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Lawmakers Support U.S. Control Of The Internet
TechScam writes "A new resolution was introduced in Congress that aims to backup the Bush administration over retaining U.S. control of the Internet's core infrastructure. From the article: 'The resolution, introduced by two Republicans and one Democrat, aims to line up Congress firmly behind the Bush administration as it heads for a showdown with much of the rest of the world over control of the global computer network.'"
You know something's wrong when they have to bring Congress into this.
Correct. The Internet is, fundamentally, an invention of the United States. Now, that doesn't mean that we should be arrogant about it, but what have, say, Cuba or Iran done to create or maintain it? Then why should they have any part in its control? Never mind the fact that they're repressive, closed, anti-deomcratic states....
"Let's just say this: he spelled 'Yale' with a '6'."
Shouldn't that read "U.S. Lawmakers Support U.S. Control Of The Internet" ?
Don't be ridiculous. China will have absolutely no control of the Internet. As for China being the "next" empire. That is dubious, according to the CIA 15 year report, it will be the EU that will become the next superpower, economically, and militarily.
This is why this is issue is so significant. The US does not want to the EU to have anymore power than it does now. This classic showdown highlights US foreign policy. The US will win because of simple facts. The sheer amount of Tier 1 ISP's as US companies, Akamai is a US company, the ICANN is still in the US. And many major websites are US owned.
The EU can poison all the DNS servers they want. It will hurt them more than the US because the simple fact is that more Europeans do business with US companies than American's doing business with European companies.
what we need is to get some momentum behind a decent decentralized DNS-type system. there have been various proposals out there for a while, but there was never a strong reason to try switching... until now.
Agreed. What most of the world doesn't understand is that the internet, the real internet, is not controlled by any goverment or agency. It's controlled by us, the geeks and nerds of the computer world! The DNS system only continues to work so long as we continue to use it. If we all start using a different system to find our pron, the companies of the world will follow us to keep our buisness. Then the rest of the world will follow them.We don't have to keep DNS around. There are other ways of finding information on the internet. If we put our heads together and came up with a replacement, then used it, we can put this whole messy business, and any future similar problems, to rest.
If you think the US is the most aggressive nation on Earth for standing up to tyrants and generally working toward freeing people around the world, then us Americans would take that as a compliment and a badge of honor.
The US is the most benevovent superpower in history. The fact is that we did invented it, and nobody else did. Going into hypotheticals is pointless because China was dirt-poor when the Internet was invented, and North Korea is starving now. There's a reason so much invention and ingenuity happens in the US.
It's sad to see the jealousy on slashdot. It's almost like you wish the Internet or anything else hadn't been invented by Americans, just so you couldn't see our satisfaction over it.
You're talking about the moral justification, not the actual reason. If the E.U. or the U.N. wanted to, they could easily fabricate some moral justification for taking over the internet. But they would then run into the actual reasons that the U.S. has control:
(1) The U.S. has a unified language
(2) The U.S. is an economic powerhouse, especially on the internet
The moral justification is orthogonal to the actual reason. It happens that they point at the same country this time.
Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.
The US having absolute control of that much economic infrastructure would give them the same willies that your fore-fathers got.
Then - like the US - they should declare independence and build their own.
I hate the current US administration, and the uselessly inoffensive Democratic party is a close second. But I love my country, and this is something we made. No foreign bureaucrat has the right to decide it's not ours anymore.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
All in all, the US letting the U.N. manage the Internet won't change what we love in the Internet, but it will prevent bad political choices (e.g VeriSign having gTLDs that are supposedly ran as Public Service), and it is just the way it should be.
It will prevent unilateral political choices, but as every Slashdotter should know by now "managing" the Internet is not possible. Only the DNS system can be controlled by a central authority. Censorship only works if every single country in the world agrees to crack down on ISPs hosting the stuff to censor. This will only work with child porn and (hopefully) spam.
WW2 had the US in the defense, there's a difference between defending yourself or your allies and attacking some country because you happen not to agree with their political system (official reason). Sure, there was the "we are definding ourselves from WMDs" claim but Hitler also claimed to be defending. Both the WMDs and the Nazi defense were lies and rather thinly veiled ones at that. What other countries do is essentially their business until the UN decides it's an international affair (or it crosses borders). When you hear of a CEO exploiting his workforce you don't go over and shoot him, you let the legal system handle that. There are international laws, disregarding them will obviously make the rest of the world hate you.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Maybe a better place to begin a discussion would be the question of which governments have the most control over their citizens. When someone's in position to take away your "freedom" whenever they want, then it isn't freedom anymore, it's permission.
Let us see...what about CIA jeopardasing weapons inspectors job? Really, don't pretend you're in the sole position to have moral stand in this world, that's what turns people/countries away.
(not to metnion that I'd like to know on what good crack you're on - since you're saying EU nations said US "deserved it". And don't you dare pretending hat France didn't help - actaully, France was one of your most active allies in Afghanistan campaign. But in case of Iraq, they've seen you're wrong, they warned you how it can end and look at the mess now that they've envisioned then. That's what freinds do. That's what allies do.
But of course you would like them to just be puppet states...
One that hath name thou can not otter
- Stopping spivs stealing TLDs from small, and naive states.
- Stopping spivs hoarding domain names thus creating a very expensive market for what should be an administration-cost only resource.
- Stopping organisations hoarding many millions of unused IP numbers.
- Stopping the registration of Out-of-Country servers and email addresses.
- Stopping the largest supplier of software foisting insecure by default machines on innocent customers who then use them on the 'Net, thus allowing the creation of million machine bot-nets to be used for criminal purposes.
- Stopping the broadcasting of billions of spam messages which are mostly used for criminal purposes.
- Controlling the veritable flood of revolting, depraved, and offensive images and film clips.
Once the addressing of these issues has at least been attempted by the US Government and its co-conspirator the ICANN, the rest of the world might agree that the Internet is being properly administered. Until that time, so sorry Uncle Sam, but you are a failing parent.Strongly put maybe, but as far as the rest of the world is concerned that's what the issues are all about. In a word, shared Sovereignty over what has become an internationally shared resource.
"Correct. The Internet is, fundamentally, an invention of the United States."
Nowadays when you post here, you must take into account that there is an editor called Zonk who barely has enough braincells to keep breathing. He continuously gets tiny things wrong, such as "is this at all interesting?" and "what is this story about?".
The story is not about control of the internet, it is about control of one small internet service, and a fairly insignificant one at that, called DNS. Invented by one Paul Mockapetris, who I assume was an American. I don't know how that should mean that the USA should control my DNS servers, but I guess some justification could be made up.
Anyway, I hope this all blows up in our governments' faces: I have always disliked the way the DNS was controlled, and I will be glad when we need to start thinking of alternatives, and much more diverse naming systems will emerge. Several ones that will not be governed my grey men in grey suits.
"The real reason that the US government asked for postponement of the
Nonsense. Cark Rove needed to get a religious group off his back by doing them a favour. Rather than delve into the stem cell issue or any of the other thorny problems on their shopping list, he glanced at their "stop
The whitehouse doesn't legitimize porn, the supremes do.
And it doesn't legitimize porn, it migtates it away from
This is why it's bad to use the legacy root servers. Consider this: say in once scenario eveybody primaried the root zone for themselves; everybody was their own root server, that is they declare themselves authoritative for the "." root zone. Now their comnputer knows where all the tld servers are and can find the
Under this scenario, how would the US government block a tld it didn't like? It can not. Nor can any government.
Under the current scenario, if thew USG shut off the legacy root servers (which it *can do* and no argument to the contrary changes this fact) the internet goes away, worldwide.
Before DNS was invented, everybody downloaded the "hosts.txt" file and your computer in that day knew the names and addresses of all the other computers on the network.
When DNS was invented, the notion of your own compter doing your own nameservice was absurd - about 5 guys worldwide had working nameserver code, so it was a great convenience that DARPA ran a half dozen nameservers that resolved the root and everythings else. And it was great that the NSF paid for these servers, deployed at the most robust points around the network. Through 20 years of sheer laziness and lack of innovation (with a good measure of subterfuge, graft and greed thrown in) we still, for some reason not well understood by me, rely on those 13 IP addresses for all names. Biz-zarre. It's *convenient*.
But, as a citizen of a country not the US I think now the convenience of the US controlled root servers is somewhat diminished.
Need Mercedes parts ?
If USA hadn't kicked a whole country's DNS off-line before, the promise in the Economist might be credible. But since but ".dk" has been taken off-line once by USA for not paying for the domain, I don't really trust such a promise.
PS: No, the countries do not pay for their domains.
"There is nothing worse than having only one drunk head."