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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!
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.
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.
The time to take control away from someone is -before- they abuse the power, not after
... at least you know that domain name control will be immediately perverted by special interests and tyrants, instead of wondering if it might be, by a country with better free speech standards than pretty much anywhere else on the planet?
And giving it to the UN, which regularly demonstrates its embrace of corruption at every level of its bureaucracy and finances, is better because
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
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.
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.
Why is that fair and right? Looking at it from a moral standpoint rather than a purely policy standpoint, the US created the internet, and has freely and openly allowed the rest of the world access to the technology. What moral reason does the world have to gain control? "We would make better owners of your property than you."?
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.
When it comes to "fair and right", the UN is usually a massive fail.
Then it's simple - have an international NGO mirror the root servers and at the first sign of any tomfoolery, announce that people should use their root servers. Bonus points if they can keep from censoring.
But if we're talking about fair and right, then it really should be handled by the UN rather than any single country.
Is that the same UN that always has its actions paralyzed by the US, China, France, UK, and Russia? The same UN that allows countries to send illiterate and untrained peace keeping troops in exchange for money? Or is it the one whose peacekeepers have a history of rape and murder? Or the one that's standing idly by while the Chechens are being slaughtered by Russia, the Palestinians being slaughtered by Israel, or the massacre in Darfur is going on?
I'm not saying the US is the shining example of what is right and good (torture, rendition, illegal wars, warrentless wiretapping). I'm just saying that the UN has its problems as well.
And yet WIPO arbitration is perfectly acceptable?
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!
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.
That's a very interesting suggestion. It sounds like you want thought police.
How about 'the time to punish someone is after they've done something wrong, or when in possession of ample evidence that they are in the process of doing something wrong.'
The notion that the UN is impartial is a far-fetched one, though perhaps no more than the notion that the US is. The article is making the case that, whatever US government's current agenda, they have thus far been apolitical, refusing to get involved in exactly the kind of murky questions that the UN loves to deal with. You don't hear the US going around threatening countries with which it has disagreements to pull the plug on their TLDs.
I'm no expert on the subject and would be happy to read an argument to the contrary, but I do accept the premise of Rabkin's thesis, which seems to be 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it.'
So let's a) see some cases where the IANA was in the wrong in such a manner that its status as subject to the Department of Commerce bears responsibility, and b) see some convincing evidence that the UN would do a better job.
The chief problem I would have arguing in favor of a UN solution (which, in theroy, I agree sounds like the best one) is that you cannot be 'impartial.' Deciding on cases of civil war or Taiwan vs. China cannot be done without value judgments. Obviously it's possible for any national government to make biased value judgments (one might even say that it's necessary some of the time) because they are elected/appointed/whatever to serve their own people. It just so happens that, in the case of the IANA, we've taken what appears to be a relatively hands-off approach where, rather than try and make impartial judgments on everything, we either don't make judgments (see TFA's comments on referring most matters to national courts) or make purely technical judgments.
Like anything else I'm sure there's room for improvement. I'm not convinced that the IANA or the US Department of Commerce deserve pre-emptive sacking just because they're the US DoC and IANA.
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.)
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.
Why is that fair and right? Looking at it from a moral standpoint rather than a purely policy standpoint, the US created the internet, and has freely and openly allowed the rest of the world access to the technology. What moral reason does the world have to gain control? "We would make better owners of your property than you."?
That's funny 'cause that is exactly how I read the current state of affairs. Sorry to break it you you sonny, but the US does not own the Internet. No one owns the Internet any more that anyone could own the air we breath. It is a common resource, and the US insisting on keeping control of it is an afront to the rest of the world. Look, the US, as every other country would still control their own country TLDs so all this worry about censorship is totally overblown. The US keeping control however will simply bread more resentment toward the US. Does the US really need that?
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.
> 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.
Well yes, the ITU doesn't like the fact that people can make phone calls over the internet, and it wants to stop that.
When we _all_ know that it was an American who did that.
Al Gore.
No, the US doesn't own the Internet, it just owns the rights to control the DNS servers that are currently used. Other countries are free to make their own DNS servers, or the UN can make its own DNS root. Let people choose what one they would like to use, or do a "first look at x, then y" style lookup.
I still don't see why the US owes anyone control of DNS.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
> The US keeping control however will simply bread more resentment toward the US.
It's part of a plan to collect a huge amount of resentment bread, then use that bread to feed the poor and bring about world peace. How can you be against that?
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.
The .xxx and .sex refusals were political, but in a grander sense than you indicated. The Bush administration didn't want them because it seemed as if it was giving a electronic blessing to smut (and mostly because the constituency that got them elected actually does hate smut). Some parents and filtering organizations speculated it would make porn easier to filter, and most of the porn industry opposed it because they believed they would ultimately be forced to move to such a domain, which would marginalize their businesses by shunting them off to an internet red-light district. All this debate is completely independent of what kind of content actually belongs in such a domain.
It failed for the political reason that pretty much no one actually wanted it.
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!
Look, the US, as every other country would still control their own country TLDs so all this worry about censorship is totally overblown.
No, it's not. Censorship is alive and well all over the world, and there are many governments who would love to excercise censorship beyond their own borders.
Here's a question: if we give the UN control over the DNS system, what happens to Taiwan's TLD? You only have to look at the last Olympics to know how China views Taiwan, they weren't allowed to compete as "Taiwan", they were "Chinese Taipei". If China had a say over which TLDs are allowed, the first thing they'll do is get rid of the .tw domain so that it is effectively censored worldwide. They can block access to .tw inside their own country now, but they don't have a way to block access to Taiwan websites inside the US or EU. That would change if the US gave the UN control of DNS. And that's only the most obvious example. I'm sure Russia would also appreciate the power if they could revoke Georgia's TLD the next time they decide to invade, by claiming that Georgia is part of Russia, or maybe they would set up a new South Ossetia TLD to bolster their claim that South Ossetia is not part of Georgia.
The only reason that it appears that censorship is not an imminent threat is because worldwide internet censorship is not being practiced. The reason that worldwide internet censorship is not being practiced is because the US controls the DNS system.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
The internet winning was not a certainty.
Six or twelve months delay in users being interested in the internet might have created a whole different future.
The users go where the content is.
If AOL and compuserv, and all the giants of old had gotten their own protocols/content built a _little_ faster than they had, then the exponential factor of the internets growth starts out much lower, or even negative.
In 1999, we could fairly easily have (IMO) seen a slower accepted gopher-with-pictures, and lack of Al Gores pushing of the funding of the eary internet having lead to the internet being a network used by some educational establishments, as a continuing research project, with buisnesses increasingly having presences on Aoluserv.
Look at for example what happened in france, with minitel - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel - it held its own well into the late 90s.
The web - helped the internet to win - although admittedly it came rather late in the game, and was among the final nails in the proprietory networks.
To be fair, the UN is completely unrelated to the Olympics, which is run by the International Olympic Committee. You can't really use the failings of the IOC to attack the UN.
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...
You're partly right, the US doesn't own the internet. The US does, however, own the DNS servers which most people on the internet choose to rely on. Why does the US own them, well it was DARPA who went through the initial trouble to get the whole thing running and then it worked it's way over to the hands of the US Department of Commerce who contracted ICANN to run the whole thing.
Now, why should the USDOC hand them off? If other countries are really that worried about the US using them as some sort of club, it's actually pretty easy to setup alternative DNS servers. As a matter of fact, if you don't like ICANN's handling of DNS, you can always turn to an alt root. To be blunt, if the UN is really that hot to run DNS on the internet, there is nothing stopping them from setting up a set of UN alt roots and offering them to the world as an alternative to ICANN. The competition between ICANN and the UN would probably be good overall. But then, there I go with the boorish US, let the free market decide mantra.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
Just also please note, it's not just an American writing in an American magazine... it is a Rightwing Nationalistic American writing in a Rightwing Nationalistic Magazine.
I just want to point out that none of that changes the meaning of his words. It would be pretty disingenuous to immediately discount an argument simply because of the source, without taking the argument into consideration at all.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
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.
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 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
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.
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.
Yet in spite of the issues with the US and online gambling, the US-controlled DNS does not exclude online gambling web sites. Go figure.
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.
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!