victims of the 3rd reich) to remind us what happened every day. And now you come along and tell us that we are afraid to deal with all that??? Think again dude. Whew....what a post, you really got me going there.
WTF does any of this have to do with the "day to day operations of the net?" The day to day operations of the net are accomplished by obscure engineers toiling in relative anonymity at ISP's all across the globe. This is about editorial control (not even technical control) of the "." DNS zone file, and nothing more. This is such a non-issue technically and for the future "evolution" of the Internet that it's laughable watching all the anti-American slashbots get worked into a lather over it.
.com, .net, etc.) will be created. Right now it is ICANN under contract with the Department of Commerce. Some think it should be the UN. Honestly, I really don't know why. It's a minor thing that has nothing to do with actually controlling anything. If you don't like the US DoC controlling your root (and remember it's just the file, not the servers themselves), you already have alternatives.
Basically what this boils down to is who gets to say what new TLDs (like
Si vis pacem, para bellum
The only thing more annoying than a Libertarian is an (un|mis)informed Libertarian
Sen. Norm Coleman, a Republican from Minnesota, said his nonbinding resolution would protect the Internet from a takeover by the United Nations that's scheduled to be discussed at a summit in Tunisia next month.
Yeah, because passing laws in the U.S. is a great way to control what other countries do, in their own countries, with their own hardware and networks that they built and paid for. Brilliant! This is just another politician trying to capitalize on the "us versus them" sentiments trying to be pushed by a number of factions in the U.S.
There is no reason why any one country should run a single point of failure for a resource vital to communications and commerce throughout the world, especially when most of the gear it is running on, paid for by, and resides in those other countries. The world has spoken, they want a democratic solution with representation for everyone. They don't want to keep paying large fees to U.S. corporations for a naming service that was free before the big corporations got involved and can be free, or nearly free again. Most of all, they don't like an increasingly aggressive and deceptive country to be able to severely damage the economy of another country at their whim. No one trusts the U.S. to be a benevolent dictator and they would be foolish if they did. It is time to remember some of those American ideals, like democracy and representation for all are far more important than the new American ideals of making money and bullying the rest of the world.
To put it simply, the internet is a global enterprise made up of hardware and software running in and paid for countries all around the world. Those countries deserve a say in how the naming scheme works and this sort of "America is superior to the rest of the world" nationalist bullshit is not only useless chest thumping, but it makes the U.S. look like even more of a vicious bully in the eyes of the world. You should be ashamed of yourself Mr. Coleman.
It was, however, shipped on the game disk. To use a ridiculous example to put it in perspective, what if kiddie porn was put into a game, locked out, and then shipped around with a E rating? What if this could be unlocked very easily with a game cheat device (I recall the PS2 versions could unlock it with a game cheat device, correct me if I am wrong)? Its not a simple black and white line of "its in the game" or "its not in the game." It was shipped with the game, and very easily unlocked, sort of a gray area.
As far as the fuss over sex... please. There has been a lot of fuss over GTA since it was launched. The sex was just more ammo to continue firing the volleys. You make it sound like everyone was ok with the game until sex was put in, which is blatently untrue. And even then, more people were upset with the fact that it seemed that Rockstar hid this content, and misled the ESRB. Not entirely accurate, but that was the perception.
To say that modders added the content (instead of unlocking it) and everyone got upset about it only because it was sex is a strawman, and blatantly incorrect.
The U.S. Military Invented the Internet... therefore the U.S. should have control over it.
;) )
The Chinese invented guns, therefore the Chinese should have control over them.
You can say it about anything. The fact of the matter is that the internet has evolved because its global. The internet as it is isn't the same as it was when it was a US thing. Many countries depend on it heavily for their economy as the US does, and don't want the root DNS servers hosted by one government. Imagine the next president, lets call him Joe, decides that country X is in some way evil (terror threat? It'd work with the american public) the US could cut off DNS record access to that country, so no domain names would resolve. or they could intentionally fudge them up and send them redirecting to wrong places. Imagine waking up, going to your computer, opening Firefox, and your homepage is now a site telling you that your countries dns access has been halted for war measures. Every domain you try now resolves to this page.
Would this ever happen? Unlikely, but it's still a bad thing for any country other than the US (and Canada... unless the softwood lumber dispute gets out of hand
It's not a matter of the UN having control, its the world, not just the US. Personally I don't want China, North Korea or any other country with a crazy government having root DNS servers, but hell if every country got one (or one per certain amount of capita) then thats decentralized enough for everyones sake.
The downside? China or some country using that power to block their citizens access to certain domains (well, at least stopping them from resolving correctly) As long as their are enough other root dns servers that can just ban getting their stuff sync'd from china then its not bad for the rest of the world, but it's another tool that China/etc can use against it's people which isn't cool.
That you omit certain key facts about Coleman's victory over Mondale--namely, that Mondale came out of retirement to enter the race mere days before the election after Paul Wellstone died in an airplane crash--speaks volumes in and of itself. Coleman's victory was seated in complex, confused circumstances; to ignore this fact is to lie by glaring omission. (Consider, too, his vocal pique at the fact that speakers at Wellstone's funeral--a man who defined modern hardcore liberalism--had the temerity to express their political views in the course of their eulogies. Classy.)
The one thing you can count on Norm Coleman to do is to ally himself with whomever he thinks will be holding the strongest hand. It's a great political strategy, and you're right--it'll probably help his political ascendency...but make no mistake about it; Coleman is the textbook definition of a facile politician. He'll slip right off the RNC's radar the minute it becomes apparent that the Democrats have the upper hand again--whether that's in one year or twenty.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
I'm *not* American, but my bullshit detectors go off hard when I see China and Saudi Arabia slavering for control of the free-est communication network known to man. And it's sad to see elements in the EU joining with these countries to promote their own bureaucratic agenda (and many Europeans have noticed).
And the ironic bit is that Tunisia, where this free-the-DNS-from-US-shackles gabfest was held, has an extremely lousy record on Net freedom.
Every time the subject comes to the front-page, the thread is aflame with uninformed, knee-jerk, and often plain stupid posts.
Half of the people posting here don't even have a basic grasp of how the internet works.
And, no, the internet is not the US. Sever the international links, and then you'll have a US-owned internet. Oh boy, you've lost access to the pirate bay. Hey, you can't get some crypto packages anymore! Please. That's the whole point of the internet.
If the world starts using different root-servers, that's it. They'll talk to the US-only roots to maintain connectivity, and the Us-only roots will talk to the new roots for the very same reason. And if they don't, why, just add them to your own setup.
There. No one was harmed.
Sharing the IP-space will be a bit harder; but that would be a good excuse to move to ipv6 faster.
But short of invading the world, there's little the US can do about it.
I can't see what the fuss is about. Really. Get on with your lack of life.
Burning karma like ther's no tomorrow
In my opinion, Scientology is a cult you should avoid.
I hate to feed flamebait... but
"You think all that routing, networking and software you use was invented in the US? Oh, ok."
Routing and networking... goes back to the packet switched networks in ARPANET, ALOHANET in the 70's. Or perhaps you are refering to the TCP/IP stack we use today. Oops, you lose there again - Windows makes use (at least when it was first becoming network aware) largely of the Berkeley IP stack from over there in California. *BSD obviously uses this stack. Other operatin g systems do as well, directly, or in translation. What has come around since then has been similar to the advances in automobile engines in the past 50 years... bolt-ons that may offer some improvement, are nice to have, but not necessary in the least. Who needs anything more than telnet ftp, usenet and gopher? The intarweb addition by CERN was nice, but "has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move".
"Other nations that carry it to where it is today."
I agree that the useful stuff comes from places other than the US. Who can deny the catchiness of the Yatta craze? SSH is awesome. Countless other things as well.
The UN did not make the internet, it was a project of US military, handed over to private industry. The US has not abused its ability to manage the internet namespace to date. Given its track record, I cannot say the same would have happened had it been in the hands of the UN. I am not saying the UN would not be reliable - that is the topic of a whole different discussion. I am saying that up until now, there has been no reason to change. If it is not broken, do not go give it to someone else to frell.
Lets say you have a neighbor who just moved into a newly built home next to yours. The first weekend out, they're in the yard trying to start a garden and want to water in some plants. Sadly, the outside faucets weren't hooked up, so they poke their head over the fence and ask you if they could run your hose over to their yard just so they could get their garden watered a little bit. You, being the nice guy you are, let them use your hose and water... you're on a well so it's not costing you much of anything.... There is nothing saying other countries can't go and start their own DNS servers. They can provide their own service, there's no obligation on the part of the US to hand over its root servers to anyone else.
Your analogy is fatally flawed. First, there is not one well, but a dozen well systems we (the U.S.) control. Second, nearly half of those well systems and more than half of the actual, physical wells are not in our yard, but those of our neighbors. Third, this is not about two neighbors, but one guy who runs the "well access system" for all the wells both on his land and other peoples land, for everyone in town. Fourth, the neighbors paid to drill those wells on their properties and paid for all the plumbing. Fifth, we (the U.S.) have our little cousins charging money every year for entries in this control system. Sixth, The guy running this control system is a violent psycho who breaks the town ordinances, beats people up, and has been caught outright lying in town meetings over and over again. This guy also has running feuds with about half of town (it's a pretty rough town).
What the U.N. nations are likely to do is just what you suggest, start their own naming service and switch over all the wells and well systems on their own property. And here is where your analogy completely collapses, because while the value of wells is supplying a resource, the value of the internet is in the connections themselves. It is a transport mechanism, not a commodity. What our dear congress critter is proposing is legislation that says all those neighbors can't do what they want with their wells, which they will promptly ignore. It might go so far as to threaten sanctions or poisoning of the existing system if other countries try to switch, which is also useless.
I see no "control" being exerted over the Internet here. What do they fear?
They fear that they will have to keep paying money to use their own networks and they fear that the U.S. will shut off or redirect DNS service to foreign countries. They fear being economically and socially dependent upon a resource that they have paid to develop and pay to maintain, while that resource can be shut off by the U.S., whom they do not trust. For that matter, I thought the U.S. was supposed to be about representation for all and democracy. What is democratic about one country making decisions for the world without giving them any sort of representation? The U.S. should be championing this move to distributed DNS in many countries with redundancy against a single (political) attack. Instead they are claiming to know better than the world, and that they should be able to make decisions for everyone. It is sad how broken, nationalist, and adversarial American ideals have become.
I keep hearing this, and I still have no idea what it means. Some of the protocols used on the Internet originated in the USA, some did not. Does that matter? Many of the implementations didn't. If you're using Linux then you may well be using a TCP/IP stack that originated a few hundred yards from me. I guess this means that people from outside Sketty, Swansea, don't deserve to connect to any servers running Linux.
The USA did not lay the cable that comes to my house. They did not lay any of the cable in the UK.
We did create our own version of the 'net. So did the French. And the Germans, and the Chinese and many, many other nations. And we joined them all together to create an internetwork.
The USA did not create the Internet. The USA created the first segments of the Internet. Since then, everyone has been creating the Internet. Everyone will continue to create the Internet whatever the USA does, but I hope the USA will choose to remain a part of it.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
So what to stop the U.N. from using the internet as a way to control other countries?
Lets swap the N with an S there, and maybe you might see the problem that other countries have.
The role the US plays isn't anything a court cannot fix if the powers are ever abused.
Whose courts? And why should US courts have any say over what happens in other nations?
What would the main benefit of letting the UN or EU control it over the US?
Here's whats really going on. The US probably, as a part of trade talks or talks over military matters, mentioned to various groups, including the EU (forget the UN, thats an arena, not an entity, its like blaming the whitehouse lawn for the actions of Bush), that their internet is looking mighty fragile, and whoops, wouldn't it be a shame if someone accidentally knocked it over, as a leverage tool. So, after going away and pondering their options, aforementioned governments tell the US to go hump a pineapple, and set up their own redundant system. That they are doing it publicly (no need to) should tell any observer all they need to know about what's really going on.
Don't think you get to see every power struggle displayed on the evening news. 99% of what counts is never seen, but may be readily deduced.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.