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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.
You mean like Alt roots? or a complete seperate network without any interconnections between the two?
:-)
The whole point of the Internet was to interconnect systems.
On a more general note, are any other non-american slashdotters noticing a rather alarming number of questionable political posts on this site recently?
Us non-americans might need to go get ourselves our own slash site too.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
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.
Especially the little rider to the summary "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." There was nothing in the Yahoo article linked about censorship. So who is "we"? And how about the motives of countries that know that the US is spying on every byte that passes through its jurisdiction (and probably a lot that don't)? They have no reason to be concerned -- no, they must be only motivated by the desire to censor?
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.
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.
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!!!
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
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)
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
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
As far as the UN 'handling' the internet, is this the same body that puts Cuba, Syria, and Libya on the human rights committee? The same guys that watched the Rwandan claim 10% of the population? Yeah. The UN is not exactly a model of speed and efficiency. By the time they realize they have a problem, it is a decade too late.
Of course, this is all an utterly moot point. 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.
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.
...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
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.
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 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.
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