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US Keeps Control of the Internet

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the well-thank-good-thats-all-settled-once-and-for-all dept.

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."

3 of 1,057 comments (clear)

  1. 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.

  2. 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.")

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  3. 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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