Slashdot Mirror
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."
Well, there is one thing to be said about US control of DNS. Any and all attempts to change the system will be met with years of suits, counter-suits and legal quagmires of the n^th degree before such changes can even be discussed.
That is of course, when it is Americans who are adversely affected by the decisions.
May the Maths Be with you!
Analogy time:
"We don't see any problem without our accountant writing and signing all the checks because we've never had a problem with it before. They're perfectly trustworthy, and so much better than -unknown entity- probably is!"
The time to take control away from someone is -before- they abuse the power, not after. If there's a world-wide organization that can impartially handle this, and handle it well, then it should be done by them. UN was suggested, and while they are weak, they are the strongest international organization I know of that is supposed to be impartial.
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.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Actually there have been complaints about how ICANN has run things including some cases where there were disputes about who was the rightful group to handle CC TLDs. In some cases ICANN used these disputes to gain leverage over the parties running the affected CC TLDs.
The guy who wrote the article clearly hasn't done his homework.
Why mess with what is working? Honestly, the US has shown no real heavy hand in managing DNS, why break it now?
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Whoa. Godwinned in only three posts.
Wow, a Godwin-First-Post hybrid. The force is strong in this one.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
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.
I have a hard time seeing how the arguments convince anyone other than Americans that it is a good idea. It is a self praising article on how good the US is written by an American in an American magazine.
If the US did not have control of DNS then would the arguments convince anyone to hand the control to the US? No.
We're generally impartial and if we ever make a mistake we'll apologize for it.
Actually, even if the mistake isn't our fault, we'll apologize anyway. That's the Canadian way.
It would give some international body actual enforcement power over something. Up until now they only have the power of rhetoric and proclamation (even if they are "binding"). This would create a mechanism for them to actually enforce penalties against non-complying (insert blank here). Given that the international relations are always (by definition) nothing but politics, this would have almost immediate chilling effects on free speech on the Internet.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
I dunno... Coast Guard?
The article makes vague speculation about what could potentially happen but neglects to consider that it is the US's ball to hand off.
So if the US wants certain terms (e.g. Freedom of Speech) met when it hands it to an international body they have the leverage to get it.
As far as the "US has never done anything bad with domain names" thing that is bull. The current system basically gives any company with enough money any domain they want and let's not forget the insane anti-gabling domain grab recently.
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.'"
The Internet should be administered by an international body.
I understand that many Americans want to keep their hands on the project their country invented and advanced, for security or productivity reasons, but the Internet has been so successful because of the international networking it helped achieve.
Otherwise here in the EU we would have used the French standard and I would have posted a similar silly post to the "La BarreObliqueDot"...
"Sum Ergo Cogito"
Wow, a Godwin-First-Post hybrid. The force is strong in this one.
No. That's not the force. That's just a greased up Yoda doll pressing on his brain.
If there's any kind of central control point in a global architecture, then it's not truly global. Any single governing body (or even a group) will be controlled or dominated by at least one country. Then it becomes a national architecture. I'm all for a different solution, where the industrial model gets broken down and a web of trust gets established. Sure there are issues with a web of trust, but they can be solved with time and money.
I'm personally surprised that there isn't more issue with BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) and it's dominance over the network of networks. I think there's a lot more direct and immediate control there than with DNS.
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
Wow a comparison to Hitler, I don't really think you know your history.
Well, say what you will about Hilter but I don't think you can make the claim that he was in bed with RIAA ;)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Great summary, too bad I have no mod points left.
As for the original one:
After reading his piece, I have a hard time arguing that it should be handed over to some international body.
Either the submitter can't read, or he's completely devoid of critical sense.
The United States could, in theory, set up a renegade, uncensored Internet. But there would likely be significant public distrust, substantial political acrimony, and a great deal of hesitation. We are better off keeping the public Internet free and leaving the social and technical burdens on governments that want to censor. The present system is thus perhaps the best way to prevent the naming system from being used to chill online speech worldwide.
The only problem with his morass of assumptions about freedom is that America does want to censor the internet.
A long time ago Feinstein tried to ban bomb making instructions on the internet, then there was the Communications Decency Act (unconstitutional), followed by the Child Online Protection Act (unconstitutional), ending with Children's Internet Protection Act which the Supreme Court eventually declared Constitutional because it was vastly narrower than its predecessors.
There's other legislation I'm leaving out, but you get the idea.
/And God helps us all if the **AA's of the world get their way.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
TFA raises a valid point but overstates the case. ICANN's work is indeed politicized, and one need look no further than the disparate fates of the .sex and .info TLDs to see that. On the other hand, it's hard to believe that something run by the U.N. would be any better.
In reality, though, DNS has lost much of its original importance. This becomes clear when you consider that all but a handful of Alexa's top 20 sites have names that have no real connection to the business. They're just rarely used words that lack much meaning in everyday life (Google, Amazon) or entirely made up (wikipedia, ebay). There are already alternative public root servers, and while these lack popularity, it shows how easy it would be for a distributed naming system to gain a foothold.
The real outcome of handing the rootservers over to an international committee would be to hasten the day when there is no longer one unified DNS, a day we'll probably see before too long anyway.
Just google the .xxx extension and why we don't have it yet. Seriously and I know this will offend some people, but the internet and the DNS is of too much importance to be in the hands of 1 party. What if the USA goes berserk, something that from an European point of view is totally possible, and they pull the plug? They should not have this power in the first place.
In my humble opinion, and briefest experience observing politics, I've typically noticed that when something changes, its for the worst. It is in the name of agenda, abuse, and grabs for power. I'm not saying that the US should run it, but I have a feeling that anyone else who runs it would do a worse job. United Nations? I've not heard of them doing anything meaningful in the last 20-30 years. At any rate, I doubt they'd have the teeth to run it successfully? Maybe the EU? Probably not. They make draconian laws serving interests other than that of their subjects, and then have problems enforcing them. (Which is not always a bad thing). Maybe we should try giving it to another country outright? Rules out Australia, with their 'decide-to-censor-off-and-on-based-on-the-whims-of-the-day' mentality. Germany too. Last I heard they were on the censorship bandwagon. There are other countries that don't censor that might seem like a good idea, being fairly impartial and not arbitrarily declaring war on abstract concepts, but you can't trust that they wont serve their (lobbyists) best interests at the detriment of the world. Moral of my story: When picking between two evils, pick the known one. You can at least imagine how far they will fall.
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
You obviously dont know about "Hitler Yodels the Classics" from EMI. Theres a number of Top 20 hits on there including "Blitzkrieg for you my love" and the ever popular "Gassing Jews in the rain". Available from all good retailers.
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.
It's an opinion piece. Conservatives are allowed to express opinions too.
Some of the opinions in the piece are interesting, e.g. the danger of politicizing TLD issues and the good track record of US management.
Some of them are stating the obvious, e.g. that any government or international body can set up its own DNS.
Some of them are silly, like the reason that the US invented the Internet is that the government leaves telecom to private industry. Of course the opposite is just as silly, that the Internet as we know it is purely a government creation.
There is no single reason the US created the Internet. You can point to a number of things, like the fact we spent such a huge amount of money on defense. In terms of national values that might have contributed to the creation of the Internet, I think our great strength is a kind of dynamic between public and private Interests. A nation with a government run on strict laissez-faire economic principles would never have invented the Internet; nor would a command economy. It started with the government doing something unprofitable, but in the public interest, and it took off when in the public interest the government let private interests use it.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
> 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.
Nope, I can't see anything wrong here. Everything is as it should be. Move along, citizens.
Internet domain names (such as www.google.com) are managed hierarchically. At the top of the hierarchy is an entity called IANA, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, operated on behalf of the Commerce Department.
Not correct. ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is under contract to DOC. ICANN has two components: control of the DNS root and control of the IANA. IANA, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority deals only with numbers: IP addresses, protocol numbers, AS numbers, port numbers, etc. IANA is almost completely unrelated to the DNS.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
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.
I either misunderstand your point, or you greatly misunderstand OpenDNS.
I'm no expert on DNS infrastructure, but I do understand the basics. OpenDNS appears to be a "free (beer)" set of DNS servers, not an "alterate DNS hierarchy." OpenDNS conisders the same machine names authoritative for .com, .net, .org, etc., that everybody else does-- which is, of course, the infrastructure this article is talking about.
If that's not the case, please explain-- and I'll be sure to be using a different set of DNS servers tomorrow.
Who is RTFM and when will he help me with Unix?
The time to take control away from someone is -before- they abuse the power, not after.
So innocent until assumed to be guilty at some unspecified later date? Awesome!
UN was suggested, and while they are weak, they are the strongest international organization I know of that is supposed to be impartial.
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?
Weak? You jest! Why when the specter of genocide appears on the Earth, the UN rushes in an observer who stridently and immediately issues a report! Take that, evil doers!
Give control to France.
They'll surrender control to the first party who asks nicely.
(Sorry. Just kidding. I have seen the crosses. Sadly, I can't remember all the names on them.)
How the hell did it get all the way up there?
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
From 1986 to 1999 it was run autonomously. Sure the US paid for it (15K/yr as a part time project) but whatever Jon Postel decided was fine. Jon would measure the consensus of the net and implement it. During this time the DNS went from 0 to 250+ TLDS.
When the US government assumed oversight in the period 2000 to now 10 new tlds were created at a cost of nearly a billion dollars. And the registration process for .com became the most inept sleezy shit ever seen on the net.
"The US" or "another country" or group of countries is not the answer.
The dns should be administered by the poeple that know what they're doing in terms os techical, legal and social policies and governments of the world has zero say in this.
The internet is not some "thing" that needs to be administered. It is not a public resource!
There are millions of private networks and we all agree to use TCP/IP and DNS to interoperate. Not one bit of it is a puboic resource. It's all privatly owned. You own your bit, I own my bit. Do we really want some government telling us how we use our computers and what we can do and can't do?
The USG and ICANN are the worst things that ever happebed to the net. They stagnated it as a single point of failure by having a choke hold on the A-ROOT of the legacy DNS.
There are better and more appropriate ways.
Need Mercedes parts ?
"On that note he was never in bed with Microsoft either, much to the chagrin of many Slashdot readers..."
IBM, on the other hand...
While you can never have a totally decentralized, as in each client on the Internet is equal, thing you can have it so there are multiple authorities at each level, each responsible for their own little slice. That's already the case with DNS at the low level. Your DNS servers are the absolute authority for your computers. Whatever they say, goes. If you don't like an answer they get from somewhere else, you can change their configuration to override that. However they are the authority only for those that choose to use them. They aren't the authority for me, I don't use them.
Now going up the chain you get to the top which is the root zone, which ICANN controls. The reason it is authoritative for most of the Internet is because it is what the root-servers.net roots trust and most DNS servers trust them. What it does is specify who is authoritative for a given domain. So for .ca it points to the CIRA's servers, as an example. What could happen is the root zone could be split. Different organizations would maintain different parts of it, and then the roots would use those to determine who is authoritative for what domain.
So the proper response to the US's control isn't to whine, it is to make your own. The EU should form EUCANN. Get that running, initially just mirroring the ICANN root zone, get your own root servers up and running that trust EUCANN. Then, contact ICANN about splitting the zone. They take the EU part, ICANN keeps the rest. The US might be amenable to that. Now repeat that process for all sorts of different regions. Have a bunch of top level organizations, each responsible for small parts of DNS space that then give their changes to others and run their own roots.
You'd end up with a system that no one person/country was in charge of. You'd also end up with a system that if one person flipped out, it wouldn't matter to the rest. Let's say that ICANN goes nuts and decides to get rid of all domains but .us and .com. Ok fine, well the other organizations would just ignore their changes. The roots that trusted ICANN would do as they wanted, but the other roots would not. ISPs could then use the non-broken root servers. The damage could be routed around.
The problem is that's not what the international community wants. They want the US to hand over control of infrastructure they built, so that the UN or someone like that can have central control. They don't want to have a system where they have control over their area, they want to be able to control other people too.
After reading his piece, I have a hard time arguing that it should be handed over to some international body.
That's because, like him, you're a nationalist xenophobe.
I mean, the argument boils down to this: America has the First Amendment, therefore we are the only entity capable of not censoring the internet via withholding access to an arbitrary (though ubiquitously popular) namespace. The insinuation is that other countries do not have the First Amendment and therefore, all of them collectively would present the possibility of such (questionably effective) censorship.
Well, how does this argument stand up against the real (though non-American and therefore unreliable) world? Let's take the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights:
Article 19.
* Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Well, that's just a UN Resolution with no binding effect, and only reflects a general sense of the body rather than something they all commit to, right? As Rabkin says, "Most countries lack our First Amendment tradition." Well, let's take the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, a treaty that 150 countries signed 30 years ago:
Article 19
1. Everyone shall have the right to hold opinions without interference.
2. Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice.
But none of these statements ensuring freedom of speech compare to the sheer Holy Writ that is the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Many other First World countries already have government-imposed restrictions on Internet speech that we would not contemplate here.
Because the United States has never, ever, ever, contemplated restrictions on free speech, proving just how trustworthy we are with the world's speech. Of course, Rabkin does not offer any specific examples of un-contemplatable restrictions on speech imposed by other First World nations, nor does he bother to prove the point that the U.S. has never done anything similar (because he can't).
Nor is he at all concerned with people in other countries who may also enjoy free speech, including speech that isn't legal in the United States -- the compelling need is not to ensure the freedom of the world's people, but as he makes clear: "If we wish to protect the free speech rights of Americans online, we should not allow Internet domain names to be hostage to foreign standards." Aha! It's the bogeyman of "foreign standards", which all good Americans rightly fear, because they are all, by virtue of being foreign, simply inferior to our own standards (whatever they may be).
But what disgusts me most about Rabkin's screed is that someone capable of putting his name on something so baseless, undefensible, xenophobic, fear-mongering, and full of straw-man arguments, was accepted to a doctoral program, and printed in a major magazine. Of course, it's The Standard, what did I expect? Not well-thought out global technology pieces, that's for sure.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
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
Your point that the US is hardly a sterling example of protecting civil rights is valid. However, that doesn't change the fact that the US does have much more robust protections of free speech than many, many other countries, including some that outdo us in other areas of civil rights. European countries, partly in an attempt to protect the rights of minorities, generally have much harsher laws concerning "hate speech" and libel than the US, and most non-European countries routinely censor content they deem to be against the interest of the ruling parties. I'm as appalled at some of the recent US actions as anyone. They're a shame and an embarrassment to a country that is supposed to be "...the land of the free..." But I don't doubt that the article is spot on that US control results in a much freer Internet than would be the case under an international overseer.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
it was ... forced?
Sorry I just could not resist.
Honestly, I'm not sure how the parent got modded flamebait, because I have to agree with that final point. The summary is entirely content-less, to the extent that *shock* I actually did have to RTFA, and all I can say is that I'm not impressed. Don't get me wrong, I can see where the article is coming from, but I do have to disagree with it. The arguments it presents are not particularly compelling, so if you're having a hard time arguing against it, all that tells me is that you're really not trying.
In fact, I'd even go so far as to say that the entire insight contained within the article can be summarised in a single sentence from its first paragraph: "America's special role in managing the Internet is good for America". That's it. I'm sure that reason is good enough for America, and I do have to admit that the Internet has been kinda ok under America's control so far, and for those reasons I don't expect the situation to change any time soon.
In spite of that though, the point I'm trying to make is that TFA did not make a give a single compelling reason for why America should have control of the internet. No, "because it does already" isn't a compelling argument. And contrary to what the summary (which, to reiterate, is utter crap) claims, TFA doesn't even mention international bodies. The article was trite and weak. The summary was not a summary by any meaningful definition of the term.
Santa's suicide mission go!