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European Union Asks US To Free ICANN
An anonymous reader writes "Viviane Reding, Information Society Commissioner of the European Union, is calling for the United States to hand over control of ICANN (Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers). She said that the organization running ICANN needs be free of control by a single nation, and rather controlled by a private entity and governed by multiple nations. ICANN, headquartered in Marina Del Rey, California, was created in 1998 to oversee a number of Internet related tasks. Reding said, 'In the long run, it is not defendable that the government department of only one country has oversight of an internet function which is used by hundreds of millions of people in countries all over the world.'"
full bit:
"She said that the organization running ICANN needs be one free of control by one single nation but controlled by a private entity and governed by multiple nations."
That's quite a different story than implied by the summary's "hand over control [implied: to the EU]".
I still think it's a bad idea to let 'multiple nations' govern the thing - there's too many nations that would seriously curb what can and cannot be done. I don't think the U.S. having sole control is all that great either, but out of the various options - I'd sooner 'trust' the U.S. with it (given existing records, although I disagree with the whole .xxx domain getting nixed - especially since ICANN has/had plans to offer .anythingyouwant anyway) than, say, the U.N. or a grouping of e.g. U.S., Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China to pick a semi-random grouping there.
group of nations which all have a constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech.
Like France, Germany and England, all of which have speech restrictions which I find disturbing?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Great links. For those who have censorship concerns, as can be seen on her Policies and Activities page, she supports the Safer Internet Programme. Their mission "aims at empowering and protecting children and young people online by awareness raising initiatives and by fighting illegal and harmful online content and conduct."
A lot of brave French men and women died fighting for their homelands while the Yanks made excuses and sat around eating ice cream in Times Square or whatever they were up to and didn't get involved til 1941. Show a bit of respect.
The French men and women were brave. The French Government failed them miserably though. Sitting behind their fortifications and ceding the intuitive to the Germans clearly wasn't the best approach to fighting the war. The collaboration of the Vichy regime also comes to mind as a stain on the history of France.
Regardless, I think you misread me. I made a cheap joke at the expense of the French but my underlying point was to dispute the notion that the British and Americans single-handily won the war. It took the efforts of every single Allied nation to defeat the Axis powers. That fact is beyond dispute for anyone who has bothered to give the subject even a cursory reading.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
You mean like the time when they kicked North Korea's ass out of South Korea? Yeah that was an UN action (Resolution 84). Or how it served as a forum for the US and USSR to work out the Cuban Missile Crisis instead of fighting it out? How about the first Persian Gulf war, the one that's approved by the UN and not based on bullshit? Don't we wish we listened to the UN instead of Bush and Fox News the second time around?
The UN is huge and has many organs. Most of them are successful enough that you never hear about them and the work that they do. Of course there are failures but a world without the UN would be a far worse place.
Stop sucking on Fox News' teats.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
Lets consider a better analogy.
We build at OUR EXPENSE an entire series of roads, spanning both countries and continents, and we tie the traffic system into YOUR control system.
We REIMBURSE you for your troubles, paying you a small fee for each traffic light you operate (DNS Registration), resulting in cheaper operational costs for everyone.
We however have grown concerned over your ability to operate our traffic as a neutral controller, as some of your states believe they can hijack and disable our traffic lights, if it bothers their locals. They have not been entirely successful yet, but they have caused disruptions that should never of been possible in the first place.
http://blog.cdt.org/2009/01/24/kentucky-court-rules-that-domain-names-arent-craps-tables/
The options we have available to us to minimize US laws/regulations on both our local and international traffic, we have the following options:
1. We leave the system in your hands (and whim), and hope for the best.
2. You hand over the control to an multinational committee
3. We sever our dependence on your system, and create our own. This however will more then likely cause international traffic crashes.
Anyone who thinks that its America's right to retain control over the entire INTERNATIONAL internet will suffer when countries develop their own control system in disgust.
Anyone who thinks America is more reliable then a committee might have a point, but 'because were better then you', is never going to be an accepted reason.
To avoid criticism; Say nothing, Do nothing, Be nothing.
It was torture when the Japanese did it to Americans, so it's torture now.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
ICANN consists of multiple parts. The important part is the IANA, which publishes such things as official port assignments, assigning IP addresses, assigning autonomous system numbers, publishing the root zone file, and acting as the registry for the .arpa and .int TLDs.
Virtually all of that it does on behalf of the IETF. That said, some of that is done autonomously without directly involving the IETF. For example, IP address assignment, except for special purpose assignments like assigning the multicast region it does autonomously. (Of note, it only assigns to a small number of other organizations who subassign IP addresses, continuing on down until an IP address gets assigned to your connection.) Similarly, the AS numbering is done autonomously. Of significant note, with the exception of special TLDs like .arpa, determining the contents of the majority of the root domain file is a task done autonomously.
As for the rest of ICANN, pretty much all it does is set policy for the DNS, and arbitrate disputes, etc.
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Now, for what should be done with ICANN, the solution is simple.
Split out the IANA as a separate entity under the direct oversight of the IAB, as a group under the ISOC, but not a component of the IETF.
Change the IANA's function to be purely a registry, publishing lists of assignments made by other parties.
Assign the responsibility for assignment of IP address ranges to the IAB. (My understanding is that the IAB is effectively already responsible for those assignments).
Create a fourth significant ISOC organization (Other than the IETF, IRTF, and IANA per above), under the oversight of the IAB. This organization would take the role of setting policy for the DNS, effectively performing all functions of the current ICANN, except those the IANA.
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So rather than hand ICANN over to the EU or UN, we hand it over to an existing international organization who is already effectively in charge of the Internet, the ISOC, who breaks it into two separate pieces, and incorporates it into its organizational structure in the usual fashion.
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Acronyms:
ICANN - Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
IETF - the Internet Engineering Task Force
IAB - the Internet Architecture Board
IESG - the Internet Engineering Steering Group
IRTF - the Internet Research Task Force
IRSG - the Internet Research Steering group
ISOC - the Internet Society
RFC - "Request For Comments"
For a more detailed description of those terms see RFC 2860
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
Yep. The US created the internet. If you want to be the ultimate authority, or let a group of countries have a consensus over a network--go create your own damn Internet.
I know I'll get modded troll, but here goes.
An interesting idea (that will never happen in practice) would be to mirror all the DNS data that's only stored in the US, and probably the RFCs too, then (from the non-US side) drop all packets crossing the US/non-US border.
There we go, now we have our own Internet. What's that, US? You want on it?
I hope it doesn't happen (all my cool shit is in the US). But in case US really becomes too much a problem for everyone else, there's the solution.
Imagine the nightmares when both sides allocate IP addresses previously used by the other side, and the networks have to be merged again...
Speculation: oh the fun! :)
The government-issued arms and ammunition would have been the preferred choice, but millions of old .30-30 deer rifles and .45-70 buffalo/elk guns could have been pressed into service at an instant.
And you don't think that fighting such an action would result in higher casualties than the neat set-piece battles we got to fight on the Western Front? The battles that we fought with full benefit of aerial supremacy, attacks on the rear area Axis logistical network and an Ally to the East that had already been bleeding the German Army for three years?
I'm a big fan of the "rifle behind every blade of grass" concept but I don't think for a moment that it wouldn't have been every bit as desperate and bloody as the Eastern Front was.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.