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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 would it have to go through America? Not all internet traffic flows through the borders of the US.
The US "control" of the internet is administrative control (address space allocation, DNS stuff, etc); it's not the hub for worldwide internet traffic.
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.
It is sometimes difficult for Americans to comprehend that their country isn't the most free in the world, and that Europe isn't full of evil communist dictatorships that prosecute people for 'thought crimes'. Because all those European countries such as Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Macedonia, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom -- which scored better than the United States of America in the 2007 Reporters Without Borders Annual Worldwide Press Freedom Index -- obviously have no concept of freedom of speech and a free press.
Russia is not the entirety of Europe, nor does it make up a majority of the countries in Europe. How did your bullshit manage to get modded +4 Insightful?