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

Those bastards

[briancnorton]

How dare they obey the laws of other countries!

WTF, if the internet is in another country, the government of that country can do whatever they hell they want with it. That's how international law works. It's called respect for sovereignty.

Re:Those bastards

[Viper Daimao]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didnt we have like 10 articles a few months ago about the UN and EU mad at the US for controlling the internet, and wanted more international involvment? Now we have an article thats mad at the US for giving up control of the internet to other nations?! WTF?

Damned if you do, damned if you don't I guess.

Re:Those bastards

[Morinaga]

Don't take the author's conclusion as fact here. It wasn't the US that gave up top level domain control to those countries, it was ICANN. The causation between the US support of such policies and ICANN granting such actions has no evidence. It's probably also important to note that if the UN had such control over the Internet that they wouldn't hesitate to give those domains to said governments. All of which makes the US controlling the Internet instead of the UN made ICANN give away the TLD threory a bit hard to swallow.

Re:Those bastards

[cold fjord]

Apparently the main outrage comes from ICAAN reassigning control of the little used .iq Iraq domain from two Palestinian immiagrants living in the US, currently in jail after being convicted on a variety of charges resulting from their supporting terrorists organizations, and giving control to the Iraqi government (which just had an electionwith unexpected support). This seemed to have fairly strong support on Slashdot just a few months ago. It was viewed as a positive thing in Iraq.

I'm finding it difficult to get worked up about this.

Lessons of history - Finland's access to internet

[UR30]

I remember how in the beginning of 1990 Finland had some issues in having faster connections to internet. Some people in the US thought that the Finns were only goint to download software, not contribute to the net. Then came Linux, which was first distributed from the Finnish server at nic.funet.fi, and there was more traffic to the US than to Finland. Afterwards we did have quite fast net connections overseas.

So...

[TrappedByMyself]

ICANN is making sure that TLDs for countries are controlled by the governments of those countries?
And what is wrong with this? Isn't this how it's supposed to be?

Nice use of the word nuclear, by the way. Its good to see that propaganda is alive and well.

Re:Here is the evidence for you

[K-boy]

Oops. I actually meant this letter: http://www.iana.org/cctld/af/razeeq-letter-13aug02 .pdf.

Although I think the first letter is suspicious enough in itself.

Kieren