How The U.S. Government Undermined the Internet

sakshale writes "The Register has an article about U.S. Government backed policy changes that have led ICANN to redelegate top level domains in such a way as to provide 'greater state-controlled censorship on the internet, reduce people's ability to use the internet to communicate freely, and leave expansion of the internet in the hands of the people least capable of doing the job'" More from the article: "At that meeting, consciously and for the first time, ICANN used a US government-provided reason to turn over Kazakhstan's internet ownership to a government owned and run association without requiring consent from the existing owners. The previous owners, KazNIC, had been created from the country's Internet community. ICANN then immediately used that 'precedent' to hand ownership of Iraq's internet over to another government-run body, without accounting for any objections that the existing owners might have."

Comments

Read The Guidelines

[N8F8]

From CP-1: Internet Domain Name System Structure and Delegation (ccTLD Administration and Delegation)

(a) Delegation of a New Top Level Domain. Delegation of a new top level domain requires the completion of a number of procedures, including the identification of a TLD manager with the requisite skills and authority to operate the TLD appropriately. The desires of the government of a country with regard to delegation of a ccTLD are taken very seriously. The IANA will make them a major consideration in any TLD delegation/transfer discussions. Significantly interested parties in the domain should agree that the proposed TLD manager is the appropriate party. The key requirement is that for each domain there be a designated manager for supervising that domain's name space. In the case of ccTLDs, this means that there is a manager that supervises the domain names and operates the domain name system in that country. There must be Internet Protocol (IP) connectivity to the nameservers and electronic mail connectivity to the entire management, staff, and contacts of the manager. There must be an administrative contact and a technical contact for each domain. The administrative contact must reside in the country involved for ccTLDs. The IANA may choose to make partial delegations of a TLD when circumstances, such as those in a developing country, so dictate. It may also authorize a "proxy" DNS service outside of a developing country as a temporary form of assistance to the creation of Internet connectivity in new areas. [N.B. The IANA continues to receive inquiries about delegation of new gTLDs. This is a significant policy issue on which ICANN will conduct a careful study and review based on the established decision making procedures. Information about this study will be disseminated on the website at icann.org.]

Evidence?

[garcia]

When the US government took over Afghanistan in 2001, it was fortunate in that the current ccTLD owner was killed during bombing of Kabul. It simple forged the man's signature on a piece of paper handing over control to the US-created authority and the job was done.

Really? They have plenty of other links to information in that article but nothing about this particular tidbit. I did a quick search and found nothing in the first 100 results. Granted, I didn't do as much homework as I should have but I would have expected that the author of this article would have provided something more than a simple paragraph making such a claim.

Anyone else have some more evidence or is this another piece of sensationalist journalism that's meant to fire everyone up over nothing?

What policy changed?

[MightyYar]

Unless I'm missing something, it has been ICANN policy to give the country's government ultimate control over the TLD for that country. This policy is from 2000:

Principles for Delegation and Administration of ccTLDs Presented by Governmental Advisory Committee

The relevant section (I think) says:

7.1 Where a communication between the relevant government or public authority and the delegee is in place, when ICANN is notified by the relevant government or public authority that the delegee has contravened the terms of the communication, or the term of the designation has expired, ICANN should act with the utmost promptness to reassign the delegation in coordination with the relevant government or public authority.

And there is a lot more language like that. The way it reads to me, ICANN does what the local government says regarding the TLD, as soon as possible - and this has been policy since at least February 2000.

Re:Decentralized Internet

[silas_moeckel]

Well the internet has 3 things that need any sort of central control IP's, ASN's and the DNS root. IP's are a finite resource and have to be given out based upon need. DNS could be made rootless at the server level but you still need some authoritative group to arbitrate domain names etc. mDNS along with some crypto like DNSsec could make a distributed root while maintaining some sence of stability. AS to ASN's it's just a number that acts as a unique identifer in the world wide BGP mesh that makes it all work :) again it's just a question of some group taking responcibility for it publishing a list and being reachable but like the DNS issue it's all about getting EVERYBODY to change over to it. mDSN has the best chance of moving as it's easy to be backwards compatable IP's and ASN's realy would require handoff from the current people that control them.

Re:Those bastards

[susano_otter]

I draw to your attention the UN Human Rights Commmission, which condones all sorts of evil by the simple expedient of letting the evildoers chair the Commission.

Or, if your political tastes run the other way, consider the presence of the U.S. on the Security Council...

The problem with U.N. control over the internet is that it would give the worst offenders equal authority with those who do play well with others. Contrast this with the problem of "U.S." (i.e., ICANN) control: the U.S. may be an offender, but it's certainly not the worst, and it doesn't give the worst offenders much authority at all.