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US Keeps Control of the Internet
Adam Schumacher writes "As a result of a a deal reached late Tuesday, the US and ICANN will maintain control over the Internet's core systems. A new body will be created to provide international oversight, which will, of course, have no binding authority."
This is great and all, but who's to say the argument won't spring up in another 3 to 4 years. The only reason ICANN actually has authority is because they say who has control of the root servers. If an international body setup their own root servers and decided they would all use them, then only the US would have control of the current roots. Then, if you wanted your website to look the same to the rest of the world as it does to the US, you would have to deal with both governing bodies (US and world). It could be a headache, and the only thing keeping the ICANN in control is that the majority of the world currently lets them be in control. It can be snatched away relatively easily.
"the unelected EU parliament"
Of all the EU institutions you picked the only ELECTED one to call it unelected. It's the COMISSION that is unelected.
Not that it makes it much better but you still gotta be accurate.
...perhaps you meant the commission?
What is this "it" that _you_ paid for?
Lets face it, most of the internet that exists was paid for by private companies with their own money, replenished by re-selling use of "it".
I've owned and run my own ISP which puts me a legup over you and I'm not so vain as to say that any of "it" belongs to me apart from the bit of "it" that is inside my house. It is an INTER-net.
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
Private Sector will probably retain control of the Internet.
From the TFA:
And it hasn't even been ratified....this is just a preliminary decision.
Have a read of this the register article about the Pakistani Ambassador who made this possible.
My pics.
The commission gets elected by the parliament. See also: the problems Barroso had when he proposed that italian guy in his commission. The European institutions are no different than any other democratic government. The only problem is that is parliament opposes one memeber of the commission, it has to oppose the whole of it.
Do the US vote who gets to be Secretary of State? Defence? DHS ? Didn't think so.
If you really think that Europe is for some reason "less free" than the US, than I would suggest you take a look at the http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=15333"> Worldwide Press Freedom Index, which lists it in a solid 44th place on the index of freedom of the press, which is mainly what you are talking about when you discuss speech on the Internet, since it is a form of press.
The US has really dipped a lot in this lately (20 places in the past year).
You're lying. In germany you can discuss nazi history all you want. In fact I doubt that there is another country that discusses its own history as much as germany. You can buy nazi memorabilia and use them as a teaching aid or for art purposes. In fact there's even a turq guy (forgot his name) touring through germany reading "Mein Kampf" by Hitler.
Now in the US, how many torrent trackers were forced to shutdown? Free speech my ass.
DNS resolves in a hierarchical structure, and therefore there are root DNS servers that sit at the top of the tree. This has to be the case in order to guarentee DNS entries are consistant. Without a central authority, how would you decide who gets a certain domain name?
Given this, a monopoly is a necessary evil. The question is who controls this monopoly. Currently ICANN, a private US company oversees this. ICANN has its faults; more public involvement would be nice, less kissing up to large multinationals wouldn't go amiss either. However, ICANN has not screwed up too badly, and the US doesn't interfere with ICANN too often.
The alternative to ICANN is a group created by a bureaocracy of counties that all want a piece of the pie. Many people are leery of such an idea, as there's a strong possibility that this will turn out to be worse than ICANN.
Better the devil you know, in other words.
Domain names can be outside latin alphabet:
http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3491.txt
And the encoding is presented in http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3492.txt and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode
An example of European thinking- say something that is widely believed to be true, but is in fact completely wrong.
From the official website of the communist party in the US
"Was the CPUSA Ever Banned by the U.S. Government?
The answer is both yes and no. The CP was never banned as a political party in name by the US government. However, the CP has had its leaders sent to prison for long terms for teaching Marxism-Leninism, has been declared illegal in more than a few states, and has been the target of numerous forms of official and unofficial government repression."
Individual states made it illegal, and those laws were unconstitutional. Stop making crap up.
How pathetic are you that you follow me from topic to topic and waste all your mod points at once modding me down?
In general, the DNS system really benefits from its scale, like the phone system. The bigger it is, and the more people use it, the better, because there will be less loss of welfare due to simple confusion. Even if another country set up their own DNS root which placed lets say all the .coms under .com.us, without some really fancy tricks, virtual hosting on the .coms would be broken for everyone in that country. (just an example)
For all the people on this post saying "The UN" or "The World" wants this, that is not true.
I'm an Australian, living in London. I find the idea of the UN running this very scary. An indepedent american body is far preferable.
The UN have a very chequered history. Seldom do they stand up for the Big Issues. Take as an example the decision to withdraw UN troops from Sinai in 1967 on the wishes of Assad. Take whatever view of the subsequent war you want, but the UN caved in to the demand to remove peacekeepers.
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combining your link with the cia fact book
o rder/2119rank.htmlp -counts.html
..
.. I don't understand .. maybe they've never heard about LAN's? (or something is seriously wrong with the ip address space)
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/rank
http://www.whois.sc/internet-statistics/country-i
we get that USA uses 4.5, UK 4.2, Japan 1.1 and China uses 0.0555 ip-adresses per capita, so they are not really the problem
Swaziland has 18682461 ip-adresses and a population of 1138227 which is 16.4 per capita..
Uruguay has 42701418 ip-adresses and a population of 3415920 which is 12.5 per capita..
I don't really understand why the American public looks down at the UN.
...in a bid to limit Saddam's power, and save hundreds of thousands of innocent lives
Most Americans don't like the idea of a huge corrupt overpowered beauracracy that seems to do nothing but hold month long conferences at 5 star hotels to discuss the idea of having a conference to set the guidelines for a meeting.
The UN is a cesspool of ineptitude and it, at the very least, needs an enema of biblical proportions.
Or maybe we find it curious as to why countries like Libya should be appointed to head the UN Human Rights commission? Or why the only UN employee that has been fired for the Oil for Food scandal was just rehired so he could receive his full retirement benefits! That poor corrupt bastard was going to have to get a new job but now he can retire and live comfortably with money paid by you and me.
Or how the wonderful former head of the U.N. oil-for-food program, Benon Sevan, had a mysterious $160,000 deposit into one of his accounts. When asked where it came from, he stated his aunt had just given it to him as a gift. But before they could ask the aunt in question, she miraculously fell down an elevator shaft. I mean, for fucks sake, that's a scene straight out of a f'en movie.
They were against the use of force without convincing evidence. Turns out they were right.
About the WMDs? Perhaps, yes.
Over the years it has done a great job in many places.
Where and when? Korea? That war is still going on and you've got the worlds most insane dictator running half of it. Sending strongly worded letters don't count, nor does trying to pass resolutions condemning Israel.
Yes, they tried to, and failed. Saddam made billions during that time period in kickbacks and illegal oil deals. The only thing the sanctions hurt were the Iraqi people.
It's not perfect, of course, but it's always ready to take on the dirty jobs that no one else wants.
What would those be exactly? I think you're confusing the UN with NATO and/or the US.
You're absolutely wrong. The first thing we learned in Army basic training was our chain of command. Guess who was right up there in it? A certain guy named "Rumsfeld"... wonder who he could be!
The Secretary of Defense has all the power the President has delegated to him. He is in the chain of command directly below the Commander-in-Chief.
These are not single hosts ... here for example is f.root-servers.net :
AKL1 Auckland, New Zealand IPv4 and IPv6 Local Node
AMS1 Amsterdam, The Netherlands IPv4 and IPv6 Local Node
BCN1 Barcelona, Spain IPv4 and IPv6 Local Node
BNE1 Brisbane, Australia IPv4 Local Node
CDG1 Paris, France IPv4 and IPv6 Local Node
CGK1 Jakarta, Indonesia IPv4 Local Node
DXB1 Dubai, UAE IPv4 Local Node
GRU1 São Paulo, Brazil IPv4 Local Node
HKG1 Hong Kong, China IPv4 Local Node
JNB1 Johannesburg, South Africa IPv4 Local Node
KIX1 Osaka, Japan IPv4 and IPv6 Local Node
LAX1 Los Angeles, CA, USA IPv4 and IPv6 Local Node
LCY1 London, UK IPv4 and IPv6 Local Node
LIS1 Lisbon, Portugal IPv4 and IPv6 Local Node
LGA1 New York, NY, USA IPv4 and IPv6 Local Node
MAA1 Chennai, India IPv4 Local Node
MAD1 Madrid, Spain IPv4 Local Node
MTY1 Monterrey, Mexico IPv4 Local Node
MUC1 Munich, Germany IPv4 and IPv6 Local Node
NBO1 Nairobi, Kenya IPv4 Local Node
PAO1 Palo Alto, CA, USA IPv4 and IPv6 Global Node
PEK1 Beijing, China IPv4 Local Node
PRG1 Prague, Czech Republic IPv4 and IPv6 Local Node
ROM1 Rome, Italy IPv4 Local Node
SEL1 Seoul, Korea IPv4 and IPv6 Local Node
SFO2 San Francisco, CA, USA IPv4 and IPv6 Global Node
SIN1 Singapore IPv4 Local Node
SJC1 San Jose, CA, USA IPv4 Local Node
SVO1 Moscow, Russia IPv4 Local Node
TLV1 Tel Aviv, Israel IPv4 Local Node
TPE1 Taipei, Taiwan IPv4 Local Node
YOW1 Ottawa, ON, Canada IPv4 and IPv6 Local Node
YYZ1 Toronto, ON, Canada IPv4 Local Node
While there are a few sorts of orders that are reserved to the President, the SecDef can, in fact, order the military to just about anything, without having to so much as notify the President after the fact. If you doubt this, I can send you about a million DoD Instructions signed by... not even Rumsfeld. Subcabinet officials sign them pretty routinely.
I'm a commander in the Naval Reserve, and hence, a lot lower on the totem pole than any of the bigwigs mentioned here. And yet, when I was assigned to a ship (not so many years ago), I had weapons release authority - meaning I could shoot at any targets I felt were a threat to the ship. Didn't even have to ask the captain.
The idea that no one but the President can order the military to do anything is ridiculous. He'd never sleep. The SecDef is part of the National Command Authority, and can (and does) direct the military to do things all the time.
Sean
You have the .xxx backwards - it was actually a good idea, shot down by the US government because it offended their christian ethics. ICANN could have stood up for its independence - instead it just confirmed it was little more than a department of the US government.
It seems that the good folks at IETF also think it was a bad idea. RFC3675
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable" - JFK