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."

Comments

No difference.

[unity100]

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.

Re:No difference.

[Xest]

Yes, I've seen many comments on Slashdot that letting the UN handle it would be countries like Iran could choose to have things censored, but that's complete and utter bollocks- how would Iran get consensus? The UN isn't based on what every country says goes, it's based on international consensus. There are also often attempts to discredit the UN's ability to handle this sort of thing by pointing to issues with the security council and so forth too.

But the problem is, that's also a load of complete and utter bollocks. The fact is that the UN already runs important international infrastructure just fine, so fine that it doesn't even break the news because it does it so well and so transparently most people aren't even aware. The UN has bodies which handle international telephony, international maritime standards, international airline standards, and international postage standards. It does this so that different countries systems can interoperate just fine, whatever the UNSC does is completely irrelevant as these bodies are run by completely different people in completely different places. It makes sense to add ICANN to this set off bodies which the UN already handles so well because the UN's track record of handling such things is thus far excellent, whilst the US' record with the internet is becoming ever worse- from small town US Judges ordering foreign company's domain names be seized through to government backed seizure of domain names, the US just isn't a trustworthy overseer of the internet anymore.

Re:No difference.

[DittoBox]

The UN put Libya on the Human Rights Council. They only suspended their involvement when Gaddafi started fucking over the people who asked for better government. I don't want the UN involved. At all.

Re:No difference.

[ElectricTurtle]

Many, many other countries have various levels of censorship, filtering and tracking on the internet besides Iran. Perhaps you don't think China carries any weight at the UN? Pardon me while I laugh in your face. India, the second largest population in the world after China, has censored political minorities online. It would be no exaggeration to say that more than half of the world's population lives in an environment of internet censorship, and giving the UN power to control internet policy is clearly handing them the keys to bring it to the minority that is not yet censored. The US has clearly lost its moral authority with regard to internet policy, but the UN is not the answer.

Re:No difference.

[Haedrian]

The UN hasn't bombed their own people either.

The argument isn't giving internet control to Libya (for which you could more argue about it disconnecting the internet there), its about giving internet control to the UN.

And 'mistakes' happen due to political tampering. Obama has a Nobel Peace prize, the US got to host the UNESCO thingy for freedom of speech. The issue here isn't whether the UN/US have made the worst decisons, the issue here is which of them deserve to control the internet, which of them are most likely to remove sites fairly? Which of them deserves to 'own' such an important international technology?

Re:No difference.

[Sir_Sri]

Who exactly would you consider a great paragon of virtue to be democratically chosen (however stupid that may be) to be one of africa's 13 representatives, without serving two consecutive terms? Even the US, the UK, Poland and russia are on there, and frankly, the first 3 are complicit in torture and mass murder from the invasion of iraq and guantanamo and extraordinary rendition, and russia is well, russia. Do we perhaps do away with the 13 african states, because it would be hard to find 13 african states who uphold human rights all that well, and dictate to them from New York and Geneva how to manage their human rights? The UNHCR exists primarily to complain about the Israeli treatment of palestinians, they chose a broader name than that, but frankly libya is as good at complaining about israel as anyone else.

Because they couldn't call it the UN committee to complain about Israel they got caught with their pants down on "human rights", but it's not like anyone on that body gets to be anything other than a hedge against constant criticism of someone, or a constant criticizer.

Just like everywhere else, democracy is bought and paid for. The UN is no different, except that it likes to give lip service to every idea out there. That is both its great strength and great weakness. Everyone gets a say, even the crazy people. It also means that if you can't agree to it, it doesn't happen. Want a XXX TLD, probably not going to happen, want to ban porn on the web, probably not going to happen, want to make sure China gets more IP addresses than a major US university, that probably would happen. Because for all it's faults, the UN is inherently more fair than any one country trying to be fair - but not at the expense of its own interests.

A fair way of doing things

[dkleinsc]

If we were going to truly make things an internationalized standard, we'd be doing something like:
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 .com, .org, etc would get phased out in favor of .us addresses.

As far as I can tell, nobody's trying to do that, though.

Re:A fair way of doing things

[Spazmania]

1, 2 and 3 describe the state of the DNS exactly as it is today.

As for #4, why phase out anything?

Re:A fair way of doing things

[yincrash]

why are we separating by country? the internet is an international community. We all go to the same slashdot.org, why would you want to make it slashdot.org.us?

Re:A fair way of doing things

[Shikaku]

http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/03/14/1329210/Happy-Pi-Day#comments

So we won't get smartass comments about 14/3 instead of 3/14.

Re:A fair way of doing things

[Kjella]

As for #4, why phase out anything?

I'd rather phase them out and make all 3+ letter domains TLDs in their own right. 99% of the time any serious corporation or organization will buy up all the TLDs to avoid the others being spam or virus or troll or hate pages, there's few enough it's a marginal cost and nothing but a money grab for new TLDs. Make it some kind of arbitration/auction who gets the TLD-less name. So slashdot would just be slashdot, google just google, yahoo just yahoo...

Practically the .com TLD is so big, it could easily be scaled to handle all. If you need to cheat you could make the last letter a TLD so your browser could do a lookup of "slashdo.t" to the "t" TLD to lower the load on the root servers while legacy clients still function. I think slashdot is almost the only site I visit that doesn't have either a country TLD or the .com TLD.

Re:A fair way of doing things

[anyGould]

Making it even easier for folks like Iran and Egypt and Saudi Arabia to control information and (lack of) freedom...

Um, you did notice that the US not only blocks domains in their own country, but prevents other countries from seeing it as well?

Hate to break it to you, but the US has lost the moral high ground when it comes to internet freedom.

Re:A fair way of doing things

[readin]

What would happen to .tw addresses under this plan?

Re:A fair way of doing things

[JWSmythe]

    That's just a bit US-centric, isn't it?

    The two letter TLDs already exist, and for many countries have been around for an awful long time.

    As for management of those TLDs, there could be something left to desire. I owned a .us domain when the structure was [name].[category].[state].us . It worked fine as it was. I had it pointed towards my work DNS servers for 8 years. ... then my employer laid me off.

    I contacted the [state].us NIC, and asked politely for them to change my NS records. For about 6 months, I tried contacting the [state].us NIC, and the .us NIC, and all of those attempts were ignored. I did finally get an email from the .us NIC saying that there were no delegations like that. huh?

    Oddly enough, about 5 years later, the name is still delegated to my old employers nameservers. I just looked, out of curiosity. They are still resolving it, but it's pointing towards its old IP, where they no longer have service. There doesn't seem to be anything on that IP any more, but I'm sure in time it will get used for something, and they'll wonder why they have traffic coming in for such a weird name.

    So, instead of a relatively small group of registrars that are actually companies who have a clue of what we're doing, you're suggesting that we go back to the delegated local NICs? and.. mine was delegated by a state university.

    That shouldn't be read to agree that we should let government or corporations own our domain names, but the previous option wasn't all that great either.

Re:A fair way of doing things

[stubob]

Admit it: you were just hoping gi.nor.mo.us would become the next del.icio.us.

Re:A fair way of doing things

[Frosty Piss]

Hate to break it to you, but the US has lost the moral high ground when it comes to internet freedom.

When was the last time the US Gov blocked / turned off the Internet to deprive the people freedom of speech? Did they block WikiLeaks? No they did not. Your ideological rant is not supported by, you know, actual facts.

Better the int'l community, than strictly US.

[Torinir]

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.

Re:Better the int'l community, than strictly US.

[ElectricTurtle]

I have defended the United States' de facto control of internet policy for many years, but the unscrupulous and in fact unconstitutional and illegal actions by DHS/DOJ and other agencies in the last year or two has changed my perspective. We have lost the moral authority we once had to be impartial protectors of the internet, but the UN is not the answer. All the countries which already have filtering, censorship, tracking etc. will push that on an international level (which they already do, but the UN hasn't had any teeth to get it done), and even in a compromise between a free internet and a censored and tracked one, something still must necessarily be lost.

The internet needs to be decentralized to be protected. Distributed DNS solutions need to be pursued. Barring that, root servers should be controlled by each sovereign nation for each national TLD. This at least will give people choices.

Re:Better the int'l community, than strictly US.

[TheSpoom]

It's a little different when the other group is "almost every State in the world."

A little consistency?

[ghjm]

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.

Re:A little consistency?

[shutdown -p now]

The UN is its member nations.

ICANN...

[lostmongoose]

...haz cheezburger?