Slashdot Mirror
United States Cedes Control of the Internet
greenechidna writes "The Register is reporting that the U.S. is relinquishing control of ICANN. The story states:
'In a meeting that will go down in internet history, the United States government last night conceded that it can no longer expect to maintain its position as the ultimate authority over the internet.
Having been the internet's instigator and, since 1998, its voluntary taskmaster, the US government finally agreed to transition its control over not-for-profit internet overseeing organization ICANN, making the organization a more international body.'"
Even the original article is contradictory:
However, assistant commerce secretary John Kneuer, the US official in charge of such matters, also made clear that the US was still determined to keep control of the net's root zone file
Is this a time paradox?
Even the original article is contradictory:
Not really -- it's more like the US's position is contradictory or more realistically, a facade:
So the US is more than happy turn over administrative control of the Internet domains to ICANN, but retains the right to control the root structure. In essence, ICANN becomes a semi-legitimized world front for the Internet. Other countries can't claim they don't have control over the process now, and the United States retains the true power. This will appease a few countries but on the whole nothing will change. In the end, the US hasn't given up a thing but a bloated and malformed beaureaucracy anyway.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
While I grimace when I hear "control of the Internet" equated with "control over the DNS root", it's not actually that much of a misnomer. You can "bypass" US control by either using IP addresses, or by pointing your name servers to an alternative root. The problems that the latter approach causes tend to completely outweigh the benefits. It is generally agreed that fragmenting the DNS root is a Bad Thing for a variety of reasons.
And since the Internet is relatively useless without a mechanism to locate hosts on it, and since nobody seems to be willing (or able) to consider alternatives to DNS (such as a proper directory service that could be immune to intellectual property disputes), the DNS root is the key to that.
Of course, ICANN encompasses more than just the DNS root, including most of the functions other organizations previously had, including the relatively mindless allocation of numbers for protocols, IP address blocks, etc.
While censorship is bad, it is certainly not why people are concerned with ICANN.
.com/.net to Verisign, which have led to unnecessary monopoly situations, and resulting inflated prices. The decisions on gTLDs to add to the root were driven primarily by domestic politics, rather than legitimate technical and governance concerns. These policy decisions affect Internet users around the world. ICANN is answerable to none of these users. ICANN is only effectively answerable to the U.S. Department of Commerce. As such, it makes it decisions in the interests of the DoC, which are not necessarily aligned with the interests of the user community.
ICANN is making policy decisions (such as which gTLDs to add to the roots and resolution of disputes over domain names) when its authority to make these decisions is murky at best. It has made policy decisions, such as ceding control of
when somenoe on slashdot doesn't know the difference between the internet, and WWW.
The internet was created in the US, once called ARPANET.
When a government committee, headed by Al Gore, decided to let the public access ARPANET they renamed it 'Internet'.
Hence the reference to the often misquoted Al Gore quote.
Tim berners-Lee created the WWW.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Ars Technica put an article out circa 17:11 GMT today claiming that The Register is misleading. http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060727-7366 .html