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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.
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.)
> 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.
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.
"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.