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Why Talk About Internet Governance?
andyo wrote to mention an article on the O' Reilly network entitled Why They're Talking About Internet Governance. The piece goes into the history of how things came to be in the first place, as regards the distribution of internet domain space. From the article: "Having established commercial beachheads on the Internet, corporations wanted to own the whole terrain. Through the World Intellectual Property Organization ... they were designing a new regime for handling domain names. It was nicely suited to large corporations ... Within weeks of the successful conclusion of the Global Incorporation Alliance Workshop, a lash-up of Internet leaders, Network Solutions, and other back room forces popped a proposal of their own on a surprised and unprepared Internet community. The proposal ... ultimately led to ICANN. Most stakeholders were left out of the decision--even many large corporations were angry--but the Commerce Department approved the proposal, happy to wash its hands of the issue. "
Echoes my sentiments exactly
"The whole domain name problem could have been solved in a way that would have eliminated strife over domain allocation." Maybe your next entry should explain how.
~jennifer.k~
None of the of the above.
If anything all goverments should be barred from having anything to do with internet. Lord know's that one of them will find a way to fuck this up too.
M$ it's whats for diner!!!!!
I think it's a pretty interesting topic, and this article supplies the back story for folks who didn't know it already. Ultimately, the hows and the whys don't matter to anyone who has any real say in this issue, though. This will by and large be decided by diplomats and beaurocrats whose experience with the internet consists of their assistant/secretary spending an hour a day trying to help them use it completely in vain.
What it really boils down to is we either trust the completely untrustworthy, unstable and unorganized UN to handle this very serious responsibility (which we've been handling just fine all by ourselves for years now), or we further degrade our world image by telling the UN where to stick it and keeping the root servers under the perfectly competent management they have right now and have always had.
America is experiencing sort of a golden age of being loathed globally at the moment, which historically has happened to every major world power, especially when they decided to exercise some of their power to improve their position, as we have been doing for the past few years. It is to be expected, and eventually we can expect one of two solutions to occur naturally: A. America reaches a place where it is comfortable enough to slow its expansion/influence, and the rest of the world's grumbling gradually decreases, or B. the shit hits the fan for one of a billion reasons and America's term as world power comes to a halt. It is my opinion that I will live to see "A" happen more than once in my lifetime, and that I'll be dead long before "B" occurs. This root server issue will be solved like every other diplomatic row, in that things will stay exactly the same but a "resolution" will be drafted that strokes the little countries' egos enough that they forget about it for now.
I am concerned if the EU or UN is able to take over control that we will suffer due to censorship. Free speech and interchange of ideas is part of who we are. It is the reason we now have an Internet. I would support forking instead of capitulating.
Just as regualation destroys free trade, it will make the internet crawl to a halt. It is only a matter of time before more governments get their hands on it and destroy the free nature of the net. It is only a matter of time. The UN and the EU want to get control of it, you can ensure that it will become highly hampered, even taxed to use to give it to those that can afford it in good socialist fashion.
I am confused about one thing in this whole fiasco. I have yet to hear a single example of what exactly "the world" needs a say in. Or are they just looking to cash in on domain registration fees by tacking on some form of tax?
You can visit the ICANN site and listen to the meeting, informative to say the least. Many sound like they have poor memories, some you can almost hear then snore over the mics and likely many had too much to drink before the meeting.
Someone didn't want ICANN making much decisions so they stacked it with people who would paralyze any further development. This is clear.
The UN is not much different for the most part.
The internet naming is already fragmented and less standard. China for example is using DNS to filter content. We can expect this fragmention to continue.
Ultimately the Internet belongs to the people. And it will be run by the people if necessary. If something becomes popular, ICANN nor the UN could stop it. The Chinese are already creative, using proxies outside their country to bypass the government.
From TFA:
Should bloggers, for instance, meet the same standards for accuracy as professional journalists?
You're proposing a law requiring bloggers to misquote people, get key facts wrong, present nonsense in the name of "balance" and generally make stuff up? Well, sure, if you're going to pay them for it.
I'm sorry, but this looks like a power grab by control freaks. Taking advantage of anti-US sentiment (Iraq/Kyoto) to feather their own nests. Worse, I suspect they intend to provide a great deal more regulation than the minimal needed.
In general they rationalize this decentralized governance by claiming the woes of spam, porn and of all things hardware costs. None of those things have anything to do with some administrative technical controls. Have no doubts representatives of the UN who are clamoring for some sort of control, want that control for only one reason and that reason is power.
As I mentioned in an earlier post I agree with most of what Oram said in his article. I had one quibble about the solution for tlds but aside from that everything he said was correct. However, what he didn't say is even more important.
It isn't just commercial interests that make domain names such a hot topic. DNS is the only possibility for control and management of the internet and that makes governments all excited, especially totalitarian regimes and other countries who aren't big fans of free expression. Sure the internet itself may make complete censorship very difficult but control over the domain name system can make certain types of information practically impossible to access.
For instance imagine a body running the DNS system which decides to crack down on hate speech. They could deny a domain name to every site hosting hate speech (or if they wanted to go really hard core every site linking to hate speech by IP). Search enginge domain names are very valuable and a great deal of pressure could be exerted on google by threatening to take away google.com and give it to someone who promised not to link to offensive material.
While I'm not a big fan of hate speech I do think it is a great mistake to ban it. I think the suppression of racist speech in germany has only given neo-nazis an air of danger and mystery and spread the movement. Since many countries other than the US have laws against hate speech it is quite plausible a UN body might enforce such a scheme if they got control over the internet. Even more disturbingly is that a large number of countries would likely push to expand the definition of hate speech to anything which is sufficently critical of islam.
On the corporate front giving control of DNS to some UN body removes the first ammendment protections for parody and commentary from play. Right now there is some (minimal) legal protection for things like McDonalds-sucks. If it was run by a UN body it would not only remove the legal hurdles preventing the administration in the US (and other countries) from giving in to the corps but also make it so distant from voters that politicians could avoid any serious political harm from giving in (it wasn't me it was the global community).
Most ditrubingly is the fact that many of the biggest pushers for UN control over the internet are also countries with large censorship agenda's like china, iran and others (brazil is an exception). While a full on censorship scheme like I describe above is unlikely to be used against talk about democracy it could be against pornography. More likely, however, is that these countries will push to create a mechanism for per country censorship of domain names, e.g., DNS records will be required to include information about the type of content to allow easier censorship of their populations.
You can find analysis on my part and more facts/links .
Don't get me wrong ICANN is far from perfect but it is mostly incompetant and a bit corporate influenced which is a lot better than some of the possible alternatives. US record on free speech is also spotted, but then again so are most countries records, and the US has some of the best protections for speech the majority finds disagreeable. Moreover, I think DNS administration is safer in any western democracy than in some intergovernmental body where everyone can deny responsibility. I would rather just give the DNS system to england or germany than share it.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Its pretty clear this isnt about just domain names. From http://www.wgig.org/index.html:
12. It should be made clear, however, that Internet governance includes more than Internet names and addresses, issues dealt with by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN): it also includes other significant public policy issues, such as critical Internet resources, the security and safety of the Internet, and developmental aspects and issues pertaining to the use of the Internet.
The really rediculous quote from the paper though is:
Internet governance is the development and application by Governments, the private sector and civil society, in their respective roles, of shared principles, norms, rules, decision-making procedures, and programmes that shape the evolution and use of the Internet.
Whats this in their respective roles crap? Who is it thats going to define what ones 'respective role' is? Why should we accept some UN idiots labeling of different groups? What the hell is the difference between the private sector and civil society? If govt supposedly reflects the values of a society, what is the difference between governments and civil society? What moron wrote this rag?
> Taking away your domain name does NOTHING
Except stops all your incoming traffic from people who bookmarked your URL with the domain name and them assume your site went down when it no longer works. Saying Domain Names are nothing is utter bullshit, an extremely miniscule number of people use IP addresses to get to ANY website.
All the bourgeois parties are pro-war. If your post is supposed to convince us that the Democrats are as bad as the Republicans- congradulations, we knew that already.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
I find it amusing that the UN - with the ITU, has controlled the telephone system and standards associated with telephony for a long tome now, with no complaints or issues. Amusing that no one here seems to understand how the UN actually works. It is doubly amusing that by demanding the Status Quo with ICANN they fail to see how unaccountable ICANN is.
/ 00990.html).
.fuck as a TLD. However I would see major US outcy of a UN body allowed .fuck to be intered into the TLD files.
Amazing that so many posters here decry the corporate pressures to control any and all domain names, yet are silent on the ties betwen WIPRO desires and ICANN actions.
Stupendous that no one seems aware of how the IANA function passed from Postel to ICANN with no stops and with no real consultation and little input from any stakeholder. Bizarre that for so many years the entries into the TLD space and delegations of Country Code TLD's were in the hands on one man (Postel).
Sad that no one here seems to recall the hundreds of pending TLD applications that were sent into "space" once ICANN gave birth to itself (my application was one pending : http://www.gtld-mou.org/gtld-discuss/mail-archive
Accountability? None whatsoever with ICANN.
The ITU has done an acceptable job in ensuring that the international phone system and it's required standards tick over nicely.
The ITU should have received the IANA function when Postel agreed it should move. However everyone in government at the time was too ignorent to absorb the implications of ICANN power.
I am also stunned that people actually believe that censorship requires any control of DNS - I am based from time to time in Dubai and remember when they fired up their firewalls and proxy servers running filtering lists.......those that want to control the internet have all the help they need from Cisco and white list vendors in the US to have any need to play games with TLD issues.
I cannot imagine that an ITU type function under the UN is going to block the issuance of
The internet seems to have no history. Certainly 1998 when all the action when down and the debates were lost seems to be too long ago for most posters to remember.
Long and short - ICANN sucks and will continue to suck.
And I think I know why.
In spite of its virtues -- in spite of the fact that it seems to embody the very ideals that most individuals seem to hold -- OpenNIC isn't very popular.
The reason OpenNIC isn't popular, is that most peoples' nearests resolvers don't use it. Most people don't want to set up BIND (or its competitors). So they're going to use someone else's resolver, which will almost always be their ISP's machine. Thus, they defer the decision to someone else. ("If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice." -- Rush)
The UN doesn't want to repeat this unpopularity. They're probably willing to leave it to the market or democracy, but only if they are guaranteed to receive the default vote. They don't want to be an "alternative root", they want to be "the" root, and let ICANN, OpenNIC, etc be "alternatives." And the only way to do that is to sieze control of the hosts that are already entered into everyone's BIND config files. There are a handful of specific addresses that they want to take over.
What I haven't figured out, is why ISPs still use ICANN's root. The big ones (e.g. Comcast), I understand: they have an interest in teaching people to just leave everything important to the megacorps. Being a Comcast customer is all about sucking the corporate teat. But as for the small ones, the universities, etc, I don't get it. I expect that the admins of these networks are educated enough about DNS that they understand the issue, so why do they still choose ICANN?
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