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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."
I work for a small ISP and can tell you that the largest carrier of Asian traffic is NTT and all their infrastructure goes from east to west from a European point of view.
There is very little in the way of west to east Internet infrastructure east of the turkey and ukraine.
Check your BGP routing table and you will see I am right.
Now my geography isn't excellent, but if you were flying to Saudi Arabia from Spain, would you connect in New York?
...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
I'm in London. Maybe the UK is a little different from the rest of Europe in this respect (cables seem to go *everywhere* from here, from the maps)
...)
/proportion/ of traffic going outside of Europe goes across the Atlantic -- lots of websites in English are in the USA/Canada, including ones needing lots of bandwidth.
Traces to:
Japan - through USA
India - IPs with no rDNS (Teleglobe, so it could be either. Only 2 hops, so it's probably direct/via SA?)
Saudi Arabia - direct
Iran - direct
China - across Europe (NL, DK,
Hong Kong - USA, Japan, HK
Australia - via USA
New Zealand - via South Africa
Of course, you're probably correct that the vast