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

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

[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 :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?"

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: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.

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