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."

Comments

Re:I'm all for internationalizing...

[Mac Degger]

In reality, there's just three things wrong with the UN:

-VETO power; this HAS to be adressed; it has no place in a gathering of nations.
-lack of teeth; there should be a permanent peacekeeping force under UN controll...but this only works if veto power is revoked (or at least drastically reworked)
-too much diplomacy...lunacy like certain countries on the human rights commission...that would be like China on the internet-commission

What I never get is that organisations (and countries/corporations etc) are in a way set up like organisms, but always lacking that most effective way for positive evolution to happen: death. The UN charter (and any corporations charter, and every country's constitution) should include sections on it's own death and rebirth (for example a total revision after 50 years). Documents written hundreds of years ago might be relevant all those years later, but they just can't anticipate the way the world has changed, or the changed expectations of people. There's a reason why nature has this thing called death; it enables evolution.

Re:Statist Musical Chairs

[JasonKChapman]

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.

They're open to competition and they're a matter of individual choice. Don't like Google's results? Use Yahoo!'s or Teoma's or any of the hundreds that would spring up in response. Of course, you're swapping one directory service for another. That was the GP's point. DNS, while useful, is not the sine qua non of the Internet. DNS relates human concepts (domain names) to IP addresses. Search engines relate human concepts (text content) to IP addresses. My Bookmarks relate human concepts (whatever mnemonic I choose) to IP addresses. It's all the same function. If DNS got borked, the 'Net would recover with surprising speed. That's why any threat regarding "control" of the Internet is empty. Any problems would be temporary--a hassle, yes, but a short-term hassle.

Personally, I think it's pretty scary that one country that, frankly, the world doesn't find very trustworthy right now, controls it.

s/country/organization/ and the statement works equally well for the UN. As a regulatory body, the UN is a proven failure. It works as a venue for mediation and it works as a coordinator for disaster relief. That's about it.

Ever hear of PNAC? It's their plan, as was Iraq

[bewert]

The Project For A New American Century is an organization dedicated "...to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests." Among the members are VP Dick Cheney and his currently embattled Chief of Staff Lewis Libby, SecDef Don Rumsfled, Jeb Bush (brother of President Bush), etc. See their Statement of Principals and a list of the signers of this founding document. If you don't recognize some of the names, Google them and see where they have worked in the last five years. Paul Wolfowits, Dov Zakheim and Zalmay Khalilzad are good ones to start with. Here's a nice place to start with Zakheim. And it only gets more interesting from there ;)

In September, 2000 PNAC released a controversial document entitled Rebuilding America's Defenses, in which they argued that a "catastrophic and catalyzing event-like a new Pearl Harbor" was needed to speed up their planned re-militarization of America (see pg. 68). Earlier in this document they itemized their core principals, including 'CONTROL THE NEW "INTERNATIONAL COMMONS" OF SPACE AND "CYBERSPACE," and pave the way for the creation of a new military service - U.S. Space Forces - with the mission of space control.'(see pg. 11) On page 57 they go into more detail about how and why America must retain control of cyberspace. Controlling ICAAN is critical to this goal.

Scared yet? Remember, these are the folks that brought us the Patriot Act, forcing a vote on it after 9/11 without allowing anyone to read it, and enabling such great things as holding potential "terrorists" indefinitely without access to family or legal representation, sneak-and-peek searches, warrantless monitoring of e-mail, monitoring dissent groups without any suspicion of criminal activity by them, etc., etc.

As for Iraq, PNAC has been calling for the overthrow of Saddam since 1997 as a way to retain control of world energy supplies, critical to ensuring America's control over the world. But I think they bit off more than they could chew over there.

This group is truly scary, and they have been running our government for five years now.

Re:Statist Musical Chairs

[Ngwenya]

ICANN controls it. The US just gave them its blessing.

No, I think you're wrong there. The US DoC has control. ICANN is simply their agent for exercising that control. ICANN cannot do anything to "." without permission of the DoC. See here for a better explanation than I could ever give.

--Ng

Re:freedom?

[arkhan_jg]

It's certainly not the life or death struggle over DNS (OMG! China will censor my blog!) that people have been portraying it, as the ccTLD's and gTLD's will continue to be run entirely by their appropriate registrars.

There is one other big issue than the creation of say, the .xxx gTLD - and that's directions to the ccTLD's. Currently, the US department of commerce can tell ICANN who gets to host ccTLD's. So any country's entire DNS system - for example, the .iq domain for iraq - can be arbitrarily turned off or assigned to a new registrar. And there's nothing that country can do about it. Haiti had to wait 2 years to get its domain assigned to the registrar of its choice, for example.

That's what this big argument is really about - why should the US government, or a fairly unaccountable company like ICANN have the right to determine which registrar, if any, gets to run a country's DNS? So far the US government hasn't abused this power *that* much - but it could.

Nor is ICANN entirely trusted either - remember the fiasco when verisign decided to start domain squatting with it's search engine on all unassigned .com and .net domains, and ICANN did virtually nothing about it?

The problem with the alternative roots is that software makers like microsoft only support the 'official' ICANN system out of the box. With very few people technicially capable of adding alternative roots, and even fewer knowing why they'd need or want to, ICANN and the DoC effective has the rest of the world over a barrel. And they want to get off it.