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The Letter That Won US Internet Control
K-boy writes "Pushing my own scoop, but I think it's a valuable piece of Net history, I have come into possession of the vital letter sent by Condoleezza Rice to the EU over Internet governance. And posted it on the Web.
The letter is pretty stern but you should also read it bearing in mind that letters of this type are not only very rare but they are always written in very, very soft diplomatic language. This was not.
The result of the letter was that the EU dropped its plan for an inter-governmental oversight body for the Internet and we have ended up with the status quo (ICANN, US government control).
The letter was never meant for publication."
Yes, they can. The root zone ( "." ) contains the IP addresses of the .fr name servers. French ISPs usually will not have the .fr name servers hard coded, but will ask the root servers (which are hard coded, bind9 has them in the "root.db" file) where to find the .fr name servers. As long as ICANN controls the root zone file, they could remove the .fr DNS servers from it. Then, French surfers would not be able to resolve .fr domain names. Until the French ISPs would hard-code the .fr name servers, that is.
Jan-Pascal
No. It is almost never illegal for a journalist to post truthful and lawfully obtained information.
Bull. It varies dramatically by country. Printing classified information is almost always illegal.
And many countries of the world throw journalists in jail if they annoy the government.
The government of Tunisia (host of the WSIS conference) does this all the time.
Robert Mugabe, dictator of Zimbabwe, said at the WSIS conference said that there is too much freedom of speech on the internet, and got huge applause.
That's why you want to keep ICANN under US control. Could ICANN do a better job? Probably. But it would be far, far worse under UN control.
you guys say that, but i doubt you could point out a single incident where a citizen was restrained from protesting the government.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone
Umm.... any DNS operator worth his salt will try to limit requests to the "." In the local hints file he should have most of all the tld's so his server shouldn't go asking who's authoritative for .fr By doing that not only do they reduce the load the other dns servers it also would limit affects from what you are suggesting. Where you seem to imply that hard coding is something not done, I'd say that it should be something that everybody already is doing. True at this time the central authority for the hints file everybody downloads comes from ICANN, but if ICANN decided to shove all .fr somewhere else; all you'd have to do is *not* change your local information.
As others have noted, it's a formal title. In the UK, it applies to members of the Privy Council, which includes the Cabinet, and to various nobles with historic titles. Hence, as Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw is addressed formally in written correspondence as "The Right Honourable Jack Straw".
You'll also hear members of parliament refer to "The honourable member for <place>" during debates, for those MPs who aren't Privy Counsellors, or to "The right honourable member for <place>" for those who are. I'm sure you can find more details somewhere like Wikipedia if you're interested.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.