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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."
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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
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 ?
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.
Each country already has control over its own TLD. They don't have to deal with the US-based root DNS servers if they don't want to. For example, if it's such a big deal, then the other countries are more than capable of setting up their own root DNS system and simply ignoring the American-run one.
This would end up being a pretty bad deal, at least initially. IF other countries really want a non-US controlled DNS system, then the solution is not to move that control to another country or an International body. The solution is to devise & implement a fully distributed DNS system where the TLD's server in each country operate in a peering setup. Something kind of like how BGP currently works.
Short of that, moving the root control isn't going to change anything. In addition, pretty much all the International bodies out there have a pretty bad habit of punishing other countries over political events. 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. 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. Notice that we did not step into the whole "cyber war" that Russia got involved in.
That is of course, when it is Americans who are adversely affected by the decisions.
If you changed the word "Americans" to "International Business interests", "Foreign political influence", or "Anyone with enough money" then yes, you would be correct. If you really think that decisions regarding DNS take the American public into account at all, then you are sorely mistaken, & I would suggest you take off the rose-colored glasses.
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
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.