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."

Comments

THBBBPPPPPP!!!! </raspberry>

[thatshortkid]

I, for one, welcome our concern-addressing, no-binding-power-having overlords.

HA HA!!</nelson>

burn, baby, burn... karma inferno!

The Minutes Of The Meeting

[ellem]

World: We want to control the internet.
USA: No.
World: Come on!
USA: No.
World: Will you at least think about it?
USA: No.
World: If you don't we will be forced to make our own DNS systems.
USA: OK.
World: But that will break the internet.
USA: OK
World: But that would be bad.
USA: Then leave it alone.
World: OK. But we're making a committee.
USA: That's cute.

Re:The Minutes Of The Meeting

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

Re:The Minutes Of The Meeting

[Jussi K. Kojootti]

...stories of how the unelected EU parliament tries to lord over every mundane aspect of life...

I understand your fear of faceless bureaucracy, but ... what the fuck are you talking about here? The parliament is directly elected by EU citizens (the last time this happened was June 2004, next elections will be in 2009).

Furthermore the parliament cannot propose laws, so it's really not in the position to "lord over mundane aspects of life". Maybe you're thinking of the Council of Ministers or (most probably) the Commission? The commissioners are appointed by the member states, so maybe that's what you were referrring to. Even then:

• Governments of member states are democraticly elected
• Comission as a whole must be approved by parliament (this is not just a rubber stamp as was seen when Barroso had to withdraw his first list)

Re:The Minutes Of The Meeting

[Tony Hoyle]

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.

Re:The Minutes Of The Meeting

[Shakrai]

Do the US vote who gets to be Secretary of State? Defence? DHS ? Didn't think so.

SecDef has absolutely no power over American citizens or American Armed Forces. He doesn't even have the authority to tell a private in the Army to drive him somewhere. He certainly can't launch nuclear weapons. What he can do is relay the President's orders to the Armed Forces, act as the second voice of approval in a nuclear launch (two-man system), and advise the President on matters relating to defense.

In the American system of Government that's what the cabinet does. It advises the President. The only cabinet member that you could make a case for needing to be an elected official would be the Attorney General. And there would be disadvantages of having him elected as well -- he could be open to political pressure -- which is the reason why we don't elect Federal judges and they have lifetime appointments. Of course having him appointed by the President is a conflict as well (if he needs to investigate the Executive Branch) -- but that's what Special Prosecutors and Grand Juries are for.

Nobody said it was a perfect system but it seems to have worked well enough for the last 200 years :)

Re:The Minutes Of The Meeting

[vertinox]

Nobody said it was a perfect system but it seems to have worked well enough for the last 200 years :)

I bet the last Emperor of Rome said the same thing.

Doesn't this remind you of AT&T?

[rob_squared]

Doesn't this remind you of AT&T, but on a larger scale?

The US owns the hardware, has all the control, and is expected not to abuse the power. And there's no one that's more powerful that can tell them what to do.

Re:Doesn't this remind you of AT&T?

[Jesus_666]

How about Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Norway, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Trinidad or Bosnia and Herzegovina? They're all better than the USA when it comes to press freedom. As has been pointed out before, citing the worst alternative is not a valid argument.

The real answer is that no single country should be trusted with control of the Internet and that the UN didn't want to control but to manage the 'net.

this is good news

[VolciMaster]

So far, the US has been the only player who wants to maintain the free and open nature of the internet, with little-to-no censoring. The internet works because anyone can put anything they want up for the world to see.

Some of that content will be wrong, inflamatory, misguided, illegal, and/or offensive, but having that open forum means that a lot of good will show up, too.

Actually, corporations maintain control

[PIPBoy3000]

Gallagher said the compromise's ultimate decision is that leadership of the Internet, and its future direction, will remain in the hands of the private sector, although some critics contend that the U.S. government, which oversees ICANN, if only nominally, could still flex its muscle in future decisions.

So in a sense, the US and the rest of the world have continued to allow the existing private corporations to keep control of the Internet.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

"Latin languages"

[orzetto]

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...

Re:and who better than the US...

[wolf-]

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?

Always good when there's a no-yelling solution.

[CosmeticLobotamy]

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.

Re:Yeah but...

[meringuoid]

This is great and all, but who's to say the argument won't spring up in another 3 to 4 years.

The newly formed oversight committee is to say.

Thus far, the US has had a pretty much hands-off approach to running the internet. That's been great, guys. However, the internet is getting larger and larger and more and more important to the economies and to the security of all nations. The potential power that comes from running the internet is getting greater. The day may come when the US government starts to abuse its position here - for instance, how about imposing export tariffs on domain names, or on IP space?

Hence the oversight committee. If, five years down the line, the US has been naughty, then it's time to seriously think about splitting the internet. But if they've continued to behave as they generally have in the past, then all is well. The committee won't have power as such over the running of the internet, but if it isn't kept happy then the next round of negotiations might not go so smoothly.

The headline should read....

[tpgp]

The headline should read:
Private Sector will probably retain control of the Internet.

From the TFA:

the compromise's ultimate decision is that leadership of the Internet, and its future direction, will remain in the hands of the private sector, although some critics contend that the U.S. government, which oversees ICANN, if only nominally, could still flex its muscle in future decisions.

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.

A monopoly is a monopoly

[Winterblink]

The Slashdot crowd really intrigues me. On one hand we're adamantly against operating monopolistic tendencies in one regard (Microsoft with Windows and other software ventures), yet we cheer when another one is formed (US having control over the internet).

If there's a difference in philosphy here then can someone please point it out to me? I can't be the only one befuddled by the difference of opinion between the two issues around here.

Re:A monopoly is a monopoly

[arevos]

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.

I'd love a secondary DNS system

[typical]

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).

Get our of your hole

[brunes69]

... and stop being so biased.

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).

Re:Get our of your hole

[ultranova]

Last time I checked I had the right to be a neo-Nazi and try to convert others to my viewpoint in the United States. Last time I checked I still had the right to wear religious clothing to public school in the United States.

That's because the US didn't really suffer all that much because of the nazis. Yes, they lost quite a few soldiers; but Europe was reduced to smoking ruins and half of it was occupied by Soviet empire. Germany still hasn't recovered completely; the eastern half still suffers the results of the communistic dictatorship era, a direct result of nazism.

But put on a T-shirt saying "Osama rules !", go stand next to where the World Trade Center used to be, and start giving Al-Qaida recruitment leaflets to everyone passing by. Let's see how long you'll walk free.

Once you've been arrested for being a potential terrorist, you can reflect on how Al-Qaida is to Americans pretty much what Nazi Party is to Europe, with about 10 000 -fold difference in deaths caused by them - in material destruction the difference is simply uncomparable; Al-Qaida destroyed two scyscrapers, World War II reduced most major cities of Europe to rubble.

The point here is that Americans, at least in this respect, are no more or less free than Europeans; the USA simply has a different boogeyman.

We fought a revolution for those ideas.

Actually, didn't you revolve so that you wouldn't need to pay taxes to England ? And now you pay them to Washington instead. The more things change ;)...

People left Europe and came over to North America for religious freedom even before there was a United States of America.

A nonexistent state can not curtail anyones freedoms, so this is hardly surprising.

Re:Get our of your hole

[Shakrai]

Once you've been arrested for being a potential terrorist

Actually, merely wearing a t-shirt that says "Osama Rules" would not get you arrested for being a terrorist. It certainly wouldn't get you convicted for anything. And before you throw out the name Jose Padilla or anybody like that, I'd like to point out that there's a huge difference between wearing a t-shirt (arguably free speech) and planning a dirty bomb attack. Not that I wouldn't agree with you that he is being unfairly held without trial.

Wearing such a t-shirt at ground zero would likely paint a giant bull's-eye on your back and get the shit beaten out of you. In fact wearing such a t-shirt anywhere in New York City would probably ensure that you got an ass-whooping. But that's just fine -- free speech doesn't mean you get to escape the consequences of your speech. It only means that you get to say it in the first place. And I rather suspect if I wore a Nazi armband to certain places in Europe that I would get the shit beaten out of me too :)

Passing out the recruitment leaflets could be another matter. That would probably be considered supporting a terrorist organization. But you were passing out leaflets telling Al Qaida's side of the story (infidels in the Holy Land, Israel, etc, etc) you wouldn't be breaking any laws. Think I can pass out leaflets in some European countries telling Hitler's side of the story?

The point here is that Americans, at least in this respect, are no more or less free than Europeans; the USA simply has a different boogeyman.

I disagree. I think I've made my point in the paragraphs above :)

Actually, didn't you revolve so that you wouldn't need to pay taxes to England ? And now you pay them to Washington instead. The more things change ;)...

Actually it wasn't the fact that we were being taxed by the UK. It was the fact that we were being taxed by them and no representation in Parliment. Leading to the rallying cry of "No Taxation without Representation".

Re:Get our of your hole

[Guysmiley777]

No, I think Russia has the U.S. beat hands down for combat casualties. 7 to 8 MILLION Russian soldiers died. Of course their combat strategies sometimes resembled "jam enemy tank treads with bodies", but that is beside the point. And yes Virginia, the Commie Pinko Russkies were on the Allied side (gasp) against Herr Hitler and friends.

Why would the US give up control? That's dumb!

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:This makes sense...for now

[meringuoid]

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.

Source of statistics

[meringuoid]

Sorry, forgot to give references:

IP allocation by country.

USA: 1.3 billion. UK: 254 million. Japan: 141 million. China: 72 million.

Something is going to have to change here.

Re:and who better than the US...

[CaymanIslandCarpedie]

Currently the US, shuts down some "Islamic Extremist" websites. If Germany had control, they'd probably shutdown more Nazi websites. If Venezula had control, they'd probably shutdown Pat Robertson's website.

If the UN is in control, it could at least limit these types of unilateral actions. Not saying it'd be perfect or even better, but I'd think it might be a bit more fair.

Re:and who better than the US...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Free speech on slashdot

[Tim C]

But the slashdot moderation process creates effective censorship

No it doesn't, you can always adjust your display preferences and read absolutely everything.

Re:THBBBPPPPPP!!!!

[ColaMan]

It'll be great! Kinda of like the UN!

Re:and who better than the US...

[Bogtha]

...to serve the internet? China?

Why do American Slashdotters always bring up China? You know there are other countries than the USA and China, don't you? You do realise that it's the UN that manages the international phone system, don't you? Does China censor your phone calls?

What other nation of the world could guarantee the free speech implicit to the internet, as sites like slashdot are testament to?

Um, how about a country that doesn't have the DMCA? How about a country that didn't force the 2600 website to stop linking to some code because Hollywood didn't like people watching DVDs on their own terms? How about a country that didn't pass a law letting the Church of Scientology pressure Google into removing links from their index? And, since you brought up the subject of Slashdot, did you know that Slashdot was censored by the Church of Scientology with a USA law?

In France and Germany they ban hate speech. In the USA they ban speech that might offend people with lots of money. Stop pretending you are any better than the rest of the world.

If the UN took control

[Anonymous Coward]

UN: "Please stop breaking into the DNS servers."
Hacker: "Ok." ...months later...

UN: "You have broken in again, please cease and desist or we will be forced to write a resolution."
Hacker: "Ok" ...months later...

UN: "This is the third time you have broken in; please see the updated resolution stating our resolve to enforce the previous resolution. We are going to send you a nasty letter, you know."
Hacker: "Why don't you secure the server?"

UN: "Resolution UN1231-123-122.1 to upgrade security has passed. We are ok."
Hacker: "No you're not, the server is still open."

UN: "But we have a resolution."
Hacker: "um...."

UN: "Don't push us or we'll send in the men in blue."
Hacker: "The Smurfs?"
UN: "Mind you, our security force is top-notch, they have cans of mace and can insult your mother."
Hacker: "right..."

Hacker: "Do you want some Pay-Pal dollars?"

The thing that has bothered me most...

[Masa]

... with this issue is that it seems like there is some sort of systematic slander campaign in the US press to make the UN look bad. This thing has gone so far that now every time when someone mentions anything related to the UN, the most vocal part of the crowd will yell things about food for oil program and how the UN is The Great Evil. I don't know, how common this negative attitude is overall, but it's clear that the age-old attitude against the UN is raising its head again.

It has been interesting to see, how surprisingly many will state that the UN is same as the EU, which it isn't, and how ignorant the general population can sometimes be. (To these people I would recommend to take a quick look to the world history and how things have built up.) All this however is (at least in my opinion) a clear sing of some sort of anti-EU attitude that is growing in the USA and this can turn into something bigger and worse in the future. It looks like that the USA would really like to cut all connections to the outside world and start living in the isolation. This is especially sad, because there seems to be more and more issues nowadays that require international co-operation between countries. So, all this anti-EU and anti-UN crap I have seen lately is doing nothing good to anyone.

Personally, I don't care how is controlling the Internet as long as it is kept free and functional for everyone. Things have been working pretty decently so far, so why to change anything. But what I care is this ignorant mentality, which seems to color news stories related to EU or UN.

Finally, as far as I know, the UN is not a "nation". It doesn't have a nationality. This seems to be a thing that most people tend to forget. Also, I have understood that the UN does not have a single body or single agenda, which it is trying to pursue. The UN was designed to be a democratic organisation with different sub-organisations, which try to improve this world we are living in. Yes, sometimes some individuals might have some selfish motives, but in the general, the UN was meant to be something completely different what American people seems to think.

OK, now I stop this ranting. Sorry if my opinions hurt somebody. And sorry about my bad English. It just pisses me off to see this black and white thinking I've seen lately when reading news and forum postings.

Re:No binding authority..

[kisak]

Actually, even though one can paint this as a "victory" for the US (been some time since last time ;-), I think the UN is very happy about the outcome. This is because this oversight committee is set up with the approval of most countries in the world, most notably both the EU and the US. International law is a slow moving process, which is based much on precedence and established ways for countries to cooperate. When a relative new thing (on the time scale of international law) like the internet comes a long, it is important then to make a new framework for countries to cooperate and make rules (treaties) that affected countries agree too. Of course international law will take inspiration from similar technology, like the telephone system, but there are many new challenges when talking about the internet.

This committee will now start its work and lay down a precedence on how the different countries can cooperate and make international agreements when it comes to how to run the internet effectively. Again, with the blessing of most UN nation as always is important when forming working international law. Of course, much precedence is already made by ICANN, but many countries were not particularly impressed with how ICANN has been run. This committee will make start making suggestions to ICANN how to change its course on certain issues. And in some years down the line, ICANN will again have to justify its existence, and the UN will by then have a working system to take over if this committee does its work properly (and ICANN doesn't).

I guess this can be seen as the first step to get rid of ICANN, or a chance for ICANN to reform. Whatever spin you like to put on it. It is at any rate a good thing that an agreement has been reached.

Re:and who better than the US...

[IntlHarvester]

> Currently the US, shuts down some "Islamic Extremist" websites

Do they shut them down by getting ICANN and NetSol to remove their DNS records? No? Then it's not a relevant point.

Re:THBBBPPPPPP!!!!

[AKAImBatman]

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.")

Re:and who better than the US...

[cbiltcliffe]

Canada, our 51st state? What would be the difference?

We'd say:

Hey, hoser! We're shutting down your website, eh? Unless you, like, give us some beer and back bacon, eh?

SecDef does have power over the military

[tomcres]

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!

Re:SecDef does have power over the military

[Shakrai]

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!

Yes, he is in the chain of command. He can relay orders from POTUS to the armed forces. But he can not legally issue those orders himself. I recall reading on 9/11 that both Rumsfeld and Cheney tried to give the military the authority to shoot down suspected hijacked flights before Bush was able to do so. Neither one of them had the authority to issue this order and the military was under no obligation to follow it. Of course one would hope that in a scenario like 9/11 that the Generals would take some initiative and issue such an order themselves -- but it doesn't change the fact that neither SecDec nor VPOTUS could legally issue such an order.

Re:THBBBPPPPPP!!!!

[terrymr]

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

Some actual facts

[rs79]

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

Sorry, the gp poster is correct...

[sean.peters]

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