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A Monroe Doctrine for the Internet
InklingBooks writes "An article in Foreign Affairs suggests that in a tersely worded statement the United States has issued a 'Monroe Doctrine' for the Internet. The Monroe Doctrine was a unilateral declaration by the U.S. that it would not permit European powers to establish new colonies in the Western Hemisphere." From the article: "Everyone understands that the Internet is crucial for the functioning of modern economies, societies, and even governments, and everyone has an interest in seeing that it is secure and reliable. But at the same time, many governments are bothered that such a vital resource exists outside their control and, even worse, that it is under the thumb of an already dominant United States. Washington's answer to these concerns -- the Commerce Department's four terse paragraphs, released at the end of June, announcing that the United States plans to retain control of the Internet indefinitely -- was intended as a sort of Monroe Doctrine for our times. It was received abroad with just the anger one would expect, setting the stage for further controversy."
There's still the possibility of an alternate internet. The US can't enforce rules online.
... I feel the internet is rather save in us hands. At least better than in that of Cuba and Iran. And even in Eurpean countries, some politicians don't always understand that freedom is always the freedom of different opinions (or sexual preferences and tastes).
Fleur de Sel
People need a clue of they're going to be given power.
The US has no control over the internet, they can mess with it and poke it a little but nothing more. The internet is an extreme communist network. You need to work together so everything works. If someone stops doing their share they get cut off and end up having to rejoin and work twice as hard or they die. It's that simple.
No one controls the Internet, no one ever will. Anyone who tries to will lose far more than I wish to even guess at.
I like muppets.
The control thing is kinda silly. If the root servers become unstable due to government interference, people will use alternative servers. It happened before. There is often a technical solution for government stupidity. Even if the poweres that be don't want it...
We invented, we govern it. Simple. If they want to
create their own version and write the bridges, they
can go ahead, but it was our tax dollars (DARPA) that
developed it in the first place.
Now, there are more than a few decisions our gov't
has made and continues to make that I *strongly*
disagree with, but that's for another conversation.
Peace & Blessings,
bmac
American can control the '1's and the rest of the world can control the '0's. France gets the occasional '2.'
DNS *is* only a small part of what the Internet is, however it is one of the most important services that exists on it. Most everything is located and connections established by resolving a DNS name to an IP. Email depends upon DNS almost completely, for example. Without DNS, we're thrown back to the days where you had to maintain and copy around massive tables for everything, so that you know what the IP of the mail exchange is, what the web server IP is, etc.
Even things like Microsoft's Active Directory require a DNS infrastructure to work, though it doesn't need the global DNS that we're talking about.
In this case, you can pretty much consider it to be "the internet", since, while IP and associated routing will still work fine, most services will not.
I think it's pretty ridiculous to argue that the governance of the Internet should remain in the hands of any one government, even the US. There are those who would say especially the US. Most of the counter-arguments go something like this: "What, you want Cuba running the Internet?" No, I don't. But I think it's really small-minded, not to mention willfully blind, to think that the US has a monopoly on goodness and freedom. The Internet is global, and no one nation should have a chokehold over a global system. If it were any other nation, the US government would be on the side of those calling for it to surrender control to an international body.
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
"In this case, the US is meddling in the affairs of everyone else by controlling the name servers that everyone uses."
Not really. The root servers, bind itself, in fact, were developed in the United States and were under the control of US organizations from their inception. It's not the US meddling in the affairs of others here. It's others wanting to meddle in the affairs of the internet as a whole and the US telling them "No."
As others have pointed out before in this argument, there is nothing whatsoever stopping other countries from setting up their own root servers and forcing their population to use them. It will proabably break things, and no one else will use them, but there's no real reason they can't.
The trouble is that Governments, all governments (US included) feel the need to have some kind of control. Getting everyone to agree on just how to use that control is an exercise in futility. Would China do a better job with the root servers? France? The UK? Zimbabwe?
Probably not.
Never attribute to malice what can as easily be the result of incompetence...
Ok, as I understand the situation, the entire argument is over who controls the root DNS servers. If another country want's "control" of the "internet", all they have to do is set up they're own servers and require that ISPs in that country use they're servers.
There is absolutely no sense in having a government of any country in charge of the root DNS servers. Given the nature of the "internet" it's almost completely out from under the control of any government anyway. The control is entirely in the hands of the communications industry anyway.
This shows how clueless politicians are when they talk about "control of the internet". The technology is available to everyone. Any country can setup a network based on TCP/IP technology, could setup their own root servers, and regulate ISPs in their country to use those root servers for their DNS's. Several countries could even get together and create a completely alternate network cut off from "the one true internet" as well. There exist all manners of segregating the current network, just look at the great firewall of China.
.com etc., domain names. I realize that some countries' domains are probably not under their control, and that seems unnecessary.
.com.nn domain in every country code (nn) - in many cases this is already done.
.com domain holder the option to move their domain name under the country code of their choice. In cases where there are conflicting names, give it to the first of the two who registered it.
.com domain, the same with other non-country code domains.
.com. I guess it just means that the root servers should be segregated by country. Would that be so bad?
All this is about is who controls the main
If we really wanted to fix the whole issue without trying to figure out whose dick is bigger, you go to something like this:
1) Make sure every country code is managed only by that country, and give them control of all root servers for that country.
2) Create a
3) Give every
4) Blow away the
Then, every country has their own little "piece" of the internet, so to speak, and can regulate it into oblivion if they like.
Come to think of it, as long as countries have control of their country code root servers (if such a thing exists), then we're practically there. There's no reason why the US can't keep control of
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
That might have been a good post. If you actually gave a reason for any of it.
When other countries, IOs, or NGOs complain about the US 'stranglehold' on the Internet, I always see it as someone complaining about a problem that doesn't exist. First off, the Internet functions regardless of who controls the root servers, and if (for some strange reason) the US government did do something foolish, others are free to use different servers.
Regardless, I'm trying to see it from their point of view. Can someone provide specific previous actions which could be used in the argument against continued US 'control' of the registry?
This is so funny. Please make other jokes like that I'm laughing.
This makes a great topic for furious discussions and in the end isn't really that much of an issue - after all, the worst they can do is refuse usage of root servers and not allocate IP addresses. I have 2 computers here, I can make a perfectly functional internet. The technology is there, and it's open, so while some central control over standards and roots etc is nice to have, abuse of it will not end the world.
What I feel more uncomfortable about is carriers not playing fair. I expect bandwith providers to start tailoring their offerings to only work with content they approve of or promote - eg a broadband provider preferring his own VOIP service over competition services or his own digital TV access over the one from others. How long till 'internet access' means a big fat pipe to my provider, and a little trickle to the rest of the world, instead of the universal 'do as you please' open network we enjoy today? Unlike root servers, I cannot self provide my bandwith.
My (monopolist) cable provider bugs me with his ridiculously priced VOIP access. I currently use competition, but I expect them any day now to throttle access to the competition's IP block by just enough to not make it work anymore....
I interviewed Vint Cerf, who yesterday coincidentally was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, about U.S. control of the Net earlier in the week.
From TFA: Any network requires some centralized control in order to function.
This statement is just plain wrong. P2P has shown that. What TFA probably means to say is "Every big network I can think of requires some centralized control"
And I think this assumption is at the core of the controversy here. If there has to be a single unique owner of something, then yes, you're going to see fighting over who that gets to be. But why does there have to be?
First of all, it's only DNS. Any TCP/IP stack that is correctly implemented can accept multiple DNS servers. It's part of the redundancy built into the system. The worst case scenario from this whole issue would be that Europe establishes its own version of ICANN, with its own root DNS servers. People will still want to communicate with eachother, so those servers will cross-pollinate entries. Some way to handle collisions will be invented - maybe you just specify an extra level of TLD to determine which root servers you use. Maybe there'll be arbitration. What I'm saying here is that the world will go on. It's only DNS.
So I guess that, aside from political blustering on both sides of the pond, I just don't see enough controversy here to warrant the media circus it's causing.
Why not advocate that each and every nation that wants to should setup its own TLD DNS servers?
.com names and such and what organizations are allowed to register them. But that would also be solved in this fashion. If a Korean site gave "slashdot.org" to one of their friends, then Korea could not get to "slashdot.org" ... but everyone else could.
If they want them to just forward requests to the ones in the US, that's fine.
If that nation wants to break those searches, that's fine too. The only people they'll be hurting are their own citizens. And the smarter ones will be able to re-direct the queries to other servers.
This is the biggest stupid fight about NOTHING.
The ONLY issue would be
If they can't play nice, they're only hurting their own people.
The reason that the EU and UN keep talking such such terms is because they want to scare people in to supporting their grab of DNS. If you tell the average person the truth: "A US orginization maintins control of the text file that contains high-level domain mappings. It's a defacto standard that the DNS roots choose to listen to, but nobody forces them to do so. Also it delegates control of individual domains to the respective contries." Well, nobody will care. If however you say: "The US controls the Internet, and they can fuck up your access whenever they want!!!" People get visions of US imperalism extending to the Internet and want you to save them from it.
I expect the rehetoric to continue full force from the EU. I also expect nothing to come of it unless there are some draconian laws passed over there. Seems most DNS server operators are happy using the root-servers.net roots, and those roots are happy listening to ICANN. Since the government won't force ICANN to give control to the UN, and ICANN has no reason to, nothing will happen.
"In this case, the US is meddling in the affairs of everyone else by controlling the name servers that everyone uses."
The United States never forced any other nation to use our name servers, nor did the United States ever force those nations to connect themselves to our WAN. When other nations connected to the internet they did so voluntarily, and if they don't like the way our government chooses to manage our WAN, those nations are just as free to stop using ours - for that matter, they're free to just set up their own name servers connected to our WAN.
What it really comes down to is that decades after the US had the internet working, the rest of the world still couldn't pull off something similar. UN can't even agree that it should make some sort of serious effort to stop genocide in Africa, the damage all those corrupt diplomats would do to the internet if put in charge is unthinkable. Perhaps if those whiners in the EU could get their own constitution ratified by the member states the US would have a good reason to care about Europe's desire to have more control over the internet, but right now there's no evidence that letting other nations have more control over the internet would do anything but ruin it.
I am not sure whether to laugh or cry at the "we invented it, therefore it's ours" posts here.
The Internet is nothing more than an agreement to interoperate between networks. The only centrally controllable resource, the DNS system, is only de facto controlled by the US government. The current DNS root servers could be abandoned by the rest of the world easily, if the US pisses them off enough.
The US can't control the Internet any more than it can control what "good music" is. It's not something that can be controlled. Any attempt to influence it simply reflects badly on the US as a country, and works against our global interests in the long term.
This doctrine being spoken of makes obvious the fact that most of the current US administration and lawmakers are still living in the (mid) 20th century.
Unfortunately, they've been holding back development of our country for years (since post world war 2, when a global war made them believe in their own moral superiority) in the name of what they believe is right. Fortunately, they'll start dying of old age in droves soon.
I just hope they don't irreconciliably damage international relations before then.
Erik
PS: Taco, for the love of all that's holy start using Kupu or FCKeditor, or something besides these damned textareas.
While I can understand why America (well some American politicians) wants to hold on to the governance of the Internet I think it's about time it was handed over to a multi-nation body (maybe the UN maybe a separate entity completely).
While the Internet was largely academic and US focused it made sense for it to be run from the US but it quite simply isn't like that any more. The Internet is world wide and some non-US countries have a huge amount of money riding on the Internet. In some cases democracy itself is partially dependent on the Internet.
There is not shame in passing the Internet over to a multi-national body. In fact America could have won quite a bit of respect from the rest of the world and shown it's maturity by handing over control with little fuss and complaint. Instead America has come across as a little child that won't let anyone else play with their toy. I am sure that most of the world would have been happy with America continuing to run the Internet as long as there was a set of procedures for them to veto unwanted changes. America could have had it's cake and eaten it.
There is one thing that is certain. The Internet will not be run by America alone for much longer. One way or another at least some of the power will be removed from American hands. The choice America has to make is simply how much power they want to keep.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
Throughout history there has always been a country leading their sphere of influence, dominating smaller countries with their policies. China and Japan in Asia, India, Persia, and Greeks, Romans in the SE Asia, the Mediterranean, and Persian Gulf, and all of the Houses of Europe have all been regional and global players who influenced the affairs of their neighbors and colonies. So why is the US treated so differently?
I don't doubt that the US is viewed by many as a bully who should just step back and let others control their own destiny. Okay, so then what? Are you going to tell me that the everyone around the world will just arbitrarily keep the global map static? You must be smoking something.
In every power vacuum throughout human history there has been a rush by next-tier players for the top spot. If the US declines to exert its power and influence, you can bet that China will. Russia will also step up and exert its power and authority over its smaller neighbors. Don't believe me? You don't read even recent history very well.
For over a century the US has represented the dreams and fears of every country in the world. Our impulse to export freedom and democracy may be misplaced and unwelcome, but consider the alternatives that history has served up. How many powerful nations have simply taken a pass when it comes to taking over a vanquished enemy? Are Germany and Japan the sole territory of the US? What about France?
I'm not saying that every policy that the US has exported overseas is great for the people we screw with. Our policies haven't always been real helpful to the US. But considering the alternatives, who would you rather were in our shoes?
And don't forget who catches the shit for the policies of our partners. France, Russia, and Germany were selling shit to Saddam as fast as they could, but which one of these countries is the primary target of Al Quaeda in Iraq? Do you think that the absence of the US would make these fuckers disappear? Do you think any piss-ant global jihadist movement that wants attention will blow up the government buildings in Sierra Leone? Local rebels might, but global terrorists don't gain their street cred by blowing up one of the smallest and poorest nations on the face of the planet.
The fact is that if a country like the US didn't exist the rest of the world would have to invent one. Criticize the US all you like. Just be glad you aren't the ones "on point".
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Mod Flaimbait.
As a lifelong American citizen, can I please ask my fellow compatriots: What the hell happened to compromising?
Why are we no longer the "Benevolent Superpower?" So the world wants to share in our responsiblities with the DNS system and naming conventions. Is it really so different to accomplish this with an international panel as opposed to our organizations (which even still contain many international members).
Don't tell them to build their own DNS servers and break the entire nature of freedom for the net, besides what good are they with IPv4 and the core DNS naming conventions. Adding DNS servers with gibberish for localized areas isn't going to do anything positive for the maturing of this medium.
If we divide the core DNS system using an international medium, can we not simply "cut out" any group that does not adhere to guidelines set forth by the panel? And if the "shit does hit the fan" and someone doesn't listen, we could build our own internet (we have it already) that's even better then the old one! Why not move into that realm in case of emergency?
I don't understand why we have to have total control. The US involvement in the creation of the internet led to this global phenomenon, now let's make it truly global. Besides, if it's part of the UN can you imagine the impact of an internet embargo against a nation (haven't quite worked out the details, but cool in theory)?
I'm not going to rant on GW, Iraq, Energy Conservation or anything like that, this isn't the place for it. But why is it we ask so much of the international community then crap over something like this when it comes to sharing?
If you're half as beautiful naked, you'd be 4 times as beautiful with twice as many clothes on.
Long after the United States is gone, there will still be the Internet.
Though it's also very possible we'll eventually see three internets: one controlled by multinationals and market forces, one controlled by a council of governments, and another controlled solely by individuals secretly piggybacking on the infrastructure of the other two internets.
Damn, I should write a sci-fi novel!
random underscore blankspace at ya know hoo dot comedy.
The net allows people to communicate quickly, efficiently, and unsensored. Over the centuries this has only burdened two groups, governments and religions. It could be argued that corporations are now effectively governments like the Barons of days past. It, therefore, stands to reason that the enemy of this freedom is government, religion, and corporations. Exclusion of these entities from governence means only one thing. The individuals ability to make choices will have to be its only form of order. Otherwise. It will be condemned to the desires of the rich, powerful, and zealous.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Four paragraphs? That's not terse. Terse would be
All your internet are belong to us.
... Germany announced that they control book printing indefinitely, as is widely know that since Gutenberg invented printing press there, they remain the rightful owners of that technology and all derived from there.
Jeez, not this subject again. It's been done to death already, and puffing it up into a "Monroe Doctrine" is just so grandiose. BS. Much better to wait until after the Tunis internet governance meeting in a few weeks' time. All that putting it on Slashdot produces is a ding-dong with a whole lot of rednecks. If the subject shows anything, then it is the extent to which the present US Administration has angered even America's most moderate good friends around the world in too many ways. I guess many Americans might be surprised at this but it's happened and it's not good news.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
I'm going to go out on a limb here, not knowing you personally, and suggest that you didn't invent shit. I know that I, personally, wasn't even old enough to pay taxes when ARPANet was brought online, so I can't really lay claim to the idea that "my tax dollars built the Internet." Have some of my tax dollars gone to it since? Sure. But so have those of lots of other countries.
Your attitude sounds like that of an armchair sports fan -- "We won!" When really it was the team who played the game and won and all you did is kick back and drink beer. It's not a helpful attitude when it comes to diplomacy. Geopolitics isn't a zero-sum game. Everybody else doesn't have to lose for America to win.
And after all, what if everybody else doesn't agree with the "we built it, we run it" rule. What do you propose we do? Take our ball and go home? "Thanks but no thanks, Europe, China, everybody ... you guys think you're smarter than everybody so we're not going to let you send us network traffic anymore." Obviously it wouldn't be a bad idea for the U.S. to be willing to capitulate a little bit.
Breakfast served all day!
As another American (not to mention North American and citizen of the USA), let me thank you for perpetuating the stereotype of Americans as ignorant and mean-spirited. If other countries decide, for whatever reason, that they'd like to use different root servers, there's nothing we can do about it. What we should do about it is to listen to their concerns and try to accommodate them, rather than allowing the Internet to fracture.
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
But this "Governance" nonsense is mostly a smoke-screen for governments that want world-wide censorship, trying to use DNS as a level for lots of currently non-existent control. Sure, there's some US-centricness, and .gov and .mil ought to be shoved under .us, but governments that want to govern their countries' DNS space have country-code DNS with their own personal 2-letter abbreviation on it, and they can call things whatever they want under that (though if they use non-ASCII naming, there are some interoperability issues - but the big player on that issue is China, who can do their own thing just fine.) The US government does meddle a bit, first encouraging ICANN to do .xxx and then ordering them not to, but there's not that much. The problem is that China not only wants to block websites like falun-gong.cn, they also want to block falun-gong.org and falun-gong.co.uk and asian-pr0n.com.
The big policy meddlers at ICANN are the WIPO-types. ICANN really only cares about one kind of IP, and it's "Intellectual Property", not "Internet Protocol", so they do insist that all registrars require and publish lots of privacy-violating information in whois records, to make it easy for companies that want to initiate trademark lawsuits to find who they're suing (and to make sure they don't sue the registrars or registries), but that's pretty easily evaded, and country-code DNS administrations can ignore those requirements if they're big enough.
IPv4 space is another smokescreen excuse - yes, we're running out of the stuff, and there's obviously nowhere close to enough address space if every cellphone in Asia wants its own IP address. The fix is not to impose UN governance on ICANN, it's to deploy IPv6, and the Internet community has been doing a pretty good job of getting universities and other early adopters to hand in their old Class A space, but the big impact was really that HTTP1.1 and sendmail/etc. allowed one IP address to support many domain names for web and email. For a while, ICANN had ridiculous pricing policies for IPv6 space, which appeared designed to delay adoption of the addresses until technical policies had really been worked out (making multi-homing scale without totally exploding all the routing tables on all the world's routers is still a hard problem), but they seem to be backing off on that.
There were also some early WSIS issues like poor third-world countries wanting to tax the Internet to pay to have infrastructure built to their countries, which is a wrong-headed approach. For most of them, the first steps need to be getting rid of their incompetent telecom monopolies, getting rid of radio spectrum monopolies so people can build widespread wireless and satellite, and getting reliable electricity at least to the big cities, and too many of those countries either view telecom as a taxable cash cow or
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
In a word- No
The kind of control the other nations wants is control of content. Already the Chinese put up firewalls
and the french ban things they dont like could you imagine if these countries got control of the internet?
You see the nations behind this China, France, Cuba, Syria, South Africa, Brazil. With the exception of Brazil all of these nations are the epitomy of either tyranny or Politically correct ideologies.
While I would prefer an affirmative statement in favor of freedom of speech, I will settle for benign neglect.
All your IP are belong to us.
In addition to the recent change of mind over the .xxx gTLD, look into the redelegation of australia's ccTLD, .au. ICANN did a secret deal to hand control of it over to another company without listening to or even informing the previous registrar when it changed, and broke a number of it's own rules when it did so.
How about the two years it took Haiti to get it's ccTLD assigned to the registrar of it's choice?
How about the contract that ICANN makes countries sign in order to redelegate their domains, which basically states that that country recognises ICANN as the ultimate authority in domain name issues?
With regards the sitefinder business, ICANN did too little too slow. Verisign's actions broke many uses of DNS, and fundamentally altered the nature of the DNS system so they could profit by domain-squatting on all unregistered domains. ICANN should have been all over verisign to do it's job properly (ICANN's only legitimate role), and failed at even that.
It's long past time that ccTLD redelgation process was clear, transparent, fast, and at the command of the government involved, not unaccountable people at ICANN or the US department of Commerce. If ICANN can't do it's job properly, it should be given to someone else, like the ITU. They seem to have done a pretty uncontroversial job of running the international phone codes and standards, which is more than can be said of ICANN's handling of DNS.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
I reposted this from a reply, since I feel it is something people should understand.
.ir for its own residents. So what? China already blocks all kinds of things. An EU naming authority will block ALL manner of things (Nazi websites, for one. But there are plenty of other registrations that are no-go in the EU). That's fine; each organization can manipulate its own registration scheme, at will.
Repeat after me:
"Anyone can setup their own DNS server at _any_ time".
Say that 3 times.
Sure, if you setup your own DNS server at home, you probably won't have a lot of adoption. But the EU has a great deal more reach than you, and shouldn't have any problem convincing Europeans to use their DNS. Cuba, China, and Iran will have even less.
The answer is simple, and has little (read _nothing_) to do with ICANN, or IANA. Whenever it wants, the EU can setup its own naming authority. As long as they don't change the way IP addresses are assigned, it breaks _nothing_.
The U.S. blocks
Rather than having one, universal, flat global system, poorly managed by a central authority which will be unable to satisfy the contradictory demands of the various governments of the world, a fragmented _DNS_ system makes much more sense.
You, and most other people, are misunderstanding what is going on.
Imagine, once upon a time, when the USPTO was established, that other governments, instead of developing their own patent organizations, simply followed U.S. standards. We had a unified world wide patent system, based upon U.S. law. Then, other nations became pissed off about this, because they felt that the U.S. would use the unified patent system to the detriment of those nations.
As such, they demand that the U.S. relinquish control of the USPTO, and turn it into the UNPTO, which would be government through the U.N. China, Iran, and Cuba, in particular, would like to see some patents invalidated, so they push hard for this.
Does it make any sense? No.
What makes _much_ more sense is that each government established its own patent authority, and then various governments negotiated bi and multi-lateral agreements regarding the governance of patents.
The internet should work _exactly_ the same way. As long as the IP address space doesn't get fragmented (and with IPv6, theres NO reason for that to happen), "control" of the DNS system is a non-issue. In fact, I think the world would be a better place with a fragmented DNS system. Why? Because barring laws in unfree countries (which have their own firewalls anyway (read China)), if you don't like your DNS, you can simply point your system at another one.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
1. what has US sponsorship of DNS servers done negatively to the internet? (no, the .xxx debacle doesnt count as a real problem)
2. before everyone spits out plattitudes about international goodwill, teamwork, superpower benevolence, the greatness of the UN, and other such pleasantries, ask yourself; "who is complaining about ICANN?" when you see the nations raising objections, it becomes clear what the motivation is.
and dont kid yourself, the US will never get any appreciation for sharing anything. giving up ICANN will bring US NO good will at all.
dont give DNS to UN! The UN is a sad fantasy (sudan is a member of the human rights council and oil for food ($$$) was the best thing that happened to saddam)
Compare it to Global Positioning...works well for everyone in the world, but is under US control. Would you really rather have a country like North Korea or China (which BTW censors internet content) in control?
http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
North America ranks #3 after Asia and Europe in terms of internet usage. (not # packets but number of people) Plus unlike Asia, pretty much peaked. Unless you count fridges and toasters.
Cheers,
-b
If you want to be xenophobes and issue ultimatums, perhaps this may help those of us who don't like being held to ransom:
http://european.de.orsn.net/rootzone.php
IPv6 root servers, too. Rather nice.
Resistance is futile. Reactance buggers it up.
You are ignorant. The nazi German empire was not defeated by the USA. It was stopped, driven back and eventually destroyed by the Soviet Union and its Red Army. They were the ones fighting their way from Moscow to Berlin on foot and track at a price of tremendous human sacrifice. Some 80% of all WWII fighting was on the eastern front. Even without the anglo-saxons, the USSR would reach Calais by autumn 1946 in the worst case, the strategic planning maps signed by marshal Zhukov clearly show that.
The D-day invasion, that has been promised for 3 years but always ignored, was done eventually, but only because the anglo-saxons were afraid USSR would take all of Europe after the mighty "Bagration" offensive started in spring 1944. It was 5x the size of D-day but few westerners know about that.
The only thing america and britain really did was to firebomb cities day and night, killing civilians, including 135.000 people in Drezden. It did nothing to shorten the war, because all industry was hidden in the caves and bunkers. It only infuriated the german population and made them even stronger adhere to Hitler.
You know why the japenese surrendered? Not becase of the A-bombs, but because on the 9th of August 1945 the USSR entered the war. Within 48 hours they destroyed the imperial Kvantung Army of 600.000 soldiers entirely and that was the end of the japanese military.
How the hell did they get this interpretation of the press release? Am I missing something? The intro uses rather heavily charged language that doesn't seem to be supported by the article or the release.
As far as I can tell, the release reaffirms 4 key points the US has stated before:
1-immediate changes to the status quo are premature; the article even notes that this is likely the best option for the short term.
2-individual nations have a right to manage their own domains; stability is a concern for determining the best way to do this.
3-ICANN is still in charge, and ICANN still operates under the same mandate as when it was set up.
4-the US is willing to talk about these issues and others in various venues, including but not limited to the UN. The only reservations the US notes is that it ain't broke, let's not break it.
Hardly seems like a declaration of cyberwar to me; the implication that this indicates that the Internet is a US only playground is overbroad to the point of sillyness. Discussions are open. The US is only stating that immediate, precipitate change is not going to get US cooperation, and that since US cooperation is necessary for immediate change, it's time to slow down and talk things over.
At least that's how I read it.
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The Release Text:
Domain Names:
U.S. Principles on the Internet's Domain Name and Addressing System
The United States Government intends to preserve the security and stability of the Internet's Domain Name and Addressing System (DNS). Given the Internet's importance to the world's economy, it is essential that the underlying DNS of the Internet remain stable and secure. As such, the United States is committed to taking no action that would have the potential to adversely impact the effective and efficient operation of the DNS and will therefore maintain its historic role in authorizing changes or modifications to the authoritative root zone file.
Governments have legitimate interest in the management of their country code top level domains (ccTLD). The United States recognizes that governments have legitimate public policy and sovereignty concerns with respect to the management of their ccTLD. As such, the United States is committed to working with the international community to address these concerns, bearing in mind the fundamental need to ensure stability and security of the Internet's DNS.
ICANN is the appropriate technical manager of the Internet DNS. The United States continues to support the ongoing work of ICANN as the technical manager of the DNS and related technical operations and recognizes the progress it has made to date. The United States will continue to provide oversight so that ICANN maintains its focus and meets its core technical mission.
Dialogue related to Internet governance should continue in relevant multiple fora. Given the breadth of topics potentially encompassed under the rubric of Internet governance there is no one venue to appropriately address the subject in its entirety. While the United States recognizes that the current Internet system is working, we encourage an ongoing dialogue with all stakeholders around the world in the various fora as a way to facilitate discussion and to advance our shared interest in the ongoing robustness and dynamism of the Internet. In these fora, the United States will continue to support market-based approaches and private sector leadership in Internet development broadly.