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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.'"
Here's what the LA Times has to say, which is quite different from the "day in history of the Internet" crap:
U.S. Unlikely to Yield Web Oversight Yet
Federal officials seem inclined to extend a deadline for privatizing control of the Internet's address system.
By Jim Puzzanghera, Times Staff Writer
July 27, 2006
WASHINGTON -- The federal government appeared unlikely to relinquish oversight of the system for assigning and managing website domain names after a Commerce Department hearing Wednesday raised broad concerns about giving an obscure Marina del Rey nonprofit unsupervised control.
read the rest
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I've often said that the only way you can solve most of the issues revolving around the internet today is to make it a sovereign nation. That way one set of laws, one set of taxes, one set of decency can apply to all thus avoiding lawsuits in a million different countries due to your content.
Hopefully though, an international body can agree to some basic tenets so that we can establish so we can limit trivial laws and lawsuits due to localized laws.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
i fear that internet regulation will devolve into internet bureaucracy and politicization, a la the united nations. simply having a diverse or shared governing board does not ensure that the product will remain diverse or shared. the u.s. has a significant interest in maintaining the network and its development, and i think the continued managment by the u.s. would leave the internet in safe hands.
So does this mean we'll see a transition from .com to .co.us for US hosted domains?
Occasionally, we catch ourselves engaging in activities that would indicate we are world citizens first and citizens of the United States second
Just think about online activities. Most of them aren't country-specific anymore (I'm thinking about things like online gaming, or even here in Slashdot). Everybody is connected, no matter where do you live. I feel the way you're describing. I'm a citizen of the world, and since I've been using Internet (when it became massive here around 1995), being Chilean is just one more tag I carry. Is the place where I was born and raised. But it doesn't mean I only think about my country and I don't care about any other place. I have the impression that many U.S. ppl are just too much into their own bubbles and don't realize there are more countries outside. Like when I met my fiancee's parents (Texan people). They had a very wrong idea of what a chilean woman would be or look like. And they were impressed when they met me:P (points for me lol).
What I'm trying to say is, when everybody starts opening to the rest of the world, political limits will become just that.
If so, that would be the exact wrong message to send. We are conscious of the rights of people. Governments are simply organizations created by those people for the purpose of protecting and enhancing those rights, and to they extent they do that, we should respect them, and to the extent that they do not, we should not.
Well, the stance of our government naturally sways with the prevailing ideologies.
Speaking as a liberal, I should take care when I characterize the position of my conservative friends. However this idea of the rights of other governments seems to me to bear on the paleoconservative/neoconservative ideological split.
The classic paleoconservative Burkean theory is that a stable government deserves a kind of deference, because it's continued stability is, ipso facto, proof that it meets the needs of its subjects or citizens. Interactions between governments are based on national interests, and while the outcome for individuals may be unfortunate (e.g. dying to obtain access to strategic resources that he as an individual may have little chance of benefiting from directly), the nation as a whole prospers. In this view, national sovereignty matters, although the sovereignty of other states can sometimes be violated in the national interest, there is an understanding that in most cases a kind of reciprocal recognition of the rights of sovereign states is important.
In practice liberal outlook on foreign policy is not altogether incompatible, although peripheral disagreements are common. Burke himself was a Whig after all, although from the conservative wing, and a sympathiser with the American Revollution. The distinguishing characteristic of a liberal is the belief that progress is possible and worth pursuing. Liberals are deeply suspicious of realpolitik, the the pursuit of naked national interest at the cost of human progress. This suspicion taints not only the end, but the means, namely military adventurism.
However, most of the time paleoconservatives and liberals aren't that dramatically different on a pragmatic level; most of the time other governments were to be left on their own, with occasional swings towards interventionism for idealistic or self-interested motives. These swings are checked by the other side, and the result was a general consensus that at times made allowances for humanitarianism, at other times pragmatism. This balance produced a consensus on the policy towards communism, the policy of containment, although at times this swung more towards military adventure than the extreme liberals wanted. It also produced the complementary policy of detente, although this smacked of appeasement to extreme conservatives. Both these policies were supported by the segments of each side that were closest to the middle.
The neconservatives, however, are a different animal altogether. They aren't conservatives or liberals. It's really unfair to the conservative side to call them neoconservatives. They're more like an amalgam of what is hated most on each side of the conservative/liberal split. They share with the most naive of the liberals a faith in their ability to create progress. They share with the most blockheaded conservative a blindness to the negative consequences of unlimited pursuit of self interest. That's it in a nutshell: neocons combine the naivte of the worst liberals combined with the blockheadeness of the worst conservative.
The natural check on the violation of soveriegn and individual rights that conservatives and liberals each have are missing from the neocon viewpoint. The liberal believes that war retards human progress. The conservative doesn't believe that human progress happens can be achieved by any deliberate plan or stratagem including war, and so will avoid war if there is no clear national interest. The neocon, however, sees war as a means by which human progress can be advanced, and so will pursue it, not so much at the deliberate cost to the national interest, but with the same faith that the progress will serve the ultimate national interest by which the liberal pursues cooperation and understanding.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.