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Lessig on Internet Governance
tcd004 writes "Should the United Nations control the Internet? That's the subject of a heated debate slated to take place at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis later this month. The European Union is pressing for a U.N. role in governing the Internet, which is currently in the hands of a U.S. nonprofit. Lawrence Lessig breaks down the debate and offers his views. An interesting point: in order to participate in Summit-related events Lessig had to promise not to talk about intellectual property." From the article: "What people are afraid of is that there will be a split within the single hierarchical system which would result in two different populations of the dot-com domain name system existing out there. Then there would be a real conflict. My view is that if in fact there is a separation like that, there are a lot of incentives for these two separate roots to figure out a way to coexist. There would be lots of anger [when] you realize that you're not getting the IBM.com you expected. But there's no reason why you couldn't have multiple root systems."
The internet succeeded because of the lack of regulation. This was a tradeoff. The incredible value of not having to sign contracts to do everything, be able to innovate much more freely etc. The downside, piracy, websites that spew hate and all the rest.
I'm just curious if some group on the UN level asserts much stronger control over the net, it is such an obvious place to control things, could see a ton of impacts. Connect with WTO as a natural partner in the fight and voila.
Remove .com, .net, .org, all TLDs
.NN where NN is the country code. Let each country control their own country code. There would be .com.NN for the old .com, .org.NN for old .org, .net.NN for old .net, etc.
.NN country code and have all the additional .whatever.NN they want. So if some countries want a .xxx.NN they can have it and if they don't want it, fine.
Yep, that's right. Just get rid of the whole TLD structure and make people go to
Just let each country control their
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
I doubt having a bunch of arguing governments would be any better than having one incompetent government in charge.
In my opinion what is needed is three corporate based committees (US, EU, JP/Asia for example) each 'in control' of a portion of the internet roots.
Any disputes could then be resolved via a 3 way 'vote'.
Two things need to be avoided at all costs.
1. US government control (either direct or inferred)
2. A root split
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
Pointing to a non-profit with broad representation (oh, wait, less broad than it used to be, isn't it?) on the board looks like a PR whitewash once we realize how easily the organization gets bullied around by financial stakeholders - it doesn't have a war chest or a strong organization behind it. Since the US government supports the status quo, I'm left with little option than to believe that Uncle Sam likes the way Verisign is currently running things. I'm not comforted.
Everybody's a libertarian 'till their neighbour's becomes a crack house.
Those TLD's were great back at the beginning.
.com, .org, .net (.edu, .mil, .gov) addresses.
.com addresses, they don't have to use them. They can setup their own root servers and manage them. Their ISP's can point to those servers and everyone in that country can bitch at their local government if they don't like it.
.com, anyway.
But now, all new sites should be *.*.cc (slashdot.org.us).
The ONLY issue here is the
Who cares? If the other countries don't want the US to control the
Country codes are far more scalable than
The technical answer, I think, is we need more addresses, so each enitity of control can have its own reserved range. IPV6 could solve the problem nicely, but we need a strategy for making the transition smoothly. Getting everyone to agree on that strategy is a problem.
But there's no reason why you couldn't have multiple root systems.
Of course yes when it comes right down to it, there's no one pointing a gun at my head or writing laws forcing me to point to DNS servers that point to DNS servers that all ending up someway or other pointing back to the root DNS servers stored in.... gods know where.
I can, and am free if I so choose, to point to DNS servers that are not connected to the root servers. Of course then slashdot.org could take me off on a whirlwind tour of a shady snuff movie site, but this is what I signed up to when I left the (somewhat effeciently) managed root DNS servers.
Now if a law gets past in the EU telling me I have to point my DNS to this "new" root server, then, given the extreme dependance of just about every net based program on my computer, the percentage of which increases daily, I can expect, for some time, extreme annoyance as essentially, nothing net based works. I can expect this irritation to continue until everyone in the EU sorts themselves out and things start working again. At least in the EU "subinternet".
Now you may say, "That why the DNS servers should stay under current (US) managment". However, consider this.
Let's say I live in a EU country. Let's pick one at random. Saayy... France. Let's say that France, for whatever reason, becomes involved in quite a nasty dispute with the US for whatever reason. Wine sales, say. Or France bans Holloywood movies.
Further assume that as a result of this, some smart alec in the DoC or on Capitol Hill, takes a patriotic stance and disconnects the French, and quite possibly EU DNS servers from the root servers. It's a fairly simple operation. Now, unless the French cave in, there will be no correct DNS for messers in France, and they'll be stuck with whatever demands the US would seek to impose before they can browse happily again.
Now I'm not French, or in France, so this doesn't bother me as such. But I will put you a middle case.
Supposing there was a website called, say, saddamhadnoweapons.org, or something. Suppose again, that the current US administration, takes exception to this sites content in some way. Now legally, it's unlikely that the administartion can force the DoC to take the address off the DNS servers for americans. But here's the thing? Could they force the site to not resolve for DNS servers not in the US? Mightn't this be legal?
Come to think of it, wouldn't they be doing this already for "sensitive" sites like military ones at some address?
All the debate in the world won't change the single most important underlying fact, the US in the form of ICANN currently controls a tremendously valuable resource that they do not want to give up.
If they plan to debate, it should be on what kind of compensation they plan to offer in exchange for a piece.
How pathetic are you that you follow me from topic to topic and waste all your mod points at once modding me down?
I interviewed Dr. Vint Cerf and Karl Auerbach about Internet goverance and alternate roots recently. Not surprisingly, Cerf wasn't a fan of alternate roots. Auerbach, however, has some provocative things to say on the subject.
I think UN control of anything technological will fail. They take far too long to make up their minds, so any technological standards that need to be implemented will be agreed upon when they are obsolete
This isn't true. Take the example of high-tech automobile headlamps. The UN body responsible for global headlamp regulations (GRE) is very close to finishing rules that will allow for LED headlamps. NHTSA, which does the same thing in the US has completely given up on making _any_ LED regulations for the forseable future because it's so hard to get safety related stuff through congress. In this case the UN is far ahead of the US in technical rule-making and you can see evidence of this in the relative technology contents of a typical American vehicle and a typical European vehicle.
-Pinkoir
There's no doubt that the US Congress is no speed demon, but as far as I know, there are very few, if any, issues before ICANN that require congressional approval. They're fairly autonomous, so there decision-making process is most certainly faster than any political body. The only valid question is whether or not ICANN truly acts in the best interest of the entire world. I personally don't know enough about the situation to have an opinion on that.
It is not that "the rest of the world doesn't trust the U.S.", it is more that that governments can rely on knee-jerk anti-Americanism and petty nationalism to remove any critical thought on the issue. If you give people FUD like "The U.S. controls the Internet", which isn't true, most people will be caught up in petty nationalism and won't pay attention to the rest of the issue: the drive by countries to exercise greater control over the Internet, allowing for easier site blocking, stopping anonymity, and more centralized control.
The U.N. just passed a resolution with almost unanimous support endorsing mass censorship, cultural "reeducation" centers for immigrants and minorities as well as mass deportation on non-nationals, banning foriegn news and media, and a whole slew of other repressive policies, in the name of "protecting national cultures from the negative effects of globalism". When such backwards, repressive, and possibly racist policies gets almost total support from the U.N., I don't think it is that the world doesn't trust the U.S. to control the internet (as in the U.S. will control the Internet badly), but they don't trust the U.S. to control the Internet (as in they don't trust that the U.S. will control the Internet).
The rest of it doesn't really matter. Google can find pirate software just as easily whether it's www.pirate-software-example.com or yarrrrr.co.jm or http://big-hosting-example.com/pirate-software/for sale.htm. UN control could theoretically let China close down sites that it doesn't like, such as falun-gong.com or possibly all of .tw, but it's unlikely.
The main change UN control could make is that ICANN has been dragging its feet on non-7-bit-ASCII internationalized character sets for DNS, which would be resolved in some manner relatively quickly (at least for China.) To cut ICANN some slack, one reason they haven't done much is that most of the proposed solutions are technically bad, except the proposals from Verisign/NetworkSolutions which are highly connected politically and technically suck even worse.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
They block free speech today
.tw domain for starters, I'll tell you that.
in China.
That may be all they can get away with now, but what makes you think they would stop there if they could exert influence over the name system in other countries? There'd be no
Cisco and the rest's complicity in China's censorship program is indeed disgraceful and should be punished, but off topic.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
"It's broken.
It was stolen by intellectual property attornies working for primarily three letter multinationals, mostly US based."
True, but you conveniently forgot to note that the enforcement body that pushed ICANN into abiding by those rules was WIPO, which was a UN regulatory body.
iow, the cause of the reason you think it's broken ultimately stemmed from the UN getting its grubby fingers in where it had not before. That international corporations are manipulating it is the EXACT reason why ICANN should not be handed over; such events would occur more commonly and with a greater sense of control.
The fact that those are overwhelmingly US controlled is simply direct correlation, not causal, given most multinational corporations are US centric given economic history and the US's was, until recent memory, the largest potential customer base in the world (and still largest in terms of economic buying power).
iow, if you believe your comments were reflective of the underlying desire for DNS takeover or breakup, the UN undermined ICANN and now uses the results of that undermining action as reason and cause for further breakdown of ICANN. Quite similar to companies (MS) or industries (health care) putting out crap products or services then demanding litigation protection or increased legal protections against a new class of criminals their negligance helped propagate (e.g. virus writers or spyware on Windows).