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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."

14 of 1,057 comments (clear)

  1. "Latin languages" by orzetto · · Score: 4, Interesting
    The accord reached late Tuesday also called for [...] the issue of making domain names -- currently done in the Latin languages -- into other languages, such as Chinese, Urdu and Arabic.

    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
  2. Re:and who better than the US... by wolf- · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  3. Always good when there's a no-yelling solution. by CosmeticLobotamy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  4. Re:this is good news by Yaa+101 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  5. I'd love a secondary DNS system by typical · · Score: 4, Interesting

    That's a really good solution.

    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 .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.)

    Second, it's great leverage against Verisign.

    Remember the .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.

    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).

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    Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
  6. Why would the US give up control? That's dumb! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

  7. Re:This makes sense...for now by meringuoid · · Score: 4, Interesting
    However we should start to consider how net governance (whatever form that should take) will develop in the future, before the future arrives. Just as China, India et al are in a hurry to explode economically they will also be in a hurry to move forward technologically too and if the US or others appear to be moving too slowly they may well 'go it alone' and develop competing networks.

    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.
  8. Re:The Minutes Of The Meeting by Tony+Hoyle · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    The verisign thing? ICANN did *nothing* - verisign backed down due to public pressure. ICANN's punishment for them? To reward them with the .COM contract pretty much in perpetuity.

    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.

  9. Re:The UN can take control when..... by iapetus · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
  10. Re:THBBBPPPPPP!!!! by AKAImBatman · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.")

  11. Re:The UN can take control when..... by close_wait · · Score: 3, Interesting
    How typical of so many African and European countries, sit idle and watch the US pay for it, then demand a part of it

    Dear US,

    Please find enclosed an invoice for the following developments:

    • democracy
    • English language
    • printing
    • steel
    • stainless steel
    • steam engine
    • calculus
    • laws of motion
    • laws of thermodynatics
    • law of gravity
    • theory of evolution
    • computers
    • railways
    • antibiotics
    • anathestics
    • vaccination
    • radio
    • television
    • jet engine
    • rockets
    • compact disk
    • most musical instruments
    • most sports
    • World-Wide Web
    • Linux

    payment terms: 28 days.

    Warm regards,
    Europe

  12. Some actual facts by rs79 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    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 .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.

    Primary the root instead http://cr.yp.to/dnsroot.html

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    Need Mercedes parts ?
  13. Re:If the UN took control by kinsoa · · Score: 3, Interesting
    If the UN is so slow, that's because the US block everything, in almost every fields.

    Your message just show that you have no idea of how the UN works, you just read the Republican propaganda, right ?

  14. Re:Get our of your hole by trurl7 · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Not that there was anyting great in Nazi dictatorship but

    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.