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An Argument For Leaving DNS Control In US Hands
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."
Do we really want the internet domain system to turn into a larger bureaucracy fuckfest? Let anyone who has a problem come up with their own competing DNS hierarchy, a la OpenDNS.
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
Referencing isolated examples of Internet-related free-speech limitations somehow constitutes proof that America is the only country that can manage digital freedom?
We're talking about a country that can't handle a Justin Timberlake exposing an elderly lady's breast on TV.
Subject says it all; The very concept of name resolution would seem to require centralization, but I'm just praying that there's someone out there who is sufficiently smarter than me to have figured it out or sufficiently well-informed that they know of some potential solution, yet who is bored enough to be here to tell me about an alternative.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's interesting that a lot of fiction scenarios assumed that the global network would be completely decentralized.. and therefore not subject to anyone's control. This utopian illusion is fading away.. because in reality the global network is just a series of cables, and yes, they pass over political borders. I think it is pretty inevitable that the global network we take for granted is going to change drastically, as every country attempts to enforce their particular political and moral stance on the information passing over their borders into their country. It is quite likely that in the not too distant future the internet will be quite a different experience from continent to continent, nevermind from one country to another.. it's already happening..
"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." George Bernard Shaw
Do I want it taken away from us? Heck no. We hold all the power in this area right now. But if we're talking about fair and right, then it really should be handled by the UN rather than any single country.
Well, he's afraid of censorship--at least after reading the first page and scanning the second that's what I gather. Specifically something like a Muslim nation or organization forcing domains with "Mohammad" in them to be automatically rejected or some such nonsense.
That said, he conveniently ignores any attempts for it to happen in the US. And on top of that he doesn't have a real grasp on how actual country by country censorship works today. I mean, it's happening in Thailand occasionally with blocking YouTube on the ISP level or last week with Facebook in Iran. I mean, those things should be done at the ISP level with local law enforcement to stop it.
I say if we hand it over we do so on the condition that certain things stay the way they are. One being that you can't censor a domain but you can allow country by country to force their ISPs to obey whatever stupid law their government enforces. Let their constituents complain.
No one has presented to me a definite argument one way or the other.
My work here is dung.
So what about the International Telecommunication Union? Has the ITU ever had any political disputes that were leveraged over a certain party?
It seems to me (though my perspective is limited) that the telephone network is pretty well internationally compatible. And on the topic of politicization, what ever happened to the .sex or .xxx domain? I thought that was a great example of politic butting its nose into the internet.
The Internet should be administered by an international body.
Here's an alternative; move all the existing three letter TLDs under .us, and give each country control of their country-code TLD. Why should the USA have any say as to what happens under, say, China's TLD?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
But if we're talking about fair and right, then it really should be handled by the UN rather than any single country.
No. It should be handled by an organization with a demonstrable history of not fucking things up in the name of censorship. Unfortunately, such a beast does not exist, and insofar as the "choose the lesser of the evils" mantra goes, your country seems to be doing a solid job.
Oh god, that woman is John Romero!
To add to those complaints with an economic one, why should it be that registration fees for .com, .net, .org and friends should be funnelled into the US economy? There have been many complaints about the monopoly powers effectively granted to the keepers of .com from within the US. (And no, .com is not a US-specific domain. .us is.)
Maybe they'll even come to realize that the US wasn't so bad after all, in spite of our flaws.
No, most of us who routinely "bash" the US know that already.
Where people such as yourself get confused is when we reply to some typical asshat who, perspective-free, claims some kind of superiority, either real or imagined, like those who subscribe to whatever warped "Manifest Destiny" meme is floating around the jingosphere at any given time.
Then there's also the relative of your own comment, which will get "bashing" responses. Something along the lines of "Well, we're pretty awesome/the bad guys are doing it, so why can't we kill/torture/invade once in a while?"
And that's part of the price of being "the best": You're held to a higher standard than everybody else and any slip ups are much more visible.
Ain't life lonely at the top?
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
If USA were truly pro-free speech they would of permitted the implementation of .sex and .xxx namespaces.
Its nothing to do with what I think about porn, it has a practical use that allows people to quickly identify with the subject matter and to allow software to classify it as so.
The conservative government simply did not want this to happen, and they have successfully lobbied hard to stop these practical namespaces to be implemented.
Creating an Internet wasteland of "filth" may have some merit, but I highly doubt it will lead to an increase in people watching it. Most large, modern cities have "saucy" areas, but just because they are there doesn't mean every citizen visits everyday.
I still believe this process needs to be apolitical as noted, without government intervention - its the only way. I do not accept that the US has a higher ground than other forward thinking countries in this matter.
There is a financial side to this that Europe particularly and the World in general likes to ignore.
The US taxpayer paid for this Internet and though it wouldn't be as important as it is now without World participation it is still owned by the US taxpayer.
If it were in the interest of the US taxpayer I could see distribution of parts of the Internet but I doubt it would be now. Many of the new recipients would most assuringly demand that the US foot the bill in integrating their DNS schemes.
Europe, the third World, China, whomever can demand all they want but the fact is they do not own it and have not paid for it and it is doubful they will want to pay a fair price to have it...
> Let anyone who has a problem come up with their own competing DNS hierarchy, a la OpenDNS.
Erm, OpenDNS has nothing to do with this. OpenDNS uses the existing root servers - the existing hierarchy - for name resolution. Then, they apply big blacklists and transformations to the bulk of the data. Typing in a slightly wrong domain will be auto corrected and bounced to the proper domain, "bad" domains (malware, etc) are blocked, and questionable content can be filtered.
(In fact, it is these very same practices that have got quite a few ISPs in trouble with their customers. Verisign pulled the same stunt with the .com TLD some time ago, and caught unbelievable crap for it. Why some people love OpenDNS but hated on Verisign for that I'll never know or understand.)
It has NOTHING to do with root DNS control. It depends upon the existing infrastructure, and does little more than sanitize it. They don't handle domain registrations, TLD management/control, and they don't manage authoritative nameservers for their customers domains.
They are, in fact, not a competitor in any form, but instead they are quite dependent upon what we already have in place. This has absolutely nothing to do with OpenDNS in any reasonable way I can think of. They are absolutely not a "DNS hierarchy" as you would imply.
There's A LOT more to the internet than just looking at web pages, I hope you know. And as far as HTTP goes, there already was a similar protocol gopher which preceded it. Had html + http not come along, it seems likely gopher would be expanded to fill the gaps the web later did.
Because the rest of the world doesn't trust us. And understandably so. Not because we're bad, but because we're powerful and out of their control. This is why many people are so angry about the warrantless wiretaps, because it is a powerful force out of the population's control. Sure, it may be being used for good today, but you have no guarantees about the future. DNS control is in the hands of the US government, which indirectly puts it in the hands of the US voting public. And as best they can tell, we're all insane. (It's fair, though. I look at their elections and conclude they're all insane, too.) So, the rest of the world sees the potential for abuse by an entity entirely out of their control. So they want to try and establish control. This is not unreasonable on their part.
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Let's say I invent a doorbell system to a large office building, 2,000 offices. There is a panel to type in the office number (1523), the press the doorbell, and the door bell rings in office 1523.
Since some people may not remember what office everyone is in, I decide to be nice and make a directory that I hang on the wall next to the panel, listing name and office number.
40 years later, I'm still taking care of the directory, but a group of offices decide they want a committee to run the directory and tell me to stop working on it and let them do it. I let them know they're free to make their own directory, but I want to make sure my 500 offices that I own are updated in the style I prefer. I will also continue to make updates to the other 1,500 offices that ask for changes to be made.
They get mad, and claim I'm being unfair.
So, by your definition, I'm the bad guy?
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
The internet as we know now is already the "renegade internet", that's why it became so successful in the first place. I left France to come to the United States in 1987. By the time I left France, almost every French household had a network computer in it. It was called the Minitel and one year it was handed out for *free* instead of phone books. When I say this to Americans, I'm not even sure they can imagine the massive scale of what I'm talking about.
In any case, my point is that at least, some countries had their chance at building the internet (as we know it now), and in the case of France they can at least claim an extremely high penetration rate -- with an extremely rich set of features -- very early on, but the thing is that France completely messed up their own efforts in that regard.
The Minitel was centralized. People could develop on its network, and they could make money on it, but before they could publish anything -- they had to get permission. It was very much like publishing an app for the iPhone. The French government had done a great job, it had invested a great deal of money, but it just couldn't let go of wanting to control everything. You can rest assured that if they had been willing to let go, just a little bit, it would have become the Internet at the time -- dominating the arpanet (but they simply chose not to go that route). And still to this day (I am french by the way) French politicians talk of controlling the Internet, censoring it, banning people from it, etc. -- all for the good of the people of course, but not clearly understanding what the Internet is really about.
So as a French citizen, I say no. Don't do it. The Internet grew out of a fertile soil. It could have grown elsewhere, but didn't. Transplanting its roots now could potentially cause some irreparable damage. Do not take the risk.
That's an interesting example. In trying to show how the US wants to censor, you give 3 pieces of legislation that did not succeed because they did not pass constitutional muster. 3 examples of things politicians wanted to see happen, but upon closer examination, before they had a chance to get implemented, cooler, more sane heads prevailed.
Politicians might want to censor this or that, but that doesn't mean their proposals get put into law. That's sort of the point we're talking about here, that the US does not go out and immediately censor something, it takes a lot of discussion and convincing to advance something like that. I'm not saying that won't change in the next few years with our RIAA friends doing the deciding, or with the lovely confidential copyright and trade agreements being worked on, but the past has shown that, with the possible exception of the Patriot Act, the US doesn't have a habit of blindly rushing into legislation that's going to result in censorship.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Unfortunately (for the US), it'll be in restrospect, because China or some other eastern or mideastern country will rule the world.
They won't rule the world anymore than the United States currently rules the world or the UK ruled it a few decades ago. They will be an economic force to be reckoned with and will have the military might to back up their interests but we'll still be the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Democracy has seen pretty dark times before and managed to survive. And that was before the advent of nuclear deterrence. I don't think we are going anywhere.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
"For example, if the UN had control right now they would probably already have taken North Korea off the internet, along several other "undesirable" countries."
No, they wouldn't. The UN is like a game of chess in the position of a stalement. And vote that has severe negative ramification for one country is most likely vetoed by the UN security council thus creating international powerblocks. For example, North Korea is under the umbrella of big brother China who will veto any negative resolution about NK, you can check the books on that.
"Notice that despite the political climate, the US has not used DNS to take action against Iraq, Iran, China, North Korea, or any other country."
Well duh. "Disconnecting" other countries has no significant advantage in these cases since other countries either tiny in comparison(Iraq), touchy(Iran with possible nukes) and juggernauts themselves(China). With that comes the fact that if the US would ever try such a thing, the internet would most likely fork because of the (justified) fear of total US control over the internet.
It's like the powers of Queen Elizabeth II. Sure, she has a lot of powers but the second she would try to use them, all hell would break lose.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
And since Americans were giving up civil liberties left and right for a while there (Patriot Act et al), are we sure they'd say boo about anything else being censored on the internet?
Is anyone else going to, besides the US? Britian in particular seems to be hell-bent on censoring and monitoring everything they can. Germany censors quite a bit based on sensitivities. Turkey attacks anything they find insulting, similar to Muslim nations. I'm not trying to claim that the US does not censor anything, but which government or organization is going to hold civil liberties and rights to a higher standard than the US?
It's hard to ask that question and not sound like a douche, I'm really not trying to toot our own horn (I'm well aware of our Bush-era image), I just think that the US has a better history with regard to the preservation of civil liberties (and a better technical understanding of the internet) than any other organization that would be considered to replace our role.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
The UN? Home of the Human Rights Council lead by Yemen that wants to globally censor any criticism of Islam (see the anti-blasphemy resolution 62/154)? The same UN that elected Sudan, home of the Darfur ethnic cleansing, to a human rights commission?
Also the same UN that has the USA, initiator of the most wars for six decades in a row, in its security council.
It's this arrogance of yours that makes us dirty foreigners want to take control of stuff away from you, even if - so far - you've not abused it. You're abusing enough other stuff, and all the while you seem to think that you should decide what's best for everyone else. If anyone else would show you the same attitude, you'd be furious.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org