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The Politics of ICANN
dstates writes "The good news is that the Internet has become a central enough part of global life that politicians are starting to pay attention to the details of Internet management. The bad news is that the politicians are paying attention to the Internet. Politico.com has an interesting note on the politics surrounding the annual meeting of the The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers which is opening its annual meeting in San Francisco today. While some people find it frightening that a US corporation controls name usage on the Internet, the prospect of a UN body assuming control raises its own concerns."
U.S. uses roundabout excuses like copyright, terror, counterfeiting etc to censor stuff, u.n. body would directly censor stuff without excuse.
at least, we would see what is happening due to what reason, instead of them being hidden behind dubious excuses that 'free market' produces for censorship.
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If we were going to truly make things an internationalized standard, we'd be doing something like: .com, .org, etc would get phased out in favor of .us addresses.
1. Each country gets a 2-letter code in the UTF-8 character set, to be assigned by ISO standards.
2. Each country is solely responsible for what goes on within that 2-letter code.
3. Each country is responsible for maintaining root nameservers that resolve domains within their country code. If they want to put their country code on some other country's root nameservers, that's between those two countries, but one way or another that's the way it would need to work.
4. All tlds like
As far as I can tell, nobody's trying to do that, though.
I am officially gone from
Don't put all your eggs in one basket. It's an old adage that never seems to either go out of style or cease to be applicable.
Putting all of the Internet naming eggs in the US basket is dangerous. With the strange goings on in US politics of late, and with the abuse by DHS/ICE, I can only see bad things coming in the future if the international community doesn't step up to the plate and offer something better.
I really don't have too much of an issue with a UN controlled ICANN clone. It's not like they can screw it up more than a Republican controlled ICANN. THAT is the scariest part.
ICANN haz DNSnumber?
If absolute power corrupts absolutely, what does this say about renewable power?
The power belongs to whoever translates "mcdonalds" into "www.mcdonalds.com" when you type the former into your url bar / search box. That'd be browser writers (e.g. Google), search engine providers (e.g. Google) and "smart" DNS server providers (e.g. Google).
Whoever runs it has enormous power and will be assumed to be corrupt. There is no right answer. We just have to suck it up and accept that, at some level, the Internet is controlled by powerful people. The price of freedom is still eternal vigilance.
You know, honestly, I have nothing to say about this story, other than ICANN is a bunch of sonofabitches who should enjoy CO2 gas leaks while sleeping in their 5-star hotel rooms. So I'll just comment on the non-story story.
First of all, ICANN as a group is a bunch of people who should have CO2 let into their 5-star hotel rooms while they sleep. I will leave the explanation and justification of this to others who have had first-hand experiences at the hands of ICANN.
Secondly, after reading Wikipedia for so long, the words [citation needed] automatically appear in my head after a phrase like "While some people finding it frightening that a US corporation controls names usage on the Internet". Some people? Who are they, exactly? Can we get a quote from one of them? OMG IT'S AMERIKKKAN CORPRATION DROPPING DEMOCRACY BOMBS OMG RUN FOR THE HILLS MABEL. Come on, this isn't the New York Times here, we need fact-checking by objective observers.
"the prospect of a UN body assuming control raises its own concerns."
Damn straight it does. As much as I despise ICANN, it has never, to my knowledge, been accused of child abuse the way the United Nations has been (warning, the previous website may be blocked based on the human rights attitude of your country or your employer).
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
pls mod parent up.
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In principle it would be nice for the international community to handle this, but in practice official community bodies are hard to create.
How do you distribute control ? Would it be something like the security council where one vote from the big 5 is a veto ? Who decides who should be on this council ?
Or would it be something where everyone has a vote ? In that case how do you stop such a body from degenerating into something akin to the UN "human rights" council ?
So, let me get this straight. We're perfectly happy to have the ITU (which is a UN agency) in charge of international telephone calls, and we freak out when the US or any corporation tries to take control. But we're also perfectly happy to have ICANN (an unaccountable private corporation based in the US) in charge of domain names, and we freak out when the UN tries to take control.
Huh? Is it just a matter of knee-jerk response and "all change is bad," or is there something more to it than that?
For what it's worth, I think ICANN has been a disaster and something like ITU, or a new UN-sponsored agency, would be much better. We need a negotiated Internet equivalent of the ITRs, rather than the ad-hoc mess we have now.
As much as I despise ICANN, it has never, to my knowledge, been accused of child abuse the way the United Nations has been
Um, are you aware that your link is to an article about The Vatican being accused of child abuse at the UN Human Rights Council? Are you aware that no one is suggesting The Vatican take over ICANN's role?
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
u.s. smuggled drugs to fund civil wars to support u.s. friendly dictators, kidnapped people around europe, set up torture facilities in client countries.
u.s. record would go way over the head of libya and what they are doing.
Read radical news here
That article is about the UN accusing the Vatican of covering up child abuse, not the UN being accused of child abuse.
It's pretty ironic that you complain about foaming-at-the-mouth rants against the USA, all the while posting a foaming-at-the-mouth rant against the UN.
And on Slashdot, no less. Bashing the UN on this site? That must've taken a lot of courage.
CO2 isn't poisonous. Although in unusually large concentrations it might be.
...haz cheezburger?
Dude, You exhail CO2.
Perhaps you are thinking of something else.
the top-level domains should follow places that can, if they wish, define what qualifies a name. So, for example, Japan says you must be a registered company to have a .cp.jp domain, so these addresses are much more trustworthy. This also means it's clear who arbitrates a dispute, and under what rules. Using only UN-recognized country-codes as top-level domain names does not 'give the UN control', it gives people control through their governments (to the extent that they have control, but that's not an Internet question). Non-geographic TLDs are a bad idea -- unless you happen to be the corporation set to make money off them.
Let's not ruin the Internet with regulations and politics imposed by above. It's already a community, let it dictate it. Impossible, of course, in the world ruled by Big Money. Impossible unless deadly force is used.
Geeks are so full of shit that "beating the crap out of them" takes a whole new meaning.
The referenced article is somewhat incorrect - word is that the governments aren't asking for the power for one country to veto ICANN. But it may prove that the governments are doing what they do well - using euphemisms to cover harsh intent.
ICANN pulls about a $1,000,000,000 (one billion) USD every year out of the pockets of net users in the form of fiat "registry" feels, i.e. about $7 per name per year to Verisign. Given that we are paying this much to get so little, we do have a right to dig deeper into what this expensive organization is actually doing...
At the end of the article we hear an ICANN employee repeating ICANN's mantra that ICANN assures the stability of net identifiers.
That description is false.
ICANN spends 99%+ of its effort on matters that have no reasonable affect on the stability of domain names or IP addresses, that is unless one includes trademark protection into the definition of stability - which is something for national legislatures, not a private body that purports to promote technical stability.
There is a cure to the common ICANN - which is for people to construct competing, consistent DNS roots. Those would contain all of the top level domains that ICANN recognizes - and perhaps some boutique ones as well - but would be outside of the ICANN mandate.
The word "consistent" is important - it would be bad if people resolved names and got surprising answers (sort of like the bad Hungarian-English dictionary in the Monty Python Tobacconist sketch.)
There is no technical way to prevent people from setting up competing, consistent roots. Nor is it unlawful. And it is often done in stealth by ISP's, smart companies, or individual users. DNSSEC does not affect competing consistent roots, but will require them to have their own root keys (subsidiary TLD keys aren't affected.)
Recent events - political in North Africa and natural in Japan - suggest that having a local ability to establish a DNS root could be a valuable tools to help speed healing of net communications when the net is torn by those events.
Long ago I suggested to ICANN that they get a monthly report from every top level domain of the top 10% or 20% of the second level names by query volume. From that ICANN could produce a Knoppix-like DVD that could be booted up and would contain a pre-populated root server with the familiar TLDs and those top 10/20% of the names. That sort of thing could be used to help kick-start local communications recovery after a natural or human disaster. But ICANN said "no, not our job".
So you want to leave it with the guys that practice water boarding...
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
As much as I despise ICANN, it has never, to my knowledge, been accused of child abuse the way the United Nations has been.
Why do you use an article about how the Vatican are accused of child abuse as an example of how the UN are accused of child abuse?
My opinion is yes. It was a system that was never conceived to fairly handle millions of domain names. "First come first serve" sounds like a fair system, but in fact it is a poor system that encourages a land-rush mentality over something that essentially should be free. It is a false commodity that is being perpetuated by early adopters (and ICANN of course) and should be deprecated. No one should control domain names, they should be done away with entirely. If I am looking for "Bob's Deli in Washington DC", I'd rather just have a search engine figure out what I meant instead of having to remember some lame domain name like "bobsdelicatessenandbagels.us" because THIS Bob's Deli was the umpteenth deli to try to register the same domain name. Might as well just remember an IP address at that point.
Of course you can. It's just slightly impractical. In other words, no-one ever does it.
But nothing forces you to run websites on port 80. ...
Nothing forces you from disregarding global address assignments on networks (in fact, I frequently do this for technical reasons)
Nothing forces you from using the "normal" DNS, and there are alternatives (this is the easiest part to avoid imho).
So yes, you can perfectly well go around ICANN. Of course, it means not being connected to the "normal" internet. A bit like being on native IPv6 a year ago.
Still, I would sooner put North Korea or Kadaffi in charge of the internet than a UN body. At least North Korea is responsible for less than 10 million deaths per decade, and Kadaffi is the chairman of the UN body on human rights, surely he will do what's best for humanity, right ?
Um - did you actually read your link? It's about the Vatican being accused of child abuse, by the UN. That's the UN fighting the good fight against a powerful, immoral entity - you could scarcely invent better support for it.
Oops! Thanks for pointing that out. It utterly and completely destroys any point I might have made. The UN is totally blameless in any sort of child sex scandals, yes sir. This is dripping with sarcasm, in case you can't tell.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Stop screaming the sky is falling. All that is national does not stink, all that is international does not shine. No one has been able to point out any realexamples of how the system isn't working. It only started in the US because thats where the internet went widespread. Let me know when it stops working
Interesting? Damn the moderators are stupid today!
So you want to leave it with the guys that practice water boarding...
Better than leaving it to the guys that practice stoning or decapitation of journalists, don't you think. The UN, if it had ever been useful, has long since been co-opted by the 7th Century Set and financial/political opportunists.
The UN is directly in the business of not allowing conflicts to be resolved. How is that beneficial for the Internet?
This is my
You, like most people here criticizing the UN, are talking about the Security Council. The UN is more than just the Security Council. The Security Council does often seem to be an ineffective and corrupt group. Other parts of the UN, however, tend to be fairly effective, which is why you usually don't hear about them. It is not the Security Council that would be running the Internet.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
It utterly and completely destroys any point I might have made.
Well, yes, actually. You made a bold claim, and provided a citation that fails to even hint at supporting your claim. Your sarcasm does nothing to bolster your point.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
The only real answer is a completely distributed, decentralised, no-SPoF DNS system. Always remember how to tell when a politician is lying - and, yes, both the US DoC oversight and the UN whatever-mythical-regulatory-body-might-be-invented are/would be ultimately controlled by political animals.
New mod option wanted: -1 DrunkenRambling