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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.'"
For years man has divided earth into political boundaries. Many of these boundaries have sub boundaries. And even more divisions among them and more beyond them and so forth based on belonging to a gregarious portion of the human race.
Disclaimer: I am an American. One thing I find myself asking not only myself but other Americans is what is their primary citizenship. What I mean by that term is which political boundary (if any) supercedes all?
Are you a citizen of the United States first? A citizen of Texas? A citizen of Chicago? A citizen of the Bronx? A citizen of North America? A citizen of yourself? At what point do you consider yourself a member of a community that will look out for other members?
Occasionally, we catch ourselves engaging in activities that would indicate we are world citizens first and citizens of the United States second. I know it's a tough concept to comprehend but we do send aid to foreign countries, we do attempt to help other countries no matter how much we fsck it up or act in our best interest. So there's some amount of talk about the United States actually being a part of the world. This act of ceding internet control to an international organization is a step in that direction.
Is it a good step or bad step remains to be seen and can be easily debated. One thing is clear, it sends a message to the rest of the world that the United States government is conscious of the rights of other governments. And this isn't a case of we need to help their economy because if it tanks, so will ours. On the surface this actually appears to be a gift of some little amount of power. This is not a historically common occurrence for a country such as the United States. Are we becoming more aware of the world political climate? I certainly hope so.
My work here is dung.
If you RTFA, it's not clear what actually changed ... and in the text, it says "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 - at least in the medium-term."
Tried and tested method: First, remove teeth from animal. Second, set it free...
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
In the status quo Internet traffic is not very censored or controlled by the US and things just plain work. I think this is a very good arrangement.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. The Register is the Enquirer of the IT world. It posts all sorts of vague and misleading titles of stories. Try reading the articles and you'll see what I mean.
Wake me when the backbone is no longer run through the NSA.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
give a loud fuck off to Kieren McCarthy for this little tid bit of editorializing, "That the US government recognises it has to transition its role if it wants to keep the internet in one piece (and it then has to sell that decision to a mindlessly patriotic electorate)"
It (he/she?) knows very little about American culture and hasn't seen recent polls about the dissatisfaction of the electorate with the present administration.
Excuse me? Is it the united nations that is politicized? Bureaucratic?
* Does the United Nations always act in their own interest?
* Does the United Nations have hidden agendas?
* Does the United Nations pressure poor countries to raise votes in favor of a specific country?
* Is the United Nations responsible for failures that occur when certain member nations does everything in it's power to slander, ridicule and disrupt?
What?
Sometimes people need to be reminded of concepts & ideas that were taught to them long ago.
I think there's a lot of evidence out there that shows many American adults could stand to go through remedial sociology studies. Hell, look at the President of the United States!
The US doesn't have "control of the internet", so it cannot be relinquishing what it doesn't have. The ICANN being US-based doesn't give much real control over IP packets travelling on some fiber halfway around the world from DC. Even if ICANN was a government agency it wouldn't. It just allows to vaguely arbitrate over domain names and IP number disputes that have relatively faint commercial implications. And even then the US feds would have to use indirect influence on ICANN.
The names change, the story remains the same.
File your story under "fiction" because both analogies you gave are inaccurate. In fact, they're so contrived that it makes it obvious that any attempt to dissuade you from your partisan viewpoint will be futile.
Therefore, I won't try.
I'm a big tall mofo.
...because the "international community" has such a stellar track record for taking on difficult tasks and running them effectively and fairly without corruption. Snort.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
Not a good idea. But a better idea than leaving it to Bush's successor.
For example, (since I forgot to log in the first time on this thread), the US invented the Internet.
The US chose to make it free and open, and this is a Good Thing.
The attitude of the rest of the world that the US is somehow false for choosing to manage it carefully, rather than just hand it over to, say, Kofi Anan and his *cough* able *cough* UN team, smells of a full diaper to me.
No one has prevented the rest of the world from devising its own protocol and implementing it.
Go ahead!
If the energy wasted whining about "those guys are evil because they won't give us their toys" were usefully diverted to accomplishing something, then global warming, world hunger, and the inability of the mainstream media to report facts would have long since been solved.
OK, I'll admit the last problem cited is insoluable. Please do not blame me for dreaming.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Not any more than we'll see the US/Canadian telephone international code change from anything but 1. It's just not worth the hassle to change it.
To be fair it was the US that developed the Internet all those years ago so I can see why they would want to keep control of it - however so many people from so many countries have added to it in so many ways (eg Tim Berners-Lee = WWW) I think it's only fair for it to be under International control now.
Art Makers Just an excuse to show photos of naked women !!
This actually has nothing to do with net neutrality. ICANN is only responsible for internet names. Net neutrality is a matter of US law (other countries realize that the net should remain neutral so it's not an issue elsewhere).
No Sigs!
I'm not sure that I agree. One of the reasons you think this is a good idea is so that the Internet can be governed by one set of consistent rules and regulations, including this concept of decency. The problem with decency is that it's highly subjective, and highly dependent upon the local community norms. While we in the US have a fairly consistent continuum of decency, even here, the line between "decent" and "indecent" floats from region to region. Radio stations in some areas bleep out words that radio stations in other areas do not. You can't set a national standard without it being inappropriate for some regions, unless your goal is to force those other regions to accept your definition of "decency".
But that's just talking about the US. World-wide, social norms vary in multiple dimensions. Things like nudity in public, language, age of consent, pornography, viewing the faces of women are tolerated in completely different ways across different nations. You cannot hope to apply a common set of rules governing decency without seriously pissing one or more groups off, because decency is strongly defined by local norms and customs. It is not an intrinsic property of all people with one set of rules that's "best" for everyone, as much as some people would like to believe.
The only problem I have with ICANN is that it's too political and its members too selfish. Open everything up, do the right thing that balances technical and non-technical needs, be transparent, document, and absolutely refuse to cater to your benefactors. I personally don't think that ICANN can be effective in its current form.
If the U.S. were to cede control of ICANN, would this in any way affect any of the net-neutrality hullabaloo going on in the U.S., or would these be entirely unrelated?
What it would mean eventually is that rather then net-neutrality you'd likely get some UN resolution to tax the internet usage of first world countries to run fiber to the palaces of third world dictators...and there would be no way to fight it.
"The UN is so corrupt, incompetent, and inept that it make the U. S. Govt look brilliant!"
;-)
Maybe that was the plan of the USA all along?
Seriously though, many problems of the UN stem from problems its members make (e.g. sovereign nations). It's only as strong (or inept) as those countries that make up the UN and have to decide when to act and when not. Some countries actively undermine the UN, and thus, obviously, this has its repercusions on the UN as a whole.
The USA shouldn't shout to loud in this regard, since it's often *they* that contribute in a major way to make the UN inept and incompetent, using its veto arbitrarily and destroying a united policy.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
I think perhaps you misunderstand the purpose of domain names like .com. They're intended to be generic, not tied to any particular country. They are not US-centric, even though that's where most of the original .com registrants were. The reasons for that have nothing to do with the domains' purposes. Commercial entities are free to register example.us if they want a US-specific domain name. Commercial entities abroad are free to register example.com without being tied to the US in any way.
Each country has its own naming scheme beneath its country code domain. The US, originally, was based on geography (which might be part of the reason companies didn't register names there; who would want to visit www.widgets.saint-louis.mo.us when they could get www.widgets.com?) Other countries adopted more useful hierarchies, which is why you tend to see more example.co.uk names. The US recently eliminated the geographical taxonomy, though, so people can register whatevertheywant.us.
It posts all sorts of vague and misleading titles of stories. Try reading the articles and you'll see what I mean.
/. anyway.
Oh, yeah, if you actually read the articles, then you find out what the story is actually about! Craziness. I'm used to just reading the headlines and then convincing myself I fully understand the situation and pontificating about it and why the author of the story I didn't read is wrong! That's what I learned here on
Seriously, this is called "style" and the Register has one where they make the title sensational, humorous, or both, under the apparently unreasonable assumption that you'd actually bother to read the article within if you wanted to know what the story was. If you really want to be able to just scan the front page of their website and feel like you've gotten a good summary of the day's IT news, then you are at the wrong website.
As far as the content of their stories, these vary quite a bit in quality, but when they're on, they're on. One of the other things that bothers a lot of Register and Inquirer detractors is that they publish rumors based on non-official non-PR-Newswire conversations they have with industry contacts. They do a good job of explaining where they got their information and how realible it may be, but again this requires reading the article. Also this means they can be wrong, but when they're right they get information out that doesn't show up on other sites that only consume official corporate press releases for months.
If these things bother you, then these are probably not the IT news sources for you. That's fine if you don't like them, but don't go around calling them the IT equivalent of the Enquirer. As news organizations that actually attempt to investigate things that you can't learn just by reading press releases, they're a step above most other IT rags, which I guess makes all of them the Weekly World News.
The enemies of Democracy are
Sigs cause cancer.
You know who wrote that? Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn. If anybody's qualified to talk about Gore's contribution to the early days of the 'Net, it's those two.
Original Document
Look, in the early '90s, 6 years before Slashdot, when there were less than a 1/4 million hosts on the 'Net, Gore introduced the Act that would ultimately fund the development of Mosaic. In the '70s, Gore was pushing support for networks, when nobody was talking network. Through the '80s, he pushed for consolidation of disparate government networks.
In the '90s, he drove the Clinton administration's focus on the 'Net. Was that administration perfect on technical issues? Far from it. But Gore was generally a positive force. He pushed against the CDA (which was getting rammed down the admin's throat riding on the Telecommunications Act). He was wrong on key escrow, but he pushed back on Clipper.
The Internet was not built exclusively on protocols and software. It required funding and political support. Gore has been a net positive force for us. Nobody is going to take us seriously and stand up for the issues that are important to us if we eventually go after everybody who does just that.
> and the United States retains the true power.
The US retains nothing. If the US wanted to enforce anything crucial that the EU does not agree with, the EU could create its own root servers and the result would be two internets. The US can't afford to let this happen. So in fact they have no power.
*re-reads*
Net neutrality can't really affect DNS...
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
The Register is the Enquirer of the IT world. It posts all sorts of vague and misleading titles of stories. Try reading the articles and you'll see what I mean.
And I'm sure you'll keep saying it again, so long as you don't understand British humour. As the other reply in this thread stated, RTFA if you want to know what the story's about. The titles are often witty and filled with puns or references to previous events. I'll bet you watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail then complain about how it's a vague and misleading portrayal of history too, right?
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
That should be the motto of all patriotic people. So simply stated yet so true. I have yet to read a convincing account of what problems exist solely because of US control over some aspects of the Internet.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
While I'm hardly a fan of the UN (outside of WHO, who are tremendous), let's not start blaming everyone for the sins of a few. It might not work out well for your arguments in the long run.
(And before the arguments over "librahal traitor" start, I'm ex-military.)
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
It's gnerally true. Yes, there are some issues witht he current administration, but most Americans do not like the current administration. 40% approval rating. Or as I think it should be put, 60% disapproval rating.
The I believe that the overall history of this country proes thats tatment.
Of courxe, some yahoo is going to post some specific case where this is not true, completly ignoring the fact that this is a gener statment.
Good question.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The fact the "international community" wants control or the net reminds me of a person who comes to crash in your apt becasue he doesnt have a place and then decides he wants to stay and not only that, wants say in how things are run in your place.
To the "international community" go start your own network, leave ours alone.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
This is often cited as being easy to do. Which it is. Technically.
On a more practical side though, you'll have to get all DNS servers to use the new zone files pointing to the new root servers. And that bit probably won't be easy at all.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Look at what the international community did to the UN. I really don't want the internet in the hands of those morons.