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An Argument For Leaving DNS Control In US Hands

Posted by timothy on from the no-let's-give-it-to-the-UN's-human-rights-council dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Ariel Rabkin has a piece over at News Corp.'s Weekly Standard arguing that the US should maintain its control over the Internet. After reading his piece, I have a hard time arguing that it should be handed over to some international body."

4 of 607 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Seriously? by Quiet_Desperation · · Score: 5, Informative

    You mean the guy who created HTML (based on a lot of previous work by many others) and had complete boo to do with the hardware side, which came from ARPANet?

    Look, nothing against Tim Berners-Lee, but I keep seeing this growing meme that he somehow fathered the entire blessed Internet.

  2. Re:Seriously? by weicco · · Score: 4, Informative

    There's alot more to internet than "a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet" and in fact, Tim Berners-Lee's system wouldn't work without the internet. I would say you are partly right about this since WWW (or Internet Explorer) is what the public sees as "the internet" and you are partly wrong because TFA talks about DNS which has basis in ARPAnet.

    --
    You don't know what you don't know.
  3. TBL didn't create internet, USA/ARPA did in 1958 by helpacoder · · Score: 5, Informative

    The USA created ARPA in Febuary 1958 in resonse to the launch of Sputnik by the USSR on October 4, 1957.

    The inter-computer transport medium that eventually became 'the internet' of today was tested successfully on October 29, 1969 and was named ARPAnet.

    (Sir) Tim Berners-Lee conceived the World Wide Web, in March 1989. He tested it successfully on 'the internet' on 25 December 1990.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee

  4. Re:Seriously? by Jay+L · · Score: 4, Informative

    The reason the Internet protocols won out over AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, et al is because if you were signed up with AOL and I was signed up with Prodigy we couldn't send each other email. The Internet was a standard that everyone could sign up to without having to pay licensing fees to someone else.

    Nope; I think the GP has it exactly right. AOL had Internet e-mail by 1991, as well as X.400 gateways (for MCI, I think?), SprintMail/Telemail, a fax gateway, a U.S. postal mail gateway, and some others. Licensing wasn't an issue at all; development time was the only bottleneck, since AOL's proprietary mail system didn't map well onto most of the interoperable standards.

    AOL got USENET and FTP in 1994, but only through a server-side gateway. Native Web browsing (using the client-integrated BookLink browser) came along a year or two later, and it was anything but a sure win; browsing over slow dialup links was painful, especially as IMG tags became widespread. Our proprietary P3 protocol made things even worse, with overhead that duplicated functions in TCP, and an architecture that made lightweight back-and-forth roundtrips (as in HTTP/1.0) horribly slow. We ran the first large-scale caching proxies, and the infamous .JPG-to-.ART graphics recompression servers, and only then was dialup web browsing tolerable.

    Meanwhile, the smartest minds at Johnson-Grace came up with a truly elegant solution: a format called ARTDOC. It contained all the information you'd see in a web page today - video, audio, graphics, text - and a "choreography" that would render each part at the desired timing. It was designed to let you pre-author media for specific modem speeds, and it was sent in a single stream so the client could progressively render it at any baud rate. Everything was compressed to within an inch of its life. It was gorgeous, and it offered capabilities that even today would require Flash or something similar, yet it ran on the slow PCs and servers of the day. HTML couldn't come close.

    If the web's popularity had been delayed by a year or two, we'd probably all be running ARTDOC browsers.