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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."
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
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.
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.
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.
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.'"
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!
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.
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.
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!
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.
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!