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Showdown Set On Bid To Give UN Control of Internet
wiredmikey writes "When delegates gather in Dubai in December for an obscure UN agency meeting, the mother of all cyber diplomatic battles is expected, with an intense debate over proposals to rewrite global telecom rules to effectively give the United Nations control over the Internet. Russia, China and other countries back a move to place the Internet under the authority of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), a UN agency that sets technical standards for global phone calls. While US officials have said placing the Internet under UN control would undermine the freewheeling nature of cyberspace, some have said there is a perception that the US owns and manages the Internet. The head of the ITU, Hamadoun Toure, claims his agency has 'the depth of experience that comes from being the world's longest established intergovernmental organization.' But Harold Feld of the US-based non-government group Public Knowledge said any new rules could have devastating consequences. Some are concerned over a proposal by European telecom operators seeking to shift the cost of communication from the receiving party to the sender. This could mean huge costs for US Internet giants like Facebook and Google."
On the one hand, we have the US and the insanity over copyright who randomly takes a small number of domains off line with no due process.
and...
On the other hand we have the rest of the world, who, to a greater or lesser extent take a large number of domains off line with no due process because of various censorship requirements.
I'm not American, but keeping the internet under the control of the US is far better than the alternative.
If you disagree, tell me one country which would do a better job. And then tell me how much influence they'd have over the ITU.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
So, this is the same UN who keeps batting around the idea of making blasphemy universally illegal. Great! Can't wait to have them handling my internet traffic!
So what, we get to choose between control by Big Content or Big Brother? At the moment Big Content appears to be the more benign choice.
You need not look any further than X.25 to see what sort of provisions the ITU would try to work into future Internet protocols.
Palm trees and 8
You cannot separate the technical details from the economic details. Imagine, for example, a technical specification that separates nodes into "consumer" and "service" systems; it is almost certain that ISPs would enforce the distinction between clients and servers, charging large amounts of money for connecting a "service" node to the network.
Now, would ITU actually do such a thing? Probably. In fact, almost certainly. That sort of distinction can be seen in numerous other ITU standards and proposals. Take a look at NGN some time...
Palm trees and 8
The internet works because everyone forwards everyone else's packets, costs are low and regulation is low.
Please don't mess with that formula or you'll make the internet become a lot like the older forms of media it is replacing.
People seem to think that increased regulation is the solution. I'm not so sure. I think big companies tend to find ways to manipulate regulation more than small ones do.
Roll it back to 1993 and keep the open, free and wild west internet.
The Internet thrives because it's free of the bullshit that the UN and the ITU would impose on it. If they had a hand in it, it wouldn't be what it is today.
FUCK THE UN. Let the ITU continue to manage international phone calls. They tariff'd those to expensive death.
The United States invented the Internet. The United States BUILT the Internet. The UN can go take a flying leap.
Please don't mod me down for language. English is my second language and perhaps I don't express myself as well as I might if I could speak my native tongue. When I say FUCK THE UN what I'm trying to say is "FUCK THE UN!!!"
Ehud
They want to control it, let them build their own;
For various reasons they ALL agreed to our control when they signed up, got their country codes, IP address allocations, etc.
We've gone well out of our way to give them everything thy could ever want. In fact now the complaint isn't about any single tangible thing; they will get 'nothing' out of this, other than control.
Well.. build your own.
You did it for GPS (galileo, glonass, a few more even); do it again.
What, you can't because the US has most of the technology you want to use? So what good is this 'control' you seek if even AFTER that we still have 'control'?
"...Some are concerned over a proposal by European telecom operators seeking to shift the cost of communication from the receiving party to the sender. This could mean huge costs for US Internet giants like Facebook and Google."" The real reason.
Conservative, mod down for violating
It depends on what you're talking about. The sender pays for its storage and for copyrights that it passes on to the receiver and charges the receiver back for its service. But when it comes to email, the receiver pays most of the cost. This is why you receive so much spam. It costs the sender next to nothing and he has no concern over how much of your ISP's storage space he uses by sending his shit to every email address he can discover, think of or make up because the ISP has no way to charge it back to him. They charge you for it.
You mean the body that, by flexing its muscle and getting everyone to agree when all hope was lost, has prevented countless wars and solved dozens of conflicts for 70 years?
Yes, a thousand times yes!
While it could easily be said for the US government as well, the UN is not really well known for doing anything well, or effeciently. While ICANN does have to come under the laws of the US, it would have to come under the laws of someone else, depending on what country it was based in, but at least it's got a track record for having some control over how things work.
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
The US has not been the best of stewards, but has nevertheless proven itself a much better henhouse guard than the foxes would be.
I don't know about all of the stuff being proposed, but I kind of like the idea of shifting the costs back to mega corporations like Google and Facebook. Maybe then, they would few the users as customers instead of the product to be sold to others.
I propose that the Internet be declared a sovereign entity or a federation of sovereign entities (one per nationwide network, perhaps) similar to the way the Holy See is a sovereign entity (headed by the Pope) with whom nations can maintain diplomatic relations. I nominate Vint Cerf for the title of chairman of the Internet Federation (in part due to his RFC 3271.) The Internet Foundation would be responsible for global guidelines that nationwide networks must follow to be considered part of the Internet; nationwide networks would be allowed to come up with other guidelines as long as they don't violate the global guidelines.
I see no evidence of any country of note who would be better for the Internet than the US. Look at Australia and the UK, with governments falling over themselves to try to censor it.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
In the meantime, the internet (formerly a DARPA project, and funded by the USA's taxpayers) can stay under USA's control, thank you very much. If the UN feels the need to steal something they didn't create, try Argentinian beef. Isn't that a world resource, after all?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
ICANN is an epic failure. The UN couldn't be more incompetent if they set out with that as a goal.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Sender already pays
Kinda.
In general the internet can be thought of as a pyramid of provider/customer relationships with peering links crossing between providers at a similar level. Traffic goes up the pyramid until it finds a peering link it can cross over on and then works it's way down the pyramid. At the top of the pyramid are the teir 1 providers who are all peered with each other. Initially it would seem this would mean that sender and recipiant were roughly sharing the costs but in reality it doesn't mean that for two reasons.
1: senders are usually servers and as such the owners have pretty free choice in their location. So they locate them in the US and western europe where the teir 1 providers have a major presense and there are major peering points so internet transit is cheap. Recipiants are usually clients and so their location is constrained by other factors. So many of them have to pay a lot more to get their data from places where the teir 1 providers have a major presense.
2: when two providers are peered in multiple locations it is usual to use "nearest exit" routing so when a packet travels from the US to europe (or vice-versa) the packet will generally cross a peering link first and then travel across the pond. Having said that the big international networks often have ratio requirements so a provider that only has content customers is likely to find it difficult to get peering with big international networks..
Didn't these guys check the pricing models of all the cloud hosts?
I get the impression that amazon's charges for internet traffic don't bear much relationship to what that traffic actually cost's amazon.
P.S. while I don't think the way the internet is currently run is particually fair (In particular the way there is a small group of teir 1 ISPs more than half of which are US based who get paid for internet service while not paying anyone for upstream) I dislike the idea of the UN being in control even more.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
So, the question becomes: How do we protect ourselves from these people to make sure nobody gets control, including our service providers, who can at ant moment cut us off completely?
Give it to the UN, they'll never agree on anything, nothing will change and the internet remains free :)
The UN has a long history of implementing bullshit the US invented, like prohibition of Drugs. Sometimes, if you're lucky, it does really take a stand against some bollocks the US or other states are trying to pull off.
So I don't think giving over the ICANN to the UN would not be a huge step. It _might_ be better than the status quo.
However, having the ITU in charge WILL lead to all kinds of shenanigans. The ITU has a long history of being a huge unaccountable body of TecCos, trying to keep their monopolies. Not a good idea.
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse