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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?
...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"?
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
I like the way Nightline NBC never reports any of the cases where the accused have pleaded not guilty.. I imagine the case goes something like this:
Judge: right, we're here because apparently you intended to have sex with a minor, is that correct?
Defense: yes, your honor, my client was on Nightline NBC and..
Judge: oh, this shit again. Where is this minor that you intended to have sex with? Is she in the court room today?
Prosecution: uhh, no your honor, but we have members of the police and..
Judge: I'm sorry, what part of the 6th amendment don't you understand? Either get the accuser in here or you've got no case.
Prosecution: well, umm, there *is* no 14 year old girl.. we lied to him.
Judge: the accuser is fictional?
Prosecution: yes.. but the accused sure thought she was real.
Judge: This isn't story book time. This is a court of law. We don't do fiction here. Case dismissed!
or, ya know, at least in a world where rationalism was valued over witch hunts. Tell me, if I intended to kill someone who didn't exist.. like, say, Mr Burns from the Simpsons, would a court in the US hear the case? What if I really really thought Mr Burns was a real person? Like, really.
How we know is more important than what we know.
True but my ideas will still stop any kind of passive snooping (there is no way even a giant such as AT&T working with a giant such as the NSA could install man in the middle logging for every IM conversation (with every different possible protocol and encryption mechanism) being passed over their wires)
...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
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.