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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. "
...then when you hijack someones domain, people wearing little blue hats and driving Nissan Patrols will come knocking on your door with a resolution number. Then you can ignore it and do what ever you want thinking "I just got a visit from the internet police!"
But serious, whoever runs it should let everyone in the world should have a say, not just a US company.
And internet police would be a good idea also. But make them wear polkadot hats. Red ones, with black dots. That would be nice.
I think that change in Domain governance will occur inevitably. As far as I remember, the world is running out of IPs, and eventually everyone will have to start using IPV6. This change may or may not become a significant oppurtunity for governments or corporations for make tremendous changes (In my view there is an oppurtunity for change). In my utopia, domain name registration (governance, as the article stated) would be managed by a world wide governing body which would commit to free (as it $$$) and fair distribution of domain names (so that no one can profit off of taking a range of names and forcing others to pay for them). The UN is however is not such an organization; never has not never will be.
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.
I think this sentence makes the point clearly enough. The rest of the world is jealous and embarrassed. When the Soviet Union was breathing down everyone's necks, all ready to "free" the world from the horrible yoke of free speech and prosperity, only the United States had the guts and the guns to stand in their way. I'm certain it was rather humiliating to have to rely on the USA to send forces whenever the USSR attacked. But that was the way it was. Only the USA was rich enough to keep their technology and prepardness toe to toe with the enemy. I'd like to think that most countries were grateful for the protection that the US provided, many even seeing the US's accomplishments as the accomplishments of the world as a whole.
But now the Cold War is over. Suddenly, that friendship has turned to resentment. Without any threat from the USSR or a military goverment that succeeded it, the world is struggling with a newfound freedom. No longer do they live in fear of a global war. No longer do they have to worry about someone knocking on their door and saying, "You no longer have the right to speak freely or have a life as you please."
But instead of being thankful for the freedom that the US has bought and paid for, they became resentful of the help they received. Turned on the hand that fed them, as it were, and demanded that the US conform to their ideas of how the world should be run.
I'll say this, and I'll say this only once. The US will remain a super power indefinitely. We will not back off our position, we will not disarm. For we know from our own history that The Price of Freedom is Eternal Vigelence. And if we need to, we will protect ourselves and the rest of the world from tyrants and dictators who presume to hurt people for their own selfish goals. And no matter what the rest of the world thinks, we will stand tall and proud, and ensure that the world is never again threatened by oppression.
So the next time China says, "We want access to the root servers to oppress our people," the US will be there to say "No!". The next time the EU says, "We want to tax the speech of our people, so that everyone is only as equal as their money," the US will be there to say "NO!"
And most importantly, the next time some poor soul needs to cry out to the world for help, the US will be there to say, "YES! We've protected your freedom to speak by protecting the freedom of the Internet. Help is on the way."
I'm proud to be an American. No matter how much you bash my country, no matter how hard you try to force us, you CANNOT take that away from me.
You forgot option C: China gradually overtakes the US as the dominant global military and economic power over the next 50 years and the US becomes a relic, much like the EU (sorry guys.) It takes a long time to mobilize 1.2 billion people, but the economic policy makers in China finally seem to "get it" (unlike Russia wrt Stalin, China learned from the disasters Mao caused.)
But the UN is largely irrelevant. The prime objective of the UN is to give people a forum for diplomacy so something like WWII never happens again. But if they can't stop unilateral aggression (they didn't stop us invading Iraq, we lied and made up a pretty good cover story) then they have failed. Iraq can still turn into a world war; all it would take is an Iraqi militant assassinating the Shah of Iran and the entire powderkeg in the middle east would explode into a global conflict with nuclear weapons.
Fun.
Have you ever heard the saying, "The Internet views censorship as damage and routes around it"? I'm not sure who said it, but he/she was right on. To expand on this, we need to look at governance in the same way we look at censorship.
.com, .org, and .edu management to some sort of NGO (ICANN for example), with the purpose being for multi-national corporations, organizations, and institutions of higher education who do not associate with any particular nation (for example would be icrc.org)
If you have never read World of Ends, I recommend you do so now.
The solution to "governance" over the internet is to remain true to the foundations it was developed under. The internet as an agreement cannot be governed. It can only exist while there is compromise and consensus. So, here is what I believe is the best solution to this problem:
1. For the time being, maintain the status quo of having ICANN responsible for the assignment of IPv4 addresses.
2. Transition into IPv6 by assigning blocks of IP addresses to all countries. Perhaps leaving some addresses for space stations, the moon, mars, etc. Do this though multi-national treaties. This is where the United Nations can help out, but the UN should only be a facilitator. Remember, the Internet is an agreement among nations.
3. Have each country be responsible for assigning its block of IP addresses, and for the management of their TLDs.
4. Transfer
The important thing is that the internet remain decentralized. This seems to be the point that everybody is missing. It doesn't matter who governs the internet, because nobody should govern the entire internet. Its works best as an agreement, and that is how we should proceed.
Here's my #1 problem with governments: the committee. These mini-groups tend to debate over what is best for them, not their constituents.
Example of typical bad true Democracy: 51 out of 100 people love large bananas. They vote to regulate bananas, and now only large bananas are available.
Example of typical bad representative democracy: 5 representatives of 100 people form a banana size committee. 2 of them have friends or family who grow medium sized bananas. 51 of 100 citizens prefer large bananas. The 2 reps convince the other 3 to set the definition of 'large' as equal to the medium sized bananas, in exchange for adding pork to the law that helps the other 3 reps.
Example of free market democracy: 51 out of 100 people like large bananas. 30 like medium, and 19 like tiny. Banana growers grow all 3 sizes, selling them at a price set by the supply of certain sizes and the demand for those sizes.
The first two forms of democracy are, well, bananas. Nuts! This is how we live today in the US. The UN is even worse,with almost zero input by the constituents.
Internet governance is best delegated to corporations and individuals. Profit is merely a reflection of a company's ability to meet the demands (price, quality, performance) of their customers. Profit can not be demanded. Profit can not be stolen. Profit can not be fraudulent for long. Except when a company is given monopoly power by government mandate (schools, roads, etc).
The Internet is a group of individuals who pick an ISP. The groups of ISPs choose a backbone provider. The backbones choose to interconnect.
Why is governance needed? If a backbone decides to break away, customers and ISPs will choose another backbone. If an ISP decides to censor or charge too much, users can select another ISP (except when government forces zero choice).
There is zero need for government involvement, except to tax, regulate, censor and control.
Just out of curiousity, do we really need TLDs? If you think about it, most companies just register multiple ones anyway, slashdot.org AND slashdot.com for example. To be honest, I think it just adds confusion for the most part, if somewebsite.com is registered to a well know site, doesn't that make somewebsite.org pretty useless to all but squatters?
.gov, .gov.uk or whatever. But then they could just register the .uk. or .us. domain and sub-domain...
The only useful thing I can think of really is to group country specific services,
I agree with most things that Oram says in this article. I have one quibble and one major disagreement I will put in another post.
.xxx (assuming it gets popular) is of no difficulty since it is easily connected with important facts you already remember about the site. On the other hand when tlds don't have much to do with content adding more of them can have a negative effect. If you know your favorite blog is computationaltruth.???/blog/ knowing the content or other facts about the site hardly helps you distingush between net, org and com. Since most people and all corporations want to achieve easy memorability when there is no obvious content (or other already known information) based discrimination more tlds can either just increase the confusion encouraging corporations to buy CORPNAME.* for all possible options. Worse too many tlds means some may fade into obscurity and fads keep the 'good' names just as scarce.
.xxx, .edu and .gov. Org and Com and Net are necessery general purpose names but that model shouldn't be followed with things like .biz which just sow confusion (is that a .com or a .biz)? The important question is whether there are enough good new content related tlds and that is something I don't know.
The quibble is that freeing up more tlds won't necessarily solve the scarcity of good domain names. If done incorrectly it could even make the problem worse.
The point of domain names is to provide a quick and easy way to remember and communicate internet locations. So long as tlds categorize sites into content relevant categories they do work to relieve the demand for domain names. For instance if you want to go to fuckedchicks (made up) your favorite porn cite remembering that it is in
Or to put it another way too many non-content related tlds make all domains harder to remember and hence don't solve the problem but just spread out the pain by making every name slightly worse.
So far it seems that the country codes (and perhaps some even smaller geographic codes) are good (in the sense above) tlds as are the
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
If they implement the IP protocal with geocoded addresses instead of the IPv4 or IPv6, they wouldn't have such an argument to fight about in who controls the Internet.
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but assuming that name resolution is handled so poorly, regardless of what institution is responsible for it, there is nothing stopping us from forking DNS. If Slash users don't like ICANN or the UN, why not start an alternative DNS? If I remember correctly, something to this effect was done when people wanted some TLD's early that hadn't been passed through. Why not split off from the whole thing?
Slash certainly has the usership and technical knowledge and resources to setup alternative Centeral DNS machines, this time with the name hierarchy done properly, and if a good amount of the tech sites go over, really what else would you need? If the businesses don't follow, good riddance, you can always go back to the polluted namespace with a simple config change, and if they do decide to migrate as popularity increases, they will have to play within the new rules.
Am I missing something here? Why NOT do this?
Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?
Nope, sorry; your argument, while grounded in correct facts, is based on an unlike analogy and doesn't correctly treat the issue of squatters.
Your hypothetical, the ford.com site about river crossings, would indeed be acceptable under normal trademark policy. However, that's not what a squatter does. We are not talking about people who bought domain names that happened to be trademarks and used them for unrelated purposes. We are talking about people who bought domain names for no reason other than to sell them to the trademark owners. In that instance, when you are talking about someone buying ford.com and trying to sell it to Ford Motor Company, obviously the commercial interest of the domain squatter is "in the same market" as Ford Motor Company. They are selling the domain to deal with the business of selling cars.
If someone buys a domain that happens to be a registered trademark, and uses it for unrelated purposes, this is acceptable. If someone buys a domain name that's a registered trademark for the sole purpose of selling it to the trademark holder, then by definition they are interacting in the same market and it qualifies as trademark infringement.
Thanks for bringing this up, because it does allow me to clarify this part of the issue, which I didn't mention in the first post. But do note that not only do you disagree with me, but you also disagree with the very well-documented views of court systems in many, many nations. Everyone who matters (a group that doesn't include either of us) has already decided that I'm right about this.
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.