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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."
AHH.. so the UN should be happy then!!
they can waste tons of money on useless and ineffective programs, treaties and resolutions, and atleast know that they "feel" better doing it, even if it doesn't do anything anyway.
Congrats for the UN..
US still does all the work.. and they get to sit around like the useless body they are.
The UK, maybe. Or perhaps France. Canada might be worth looking at. Japan? Who knows. Germany, Switzerland? Who can say?
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I suppose they mean Latin alphabet, yet Urdu and Arabic are both written in the Arabic alphabet (possibly with a few Persian-style letters more?). Anyway, I look forward to my first spam with a Chinese address. I can already see the scams: PCs without Chinese fonts that trick users into clicking on a blank link...
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
The rest of the world just let the US keep it until they can get their shit together, once they have hardware in place, it will become a moot issue and the internet will be a total clusterfuck. Yay!
France? Germany? Not likely.
Can't even discuss Nazi history there.
Can't trade Nazi memorabilia.
Suggestion of Great Britian, possibly. They tend to have their heads screwed on straight. Canada, our 51st state? What would be the difference?
----- LoboSoft specializes in Digital Language Lab
Now if the rest of the world is smart, they'll get to work on setting up plan B servers to bring out on a moment's notice and distributing the info to their big ISPs in case the US suddenly goes nuts. Which has the added bonus of giving the US incentive not to go nuts, and we can all feel better about it.
How much power does ICANN really have, though? Right now everybody listens to them, but I see no reason why people couldn't just set up their own organizations that performed the same functions, and use these instead. Of course, if they all moved in different directions, there would be big chaos, but as long as they all agreed with ICANN, the Internet would continue to work, right? And then, if ICANN ever took decisions that many disagreed with, people could just rely on these alternatives and bypass ICANN, right?
I know that such a movement already exists in the DNS world (see, for example, OpenNIC).
So, while I resent that one organization - worse, a corporation - has so much power over the Internet, I don't think it's as big a problem as it could be.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
That is why the big US corps are in the queue to serve China with it's censoring... Not that I disagree with you that we are better of in the current situation on the internet.
That's a really good solution.
.xxx. (Or something else that tries to inject one country's culture into DNS, which is absolutely unacceptable -- banning any domain names containing "nazi" would be another one that I suspect a few countries might try.)
.com wildcard problem? Where *all* .com addresses always resolved...just much of the time, to a Verisign-run machine with a webserver with ads? If there is a second DNS infrastructure that can be transferred to in an instant, that would put pressure on Verisign not to abuse the DNS system.
While I think that the US has done a pretty good job so far of staying hands-off, and I don't think that many countries would do as good a job, it's not impossible that in the future they'll start to abuse their position and do things like
Second, it's great leverage against Verisign.
Remember the
Finally, IIRC, we use the ISO country codes for CCTLDs. That's probably the thing that most countries want to have input on, since it allows them to legitimize claims to country status in the public's eyes. As long as ISO codes are used, the DNS world isn't making any huge political statements -- it shoves the political burden off to ISO (who probably doesn't want that, but it produces separation of red tape and techies, which is a good thing).
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
"The United States built the thing, and it's not asking for control of all the stuff Europe built."
Actually wgen the Galileo project began, the US did just that - and unlike the Internet, Europe (and others) are actually PAYING for the whole thing themselves and they still wanted control.
I think the US should put the top level domain servers under international control the day after all the Middle East countries put their oil under international control. It's the same sort of idea, since the whole world has a vested interest in oil just like it does the Internet. Why shouldn't EVERYONE have a say in how it's used?
I don't know how to feel about the US keeping control.
It comes down to one thing:
Where would you like the corruption to be?
It is that simple. Someone wants to make some money somewhere. If you hand it over to the UN, then we'll have an "oil for bandwidth" scandal. If you keep it here, then... well... then all of the historic political battles will continue and those who are lining their pockets will continue to line their pockets.
More
I suspect IP space will be the problem.
There are some four billion possible IP numbers. Of these, some 2.4 billion have been allocated. Of those, some 1.3 billion are allocated to organisations in the United States.
The EU has a little less than twice the population of the United States. India and China each have over four times the population of the United States.
Can you see the upcoming problem, people?
Either we reform the system so that IP space is more evenly allocated, or we go to IPv6. Four billion is not going to be enough once China and India really start getting wired. Once IP space gets scarce it gets valuable, and that's when the US government will think of export tariffs on IP space, and other governments will think about splitting the internet.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
ICANN done a good job??? I never thought I'd acutally hear anyone defend ICANN for anything, let alone claim it did a good job.
.COM contract pretty much in perpetuity.
.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.
The verisign thing? ICANN did *nothing* - verisign backed down due to public pressure. ICANN's punishment for them? To reward them with the
You have the
You can discuss Nazi history, yes. But you are not allowed to have the wrong opinion, ie. fly the swastika, "deny the holocaust" etc. Mind-crimes are far more dangerous than torrents being shutdown due to flagrant copyright infringement.
Fair point.
Do you pay your HTTP royalties to Europe on a per-request basis, or have you gone for an annual fee basis?
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
It hasn't been shot down. It's been delayed (intentionally) by administrative processes. At this point, we don't know if it's going to get killed or not. I rather hope not, but it's tough to say right now.
As for defending ICANN, I think most people are willing to live with the devil they know than the devil they don't. ICANN's level of ineptitude is a known quantity, whereas the introduction of a different group from a wider range of countries and political agendas may introduce all kinds of new horrors.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
So does this mean that the Internet isn't going to fall apart now, like the U.N. was predicting?
Or more precisely, the Internet isn't going to break like the UN threatened to do. Of course, such a move would have carried little (if any) weight. US netizens would continue about thier business, mostly oblivious to the loss of the rest of the world (except for email, that would be a pain) while the rest of the world screams bloody murder at their stupid governments because they can't reach many of the sites they use daily. (Slashot being an example of this.)
That's assuming, of course, that the member countries actually had any way of shutting things down. They have control over their domains, but the machines are still handled by ICANN. Attempting to sieze those machines would have meant police or military escalation. And even then, they still couldn't break much. They would then need every DNS server to redirect to a new root server controlled by the UN. (Since it's doubtful that the UN could gain access to the primary root servers.) They could redirect the IP address, but then things would get even dicer for them, and increase the yelling and screaming from the populace.
In the end the UN did the right thing. They stopped throwing a hissy fit and let sleeping dogs lie in exchange for a token method of voicing their opinions on DNS allocation. Did it buy them much in actual authority? No. However, they now have a central method for disseminating any complaints to the public. (i.e. Rueters: "UNCANN, released a press release today [criticizing/congratulating] the latest moves by ICANN.")
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
You have the .xxx backwards - it was actually a good idea
The only way .xxx is a good idea is if you require all pornography sites to move there. Otherwise it's alleged purpose (making it easy to filter porn) becomes moot. Without that as a reason to deploy it then it becomes a red light district that exists for no other reason then to make it easier to find porn. The US Government would have be overwhelmingly behind it if you could have sold it to them as a way to make filters easier and more effective.
And even if you could sell it like that -- what's pornography? Does a site advocating Topfreedom need to register in .xxx if they include pictures? You and I would probably say they don't.... but many prudes (in the US and Europe -- don't pretend it's only an American thing) would say they should.
.xxx was a disaster waiting to happen.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
...This is one Brit who is more than happy that the US is still in charge. They built it, they run it well and the EU would only mire it in bureaucracy.
Radio on your iPod
Dear US,
Please find enclosed an invoice for the following developments:
payment terms: 28 days.
Warm regards,
Europe
I am not a supporter of Bush and would like to see him removed from office. However, dragging up past history of someone's grandfather being a Nazi supporter really has no bearing on this thread. In fact, you appear to be calling the entire population of the U.S.A. Nazis because of the actions of the grandfather of their current President. So can I call the entire population of Germany Nazis because either their grandfather, their father, their uncle, their brother, or themselves were involved in what occured during that time? How many German families also gained wealth due to the actions of the Nazi party? Should we drag all that up too?
The capper is that they ship people off to get tortured for them in client states under a program of 'extraordinary rendition' because both International law and US law says that torture is illegal ... but they still really want to do it, anyway. Their own Senate tries to curb that nasty behaviour but the President threatens to veto their attempt and the Vice President works around the clock to get exemptions for the CIA. I guess there is too much of an investment in those gulags to give up without a fight.
The Project for the New American Century, indeed! I just wonder what kind of century it will be ...
I'll tolerate anything except intolerance.
292,000 American soldiers lost in WWII is more soldiers than any other allied nation except for possibly Poland (6 million deaths, but not sure how many were soldiers). If you include civilian deaths, France lost 600,000 people and Great Britian and Italy last low to mid 300's. Our Pacific coast was very close to being attacked.
People that talk like the grandparent poster are just ignorant of history or out of touch with reality, desensetized by media and entertainment.
Dear US,
Please find enclosed an invoice for the following developments:
Your analogy is grossly flawed.
The U.S. is not demanding royalties or a lump-sum payment for inventing the Internet. They are simply insisting on maintaining control of something that they invented.
The U.N. is acting like a houseguest who's demanding a say in what color the walls are painted, who cuts the lawn, and who gets to occupy which rooms. When you're invited into someone's home, you don't get to dictate how that home is run -- even if you voluntarily make improvements. You can point to the neat stereo that you set up or the nice garden that you planted, but that doesn't mean that you get to have your name on the deed of the house.
Your country is free to create your own separate network of computers using all of the protocols and standards of the Internet. We won't ask for a dime in return. Maybe in a few years, you will invite other countries to interconnect. Then they can start trying to wrestle control of your network out of your hands and you can better understand how the people of the U.S. feel now.
And the Bush Administration has just what to do with the root DNS servers?
/. doesn't know how DNS works?
You do know that is what this is all about, right. A distributed database that is is *impossible* for anybody to "control". Not even all the root servers are in the US. And those that are are ran by volunteers, most of whom likely disllke Bush and his policies as much as you and I do. They only really listen to ICANN as a courtesy. ICANN certainly has no right to tell them what to do. And you are free to point at other root servers. I do.
Simply put people continue to use the current system because it works and fits their needs and wants. If they ever did do anything really evil people like you would whine about it while people like myself would route around it like the damage it is and then make it possible for the rest of you to do so.
So please I beg you point to or explain in some way how anybody "controls the Internet". It is simply put, impossible to do so. God are we really at the point in space/time where someond reading and posting to
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
This shows just how important it is to elect a High Noon Texas cowboy to the White House. They get things done. The world needs someone as President who faces down both the dictators and the Eurowimps. (Both have their equivalents in High Noon.)
If we'd have elected Gore in 2000, he'd be droning on about how, having invented the Internet, he could give it to anyone he wanted, and promptly given control to nasty regimes such as Iran, North Korea and China, perhaps slipping another campaign donation from the last into his pocket.
And if we'd elected "War Hero" Kerry in 2004, he'd have asked himself it giving up the Internet would keep him from marrying a third rich wife if rich wife #2 dies. No, would be the reply from his handlers. Or if it hinders his buying $3000 French bikes. Again they say no. Last of all, he would ask if it would make the French and Germans like us. On being told it would, he would promptly give up control to those same nasty regimes, perhaps with a provison that lets European corporations get rich joining U.S. corporations (i.e. Cisco) in censoring political free speech on the Internet.
Let's hope this do-nothing committee follows in the footsteps of all the UN's other do nothing committees and pockets their checks and merely holds conferences in expensive hotels. It's a small price to pay for a free Internet.
--Mike Perry, Seattle
In 1998 I was in the office of the CTO of the company than ran the A-root. At the time they were not getting along with ICANN. They wanted to sell domain names in any tld they could and didn't see anybody else being able to handle running a 30+ M name com zone file. Other than that they didn't care what happens.
.com nameservers are then you are vulnerbale to games like this. Administration of a net of network numbers so we can find computers on the network is not supposed to leak into the political layers of the TCP/IP stack. Mercifully there's a software patch for this.
The goverment, IBM and ICANN were exerting pressure on them to sign an agreement with ICANN which placed them under ICANN's aegis. Up to this point they had nothing to do with them.
It was feared NSI would "go rouge" and I guess it's ok to say now that there were root servers at NSI that did not carry just the legacy root. Only a handfull of people knew about these but they were a beautiful thing to run dig or dnsq against.
If there was no accord reached with ICANN and NSI was effectivly out of the business it built then one scanario was they'd just keep going and ignore the USG and ICANN and expand the root zone. They owned the IP's the root servers ran on in more than enough cases.
I asked what would happen if they did this before a fallout with ICANN occurred and was told the a.root would be declared a national security resource and the Army would simply come in and run it so don't even think that. Since this CTO used to be in Army intel. I figured he had a good understanding of this. IBM coerced NSI to sign with ICANN (at the famous secret meeting nobody can talk about because of an IBM NDA) and this stuff was all dropped very quickly.
But the lesson is there: the DNS is whatever the US wants it to be, period.
If you rely on somebody else to tell you where the
Primary the root instead http://cr.yp.to/dnsroot.html
Need Mercedes parts ?
In my opinion, free speech is _exactly_ escaping any consequences of your speech (although I'm aware and somewhat positive to the exceptions regarding slander and such). Vigilantes don't have any rights whatsoever to suppress any utterings they happen to disagree with, unless of course they do it by yelling louder than you.
Agreed. For the USA, the KKK is generally a better example, being a racist discrimitatory group, homegrown, etc. It's just that them and the Neo-nazis have sorta combined.
Our first amendment rights mean that the government can't stop you from spouting stuff*, and indeed, if somebody beats the snot out of that extremist, it's the person doing the beating that the police will arrest. It's just that, like one of the more recent KKK rallies, the spontaneous(or planned) response will tend to be extreme. People consider it worth the assault charges to chuck D sized batteries at KKK members. It can also become hard to arrest them, given that there was a crowd of hundreds screaming back, compared to not even a dozen KKK people.
I mean, when six KKK people want to march, the city involved generally has 3-5x cops assigned to protect them, because 100x protestors tend to show up, and they aren't all nonviolent.
*As long as you're not advocating illegal violence, support for terrorists(see first rule), outright lying with malice, etc.
I don't read AC A human right
Your message just show that you have no idea of how the UN works, you just read the Republican propaganda, right ?
Look up the definition of the word "understatement", please.
Stalin was planning an invasion to Western Europe
That's a brilliant argument, because proving it's negation is so very difficult. After all, how can anyone truly *prove* that no such plans existed? Only circumstantially, and circumstantial evidence is ever so much weaker. But consider this: not all armies are created equal. Invasionary armies (e.g. Nazi Germany) have to focus on things like mobility. The country's military-support structure must be geared toward handling supply lines stretched thin by distances. The type of intelligence gathering you do is specific toward expansion. Conversely, defensive armies focus on defense-in-depth - supply bases throughout conflict territory, lesser emphasis on high mobility. These considerations affect everything - airplane and tank construction, armaments, etc.. The Red Army, as it existed in 1940 was not of an invasion type. There were no built-up depots for rapid offensives into enemy territory. There was little to no mechanized infantry, etc..
An invasion doesn't take a day to create. Hitler worked on it from roughly 1933 onwards. First offensive operations were in 1939. Throughout 1933-1937 Nazi Germany was not a creditable military threat, yet we see no buildup of invasionary armies in the Soviet Union. Thus: had Stalin had plans for invading Europe, invasionary armies would have been created in this time, and further, had such plans existed, Germany would not have stood in the way. The emergency war preparations that took place roughly between 1936 and 1941, when war between Germany and Russia broke out, created an army intended to defend Russia in the coming conflict. Stalin, realizing that Hitler's Herrenvolk doctrine would eventually lead to a war involving the SU prepared the country for a defensive war. And to address everyone's favorite complaint, the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact was not an honorble one, but it did by the SU what it badly needed - time. Stalin was prepared to hold off hostilities for as long as possible to gain time to prepare a defense.
Now, to address the underlying emotional point of your statements - it amounts to no more than a categorical hatred of Stalin, irrespective of his actions or motives. This comes from the fact that America hates Communism more than it does Fascism. I would go so far as to say America doesn't really have a problem with Fascism. Never mind that the Nazi ideology, which people seem to believe as being relevant advocated racial supremacy and genocide. After all, they were only killing "inconvenient" people, right? This is why American businesses kept up trade with Nazi Germany, and basically got slapped on the wrist for it (remember Prescott Bush, anyone). This is why Allen Dulles wanted to negotiate with Himmler for a separatist surrender of Germany to America, so that the war could be turned against the allied Soviet Union. This is why Nazis got respected positions in the scientific community in America.
I won't try to claim that Stalin's actions were not brutal. They almost certainly were. However, the fact is this: his methods won the war, and it's certainly not up to some armchair strategist to claim, 60 years later, that things could have been done diffirently with the same victorious result. Maybe America would be ok with Nazi Germany runnin Europe - after all, they paid on time. But somehow, the rest of the world wasn't so much ok with it. And the history has been re-written so much, that without a thorough re-examination of the evidence, your arguments amount to parroting American propoganda, which, under the circumstances is more than a little self-serving.
If what I said could be construed as "hate speach" then what does it make what you said?
It's not hate speech per say. It's the typical "I hate America so I'm going to run my mouth without any figures to back it up" bullshit that I've come to expect from too many people on the Internet.
What is it with so many Americans and their over-sensitivity and complete inability to take critiscm or tolerate people who think differently? It's almost like insecurity. Pretty pathetic from the most powerful nation on the planet.
And there you go again. Given a chance to defend your arguments about half of the deaths in the 20th century being caused by the United States you resort to bashing us. I have no problem tolerating people who think differently then I do. I do have a serious problem with people who run their mouths about something without anything to back it up.
And it's funny you should accuse Americans of insecurity when the French are so insecure about their culture that they tried to rename "e-mail" because they didn't want an English word in their language. Care to venture a guess as to how many words in American English came from other languages and cultures?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Do you think all the people who were tortured by Saddam Hussein broke laws? Do you think that's the reason people thought Iraq was an evil regime, that it had evil laws? No, the reason was that it arbitrarily arrested people and tortured them, they didn't have to violate any laws for that to happen.
I don't care if you don't like Guantanmo Bay. It's part of America now, and because of its existence (among other things), America can no longer claim to be a free country. America is a shit country now, and it's partly your fault because you didn't stop this torture and bombing which is going on, and as far as I can see, you're doing nothing to stop it now. Instead you spend your time posting on Slashdot.