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US Internet Control To Be Topic #1 In Rio
Crazy Taco writes "It looks as though the next meeting of the UN's Internet Governance Forum is about to descend into another heated debate about US control of key Internet systems. Although the initial purpose of this year's summit was to cover such issues as spam, free speech and cheaper access, it appears that nations such as China, Iran, and Russia, among others, would rather discuss US control of the Internet. In meetings leading to up to the second annual meeting of the IGF in Rio de Janiero on Monday, these nations won the right to hold an opening-day panel devoted to 'critical Internet resources.' While a number of countries wanting to internationalize Internet control simply want to have more say over policies such as creating domain names in languages other than English, we can only speculate what additional motives might be driving nations that heavily censor the Internet and lock down the flow of information across it."
Why the hell would the US cede any control over the Internets to Iran? Do they have something to offer us in return, or something?
While a number of countries wanting to internationalize Internet control simply want to have more say over policies such as creating domain names in languages other than English, we can only speculate what additional motives might be driving nations that heavily censor the Internet and lock down the flow of information across it.
Not to be confused, presumably, with a nation whose government has a demonstrated history of violating the privacy rights of its own citizens and stating on the record that it doesn't accord any such rights at all to anyone who isn't one of its own citizens, including the vast numbers of Internet users from other nations whose traffic is all but certain to pass through systems under its jurisdiction, and within which it has repeatedly been shown that major communication providers are more than willing to provide the government with access to traffic they carry without proper authorisation anyway.
Nope, I can't imagine how any other nation in the world could see a problem with that. There is no danger whatsoever of industrial espionage, interception and decoding of confidential government transmissions, or investigations of private citizens of high influence, and none of them could be used to further the interests of a nation with such access at the expense of others anyway.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
They'd talk about really internationalizing it. You know, things like setting up a new system of non ICANN roots and such. Try and get infrastructure that is independent of the US systems but interoperable and then once it is established and working well, talk about redelegation of control. For example if the EU were to set up a central agency that controls a bunch of EU based roots, mirror the ICANN root zone, get all that going well. Then they go and talk to ICANN and say "Hey, how about we split the root zone, we take the EU nations, you keep the rest, we both mirror each other." Do that in a few places around the world we could have a DNS system with more regional control, that would also be outside the ability of a single government or governments to screw up. For example if the EU later decided to be jerks, ICANN and others could stop accepting their updates, and people in and out of the EU could use the other roots.
However I have a feeling that it is going to be like most of these meetings where people just whine that the US companies should have to give up control of their resources to some international oversight body. In addition to being rather greedy, this is also stupid. Having a bunch of systems in the US that control everything but are theoreticly under international control changes nothing. The US government could change their minds at any time, and if the companies and servers are in the US they'll do as the government says because they won't have a choice. You haven't really solved anything, just added more bureaucracy and more people who can control what's going on normally but the buck still ultimately stops with the US government.
The real answer is many systems, all around the world, that are controlled by many groups. In that way there really isn't a single group that "runs" the Internet. Of course that isn't what most nations are at all interested in. They are interested in just having the US keep control, so long as the US will do what they are told.
Instead of whining, these nations should explore means of setting up a separate Internet backbone. I understand this is entirely possible, though I cannot speculate on how it could be implemented at all. Go figure!
Give control of the TLD's to the Useless Nations, and watch what can be said, posted and read disappear. If these other countries don't like the fact that the USA (who invented the net) runs it, then develop your own and leave the rest of us alone.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Since those early days the development of the Internet has been a multi-national collaborative effort.
So, basically, you are wrong.
If it's such a big problem the nations that don't like how the US-run internet works can always just seperate from the network and create their own network (or at least threaten to).
Though I doubt anyone has the balls. Personally ICANN/IANA does a pretty good job at what it does, and the FCC seems to only step in extremely rarely (if at all). And I promise you that a large majority of nations, if not every nation, intercept/store/decode internet information. Changing who 'owns' the internet would not change that at all. It would just potentially change who gets what IP blocks (alot of businesses would be pretty upset if this changed), what TLDs are official and valid (and nothing stops a nation from having their own ISP's DNS servers adding TLDs), and I guess some protocol stuff.
The US may do some terrible things but with regards to the internet it's policy is typically 'do not regulate if possibly'. Unless that changes this is all just a bunch of moaning to stur up anti-american sentiments.
You control botnet.
Those nations could encourage economic prosperity that would encourage their citizens to create web pages, thus increasing how much of the internet they 'control'.......or they could just bitch that the people who invented the internet used their native language.
All other nations have an easy solution:
If something is in your way go around it. Disconnect your net from the USA. If all nations isolate the USA then probably you have something to negotiate with. If not, then you have some begging to do.
disclaimer:
I'm an American and I live in the United States, just not the "America" ones.
well back when there weren't a lot of computers on a network, there would be no need for transmision control or collision detection. thats like saying the Wright Brothers didn't invent flight because they never built a jumbo jet.
"A gentleman never strikes a lady with his hat on." - Fred Allen
It is sometimes difficult for Americans to comprehend that very few countries understand the concept of the free speech and a free press. For example, in our 21st Century, most European countries will prosecute individuals for thought crimes. In Russia, the state continues to repress the free press. The Russian web and broadcast outlets have become targets for Putin's heavy handed interference.
Muslim countries block access to web sites deemed too sexual or which differ in religious outlook from their repressive theology. China? Well, we know that story all too well. The quest of these regimes toward control of the the Internet is not rooted in a desire for "freedom" or "diversity". Quite the contrary. It is a desire to control and repress.
Fine you can have the net, but by your logic, world wide web design and content should be approved by Switzerland since it was invented there.
Have fun with your bbs
Excuses Are Like Assholes - Everybody's Got One
The Internet basically refers to a wide area network of computers connected by TCP/IP. ARPANET was the first network to operate on TCP/IP, which was also created by DARPA. The word "Internet" was coined to describe this type of network in RFC675. The modern internet sprang from NSFNET, a clone of ARPANET created by a few US universities. Sorry, the guts of the internet came from the US. That's why we run the thing.
:)
The web was invented at CERN, so if you're Swiss you can be proud of that. It was an evolution of Gopher, however, which came from the University of Minnesota. Go gophers!
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Personally I think the US has done a phenomenal job of keeping the internet as open to the average joe as possible. By transferring control, they will probably just manage to mess things up, and find some way to add an additional cost.
"we can only speculate what additional motives might be driving nations that heavily censor the Internet and lock down the flow of information across it."
I really don't think the US is going to stay free of blame much longer, and I'm a somewhat privileged citizen.
China
Iran
Russia
Are these nations known for their defense of liberty? Are their citizens free?
The more things change, the more they stay the same. The internet is just another area where those who seek power to oppress their fellow man are hard at work erecting barriers to the free flow of information, barriers against truth. They did it with the spoken word. They did it with the printing press. They did it with broadcast media. Now they're sinking their claws into the internet.
Evil never sleeps and stupid never dies.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
From what I've seen thus far, all they've done is demand control of systems and services that don't belong to them (but they're given use of).
Unless they're willing to actually, y'know, INVEST in supporting the infrastructure (their own root servers, etc), they need to step off.
It's like some of these nations that get sent food demanding steak instead of the grain.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The US invented IPv0 (which nobody uses any more) and DARPAnet (which nobody uses any more either). How this differs from Europe's X.25-based International Packet Switch Stream, I don't know. Other than IPSS was routinely subscribed to by members of the public long before Compuserve provided an Internet gateway, of course. Did I mention that IPSS was also available for multimedia systems (CAS Online was fully graphical, for example) and computer games (eg: Essex University's MUD-1)? These sorts of systems existed in the US via bulletin boards such as TBBS and FIDONet, sure. And doors-based games were none too shabby. Many a poor soul got lost in massively multiplayer online turn-based games. In comparison, can you name me the truly massive game engines of DARPAnet? No, 16-player X11 games don't begin to get close to some of the stuff out there.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
After all, the UN is a model of efficiency and transparency. It should be easy to share control of the Internet!
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I agree -- there should be an internet UN that handles this. I'm just thinking of 9 years from now when the Republicans take control again... and this time there really will be the technology to control everyone if thats what people want. Why would a foreign business want to have to deal with the US if they didn't have to anyway? (sad but true)
according to Nightline NBC, horny men who get chatted up by someone who claims to be a 14 year old girl and then show up at the allotted place for sex can be arrested in the US for attempted child abuse or similar charges.. sounds like thought crime to me.
How we know is more important than what we know.
...a network of networks. If every company I've ever worked for set up a private network, and decided to provide a restricted gateway, so can China. And, guess what? None of those companies created an international incident to do it. They just did it. And don't say that doesn't scale, either. It does.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I'd hope that control of the Internet was taken out of the control of any non-representative body. I don't care who is not getting represented, the important thing is that the Internet is a federation of networks and you cannot have a federation that is run by a theocracy. If it's a federation, it cannot have anyone in overall charge, which is the way the Internet should be run. Particularly if it is supposed to be resilient to damage (cyber attacks, nuke attacks, etc).
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
"we can only speculate what additional motives might be driving nations that heavily censor the Internet and lock down the flow of information across it."
The devil you know or the devil you don't. We know that *many* in the US want to limit free speech or otherwise censor the internet. So, how much further down that road will others take it.
IMO, the many could provide (depending on setup) a redundancy that could make many types of censorship moot. It's pretty hard to cut something off in a robust distributed environment. Bittorrent (at least) has proved that.
Well, that and the US's politics makes me *very* nervous about the future on freedom of speech on the 'net.
p.s. The countries chosen to be in that list seems rather loaded to me.
ok, so the GP is a tard and doesn't understand that the wright brothers could not have "invented flight", in that birds have prior art (by a few k-years, i would suppose).
the assertion of the U.S. creating "the net" is most certainly valid, though. to suggest otherwise is the height of arrogance. or a french perspective. the two are sometimes difficult to discern.
irregardless, let us suppose that there actually exists an international body which could perform these duties. one which cannot be influenced by a particular sovereignty. just for the edification of all reading this thread, can you provide the name of such an organization?
or do you console yourself with the belief that your access to an established infrastructure came with the rest of your surroundings? if, in fact, you reside outside of the continental united states, do you suppose that the technology you enjoy is a fruition of the greater consciousness?
Not to be confused, presumably, with a nation whose government has a demonstrated history of violating the privacy rights
Stop right there, privacy is a different issue than censorship.
"Brave Guy" indeed, what a lemming. Just spouting off the same message about privacy issues even when it has nothing to do with the topic under discussion!
And as a last thought, are you seriously going to sit there and say a U.S. citizen has more to worry about from their government than a citizen of *Putin's Russia*? Than any Chinese citizen?
Come on.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There is something broken with the Internet if people are discussing who gets to control it. Control indicates centralisation and a point of failure. Rather than discussing who gets to control IP addresses and domain names, the discussion should be how do we eliminate these points of weakness and make those who want to have control irrelevant?
While it doesn't hurt to be politically active don't let it become an end in itself. Once the bickering starts the geeks are probably better to leave the politicians to it while getting on with the real job of routing around them.
Much of what is happening in Rio is not on the agenda.
Both the US Gov't and ICANN have tried to put many issues off limits, not the least of which is ICANN itself.
It is slowly dawning on people that there is a mad grab by industrial interests, with a lot of assistance from certain parts of certain governments, to lock-down large parts of the net and keep "the mob" (you, me, and the other people who use the net) as nothing more than puppet consumers.
That exclusion, which amounts to a total inversion of the idea that governmental authority derives from the people, i.e. a rejection of democracy, is a foundation stone of most of internet governance - see my note "Stakeholderism - The Wrong Road for Internet Governance" at http://www.cavebear.com/archive/rw/igf-democracy-in-internet-governance.pdf
This isn't really relevant...
You can't make DVDs play out of the box in Linux due to the state of copyright law in modern America. Mostly, you have the Digital Millenium to thank for this. However, if the DMCA doesn't happen to apply to you, or if you don't particularly care about the current incarnation of copyright law and want to stick it to the man, libcss is quite available for you to download out of the box.
Automatix should be able to help you with this, and is available with a few clicks over the intarwebz.
It's the modern way for anti-Semites (on both the Left and Right) to say "Jew" while appearing to be socially correct.
If I'm not mistaken, TCP was invented in the US and tested ca 1977 (see a recent CNet article on the 'Internet Van'. The focus outside the US was drawing up the specifications for the OSI networking stack. The first widely available OS to support TCP/IP was BSD 4.2 - though it may be argued that Berzerkeley isn't really in the US...The USA is known to listen to all the international calls to / from its territory. What makes us sure that they will not listen to all VoIP calls?
I know well the mentality of the government people. They do not care of us, they do not care of our security. The friend of Tony Blair, the former UK PM, was the mastermind behind the Herbalife spam scam. He helped Tony Blair in another scam too? - to buy 2 apartments, almost legally, but times cheaper. So the government is the spam.
The US administration hijacked the values of democracy and freedom for the benefit of the US oil companies. Just like Napoleon hijacked the ideals of French revolution to conquer the whole Europe at his time.
Internet should be designed in such a way that the users have got the control. We. Not "kind", "wise", "caring", "honest", "noble" government officials, who in reality care only of themselves. Why shouldn't they?
Don't be silly. The quest to keep control on US side is not based on free speech, diversity, melting pot and American way of life and whatnot. It is based on keeping the control on what is a vital part of all society : the communications pipelines. On both side it has been recognized it is a form of power and now both keep to get/keep as much of it as possible.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
leereyno,
I looked at some of your other posts, and I wish you had worded this one a little differently.
Are these nations known for their defense of liberty? Are their citizens free?
Patriot Act
Warrantless Wiretapping
Guantanamo
America is hardly at its height in the human rights game. Hell, we're confirming an Attorney General who isn't sure that waterboarding is illegal/torture.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21698732/
No, we're not yet as bad as the nations you listed.
Evil never sleeps and stupid never dies.
But let's keep our eyes open.
Because this Brazilian started building an airplane a year AFTER the Wright brothers flew, you discern from this that the Wright brothers did not invent flight? Being Saturday night, I'm going to assume you are way passed drunk.
The Internet is fine. L2play, noobs.
It is sometimes difficult for Americans to comprehend that very few countries understand the concept of the free speech and a free press.
...because it is sometimes difficult for non-Americans to comprehend that very few Americans understand the concept of the free speech and a free press.
Sad but true.
How to get rid of chlamydia.
Botnet spams YOU!!
As fascism evolves, the media and communication in general inevitably suffer. We've certainly seen this already to a degree. I'd feel more at ease if the internet on/off switch wasn't in the hands of the U.S. military. (When you dig thoroughly enough, you see the ties.)
Imagine how cut off you'd feel if the internet were to suddenly go off line.
-FL
Rather standard procedure. Your country has a history of violating human rights, so of course you try to take attention off your shitty regime by bitching about the U.S.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Rio de JanEIRO, not Janiero.
Sounds to me like it would make sense to keep the "power" over the net in as many hands as possible. More redundancy and duplication of key functions thats physically separated must be a good thing, right ? Less potential for some nutter to disrupt the flow of information, deliberately or by accident.
Now the world has gone to bed, Darkness won't engulf my head, I can see by infra-red, How I hate the night.
First off, I'm having a really hard time understanding just how the US controls a network of mutual consent. That said, and I know I'm going to be modded to oblivion for not participating in the groupthink du jour (America hating), so far the US control of the gTLDs has been exemplary, impartial and efficient (Verisign's idiotic DNS pollution aside).
I'm British and yes, I can hate Bush and [Blair|Brown]'s little crusade with the best of them but I fail to see why we should fix something that isn't broken. If you really are worried about US control, use ORSN roots as I do. So far, the only reason I have had to use them is IPv6 accessible root servers, but they also go into independent mode if anyone screws with the roots with malevolence. So far, touch wood, nobody has.
Would it also be so terrible to say "thanks, USA and ICANN" for the stability they've given the gTLDs over the years? I shudder to think what would happen if the UN ever got control of the roots. Can you say "bureaucracy" and not think inefficiency and inaccessibility?
Resistance is futile. Reactance buggers it up.
As a meta-observation, it's really interesting to see how every time a story such as this is posted, people who're otherwise mostly sensible immediately start raving about how "we" can't let "countries like Iran" "control the Internet".
That's the same people who usually bemoan the fact that a significant percentage of the USA's population doesn't really know what the world looks like outside of their own little nation, the same people who complain about rampant xenophobia and wars, and the same people who criticise (rightfully, one might add) their own administration for consistently and willfully violating just about every constitutionally-guaranteed right and every human right on the book.
In fact, it's even the same people who will loudly complain (as before, rightfully) about ICANN's latest bullshit when they (ICANN) pull another stunt. Yet somehow, for some reason, when the words "Internet control" are mentioned, they all turn into raving nationalistic wingnuts.
What gives?
What's more, they aren't even able to provide good reasons. "Giving Iran control over the Internet" is an obvious strawman, for example. Complaints about a perceived lack of freedom of speech in Europe (which part exactly? It's not as if Europe is one big homogenous mass) just betray a lack of understanding of the concept of free speech in the USA (if you think you've got absolute free speech - even absolute free political speech - you're sorely mistaken). UN bashings are on the same level as those of Bush and Cheney and the rest of the neocon mafia (apologies to the *real* mafia for that comparison, BTW) - childish and unfounded. And so on...
Generally speaking, it's not something that'd really amaze me, but I just don't - can't - understand why this happens on Slashdot. It's almost as if the usual readers, commenters and moderators are suddenly exchanged for an entirely different group of people when these stories crop up.
...when talking about the internet and the root dns systems. A few points:
My suggestion would be that the UN sets up an organization that maintains an alternative set of opt-in dns servers, maybe with a recommendation to use these in UN countries. The same organization should also be responsible for trying to remedy geographically uneven routing in the core internet infrastructure. Please, spare me of the criticism of the UN, which in this case might not be relevant or warranted (oil for food, poor peacekeeping track record, dictatorships in the UN, etc.). A lot of that dislike for the UN comes from the fact that US politicians actively try or tried to turn public opinion against the UN, because ignoring the UN served as a means for executing a unilateral foreign policy. Of course, there are legitimate criticisms, but the UN merely reflects on the state of the member countries. You can talk about China or North Korea, just as well as you can talk about Sweden or Denmark and their UN track record. But I'm diverging from my main point about the UN: it has a good track record running technical organizations like the ITU that runs the phone system of the world or like the WHO.
Yes, North Korea and China is in the UN. They would censor the whole world if they could. The problem with US foreign policy is that it sees itself as the sole beacon of light and hope in the world, while it is not. The US wants to protect us from censorship? Great news! You CAN oppose China or North Korea when they demand censorship in setting up a UN run system. Just band together with Sweden, Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, UK, etc.. That would require bilateral negotiations and a little less sovinistic attitude, but if you're not doing that, don't hide behind cheap excuses.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
So those are the only countries with significant technological development? False dichtomy is really popular on Slashdot, Socrates would be proud.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
This is a spurious argument. Many of the root servers are already maintained by and paid for by organisations from outside the US. See http://www.root-servers.org/ for a list of them. It is one of ICANN's great bugbears that it has no direct control over these independent root server operators.
China and Russia would hold much power in such a case since these two countries are Security Council members. They're also FAR more interested in control and censorship than the economic freedom enjoyed by Western companies.
The IGF's official Web site is notoriously useless. A few members of the IGF community have begun a grassroots effort (under the banner of the Online Collaboration Dynamic Coalition) to produce a community Web site at igf-online.net to redress the problem. The new site already hosts a number of useful resources including a community blog, wiki, calendar, chat and needs feeds, most of which were selected for their capacity to support multilingual usage. It also features a specially-designed menu running along the top of most pages of the site, that links in external Web sites including the Secretariat's official Web site and that of the Rio hosts. By registering (or logging in with your existing OpenID) you can begin posting on the community blog, adding events to the calendar, and entering information on the wiki. Hosting of other content will be accommodated on request. Volunteers are needed to help with translating the site's content into other languages, designing a complementary set of themes, and spreading the word.
While a number of countries wanting to internationalize Internet control simply want to have more say over policies such as creating domain names in languages other than English blah blah blah
They want to restrict the free flow of information...Censor it. Understand?
You are getting your shows confused.
- sigs are for wimps.
[quote]While a number of countries wanting to internationalize Internet control simply want to have more say over policies such as creating domain names in languages other than English[/quote]
Erm... I think you mean they want to have the ability to create domain names using characters outside of the limited subset of the US-ASCII character set.
they can go make their own internet.
this one's ours.
OJ? Is that you?
and 2/3 of the people wouldn't have any idea what you were talking about. Hell, 99% of people don't know who their elected leaders are, can't find their state on a globe, and you expect them to know what darpa is?
...national governments (and/or the people in the country) tend to demand control of what happens in their territory. The international Internet will eventually become a thing of the past, just like the Wild West did. The more money and people came in, the less free and open it was. Or any new territory. Lots of us were pioneers on the digital territory of the Internet, but the outsiders have moved in and they are here to stay, because there are too many of them to toss back out on their butts, and they're making too much money from this Land of Opportunity we built.
Eventually China is going to be the model, if not something more drastic. Probaly something more drastic, after thinking about it. Internet connections between countries are eventually going to have to be by treaty. At some point Russia, China, or some other country is going to flex their cyberwarfare muscle on a country with actual clout (as opposed to poor Estonia), or the spam/botnet problem is going to get to a point that's impossible even for Washington to ignore, and then the lines are going to be physically severed and only slowly reconnected with friendly or neutral countries. Even if it doesn't come down to a physical severing, the best case scenario are national firewalls with ports opened only to friendly countries. Hell, maybe even import tarrifs on data traffic to/from certain countries.
I wouldn't give up control of the net for anything. The damn Useless Nations want to control everything, and punish achievement. We won't, but, the next time some idiot tries to take over Europe, we'll sit this one out and let you deal with it. Bunch of ungrateful pussies in the world who won't stand up to anything and let a bunch of dumbasses with towels on their heads take over the entire world with their garbage. At least (for now) the French leader gets it.
While the Internet is just a collection of computers and networks, you all have to obey some common protocols to make it real useful. In the case of many of these, the ultimate control is in the hands of a US entity. Domains are a great example. Nobody is making you do shit in regards to any particular DNS, and indeed you can not use DNS if you like. However, it makes life easier if we all use it. Well, just about every DNS server in the world trusts the root-servers.net roots. By "trust" I mean when they need answers to a query they don't know, that's who they ask. In turn the roots trust ICANN. The zone that ICANN publishes is the one they use. So that means by default ICANN is in control of DNS. Since ICANN is a US entity, that means the US government can exercise ultimate control, if they want.
So it is very real, and accurate, to say the US has control over many things on the Internet. However what many people, and it seems all politicians, fail to understand is that the control is de facto, not de jure. If you want to do your own thing, you can. As you noted, there are other roots that play nice with the ICANN roots but are separate. There could be far more of this, and on a far wider scale. In fact if a major entity, like the EU got behind something like that and made it work well I'd bet ICANN would be open to the idea of handing off the EU part of the zone to them and swapping zone information.
However that's just not a concept that many people readily get. They are used to things being owned or run by someone, and that ownership is something that is absolute. This is particularly true in terms of politicians. After all, that's how it works for them. As such they want control over the Internet, and believe that the way you get it is getting those that have it to give it up. They don't understand the idea of a collection of systems where it's just all about trusting each other.
Ultimately, I think nothing is ever going to come of this crap. ICANN does a good enough job nobody seriously seems to want to spend the time money and effort to try and compete, the US isn't going to hand ICANN over to another country just for kicks, and other than bitch these politicians can do little. Also it isnt' like the US could cause real problems. There are a number of ICANN roots that aren't in the US at all, they are vast worldwide anycast systems. If ICANN flipped out, they'd be perfectly able to just keep using old versions of the zone file. The US based roots might have to fall in line, but there are at least 3 that wouldn't.
Except as part of some totally unfeasible net-censorship scheme, it would serve no purpose. No good can come of it.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The "control" the US has is just keeping a copy of the DNS list. You can actually go up into your browser settings and use someone else's list if you really want to. If the rest of the world wants to use a new system, absolutely nothing is stopping them other than that if they get out of sync with the US, they might have pissed off users. The US doesn't have to 'give up' anything. The rest of the world just needs to point their browsers in a different direction.
Good point.
In this sense, the DNS system is like hard currency -- "a currency in which investors have confidence."
-kgj
-kgj
A pure WWW is gonna work real bad without that whole TCP/IP thing :-)
Besides, the Swiss are neutral, which is exactly what we want from the Net.
There are four boxes used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order.
You can't take the sky from me...
"In meetings leading to up to the second annual meeting of the IGF in Rio de Janiero on Monday..."
Rio de Janeiro
Sorry, Gopher was great (I ran a Gopher server until ca 1999) and in many ways superior to the original WWW, it has no relation to the WWW however except in that both are distributed hypertext systems, Berners-Lee was in fact not aware of Gopher when he started work on the web and the distribution system for the web is much simpler than for Gopher.
What people do not give Gopher credit for is the search system (Veronica ?) it was a revolution and without it no Altavista or google, when I first tried it blew my socks off.
While Gopher "got big" (to the extent it did...) before the Web, Tim B-L started work on the web in 1989 and had a working server and browser by the end of 1990; Gopher was released in 1991. The two projects were pretty much independent creations. And, really, they weren't that similar conceptually - menus vs. hypertext.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
Not to be confused, presumably, with a nation whose government has a demonstrated history of violating the privacy rights of its own citizens and stating on the record that it doesn't accord any such rights at all to anyone who isn't one of its own citizens, including the vast numbers of Internet users from other nations whose traffic is all but certain to pass through systems under its jurisdiction, and within which it has repeatedly been shown that major communication providers are more than willing to provide the government with access to traffic they carry without proper authorisation anyway.
Of which nation do you speak? Perhaps China? Iran? Russia? France? UK? Germany?. Because all of these nations and probably every other one in the world have the same "demonstrated history" that you speak of, although some more so than others. Which is the point here: some more so than others.
And which nation has independent (i.e. not state owned) operators who can say "no" like Quest? And which nation can actually have a public debate of these matters or can have disputes resolved before a (relatively) impartial court?
Methinks that either your disingenious anti-american myopia has blinded you, or you are incredibly naive about how all nation states behave in regards to perceived threats. Before you complain about the splinter in your brother's eye, you should remove the plank from your own.
Fuck yeah!
Comin' again to save the motherfuckin' day, yeah!
America!
Fuck yeah!
Freedom is the only way, yeah!
It's the dream that we all share,
It's the hope for tomorrow.
Fuck yeah!
>Sorry, the guts of the internet came from the US. That's why we run the thing.
And ve invented ze automobile. So for all ze road networks around ze world, no matter who payed for them, the administrative übersight should be wiz ze german government, jawohl!
Get the logic? No? Neither do I...
bye, r.
US government wants to be able to spy and spoof on all internet traffic. Same as with all international banking traffic. You can't make international bank transfers without them going through approval process in either UK or USA. Also why new inside-EU bank transfers will all go through USA. Let's hope our new american overlords won't steal our money, even if they do steal our emails.
Everywhere today there is big.gov and frankly it is a little disingenuous to imply that traffic going through the US as opposed to China, Russia, even the UK and Germany isn't subject to monitoring. The US only stands out because at one point in time we had something on the books that said this is a bad thing.
Because a representative form of anything can never be abused and will certainly not be twisted into a political circle jerk regardless of what needs to be practically done to ensure function.
This morally questionable entity that would most likely NEVER do the thing I'm proposing because of a very long history of not doing thing I am proposing, should not be trusted. We should instead trust a group comprised of people who will most likely do exactly the thing I fear whenever they feel they are criticized. I am not shit crazy and I approve this message.
-FL
The parent article's correct, unlike many of the replies to it. While there is still a lot of EU-Asia connectivity that goes the long way around through North America, there's an increasing amount of bandwidth on cable systems that go directly. Most of it's undersea cables that go through the Middle East to the Indian Ocean and then to east Asia or Australia, but there's starting to be some land-based cables across Russia as well. It's more likely to be bought by private businesses that need lower-latency connection for their applications than by the general Internet ISP market, but that's also growing. There's also some obvious geographical difference in which routes to take - EU-Asia cables are much more important for India or Singapore than for Japan.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Pfth, everyone knows Henry Ford invented the automobile.
The thing to realize, especially if you are American, is that 'The US controlling [whatever]' does not mean 'You, the average American, controlling or even benefitting from [whatever]'. The present government is not your friend, unless you are very rich or ultra religious.
Having the U.N.around is like having a neighbor move in down the block and demand that since you work harder and make more money than your neighbors that you should buy their groceries,pay their bills,walk their dog and pay for a security service for them.That way your neighbors can relax and take it easy,have a vacation.
The U.N are just silly bastards aren't they? Socialism they call it.
Get the U.N. out of the U.S. and the U.S. out of the U.N.
(I give candy to the "trick or treat for unicef"kids.No point in spending Halloween completely duped)
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
You're right without realizing it! In the first half of the last century, engineers were pretty much required to learn German, because all the most cutting edge engineering was coming out of Germany. If you wanted to be on top of the latest in mechanical engineering, you needed to be able to read German technical journals. It wasn't inherently unfair, the Germans were just really good at engineering, and they weren't expected or morally required to print their journals in any other language.
Nobody is forcing anyone to use the US-based root servers or IP allocations. It seems like most of the people who don't like it are communications ministers from other countries, and organizations that just don't like the US much. I haven't heard a good technical argument against US administration yet, a few mildly compelling managerial arguments, and a bunch of awful political ones.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
If we just had that, Humble Compassionate Conservative Governor, as our President, perhaps the world would love and trust us? If we just had enough Congress people that were humble enough to know that they are just serving our citizens, and not thinking they are in charge of our world, the rest of the world would think we had a lot of rational leadership. If we just had enough people in our government that had not gone rogue, perhaps the world would want our leadership. The certainly do not want us as dictators, nor do I.
it is: http://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/countries.lasso