Slashdot Mirror
Can There Be a Non-US Internet?
Daniel_Stuckey writes "After discovering that the US government has been invading the privacy of not just Americans, but also Brazilians, Brazil is showing its teeth. The country responded to the spying revelations by declaring it'll just have to create its own internet. In reality, although Brazil President Dilma Rousseff is none too happy with the NSA's sketchy surveillance practices, Brazil and other up-and-coming economies have been pushing to shift the power dynamics of the World Wide Web away from a US-centric model for years."
While it should be relatively simple for any country to set up its own DNS servers, interesting services and so on; the sheer amount of 'information' that is hosted in the US would make any 'internet' experience without it severely lacking.
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
I thought we already had an internet filled with blackjack and hookers.
Does this rag smell like chloroform to you?
The only thing unique about the United States is the resources. That is what is so sad about this: the entire idea of "American Exceptionalism" is the notion that the United States stands alone as a country; Unique in it's respect for freedom and human rights. The NSA's violation of every honor code existing in TCP/IP has demonstrated the United States to be equally mediocre as any other country, where virtue and abuse of power are concerned.
Once you lose your credibility you can never get it back. Its actions have left the entire internet community in search for new social & technological methods for enforcing these basic tenets of privacy that were previously easy to support via a fragile honor system: the United States promised to not be a dick and molest other people's cake as it got passed to the left.
Fundamentally the reason that the internet is US centric is partially the fact that ICANN is located in the US, but mostly because the most used services are based in the US. To create a truly non US-centric model you would have to relocate ICANN and come up with significant competitors to people like Google etc who have no US presence(once they have a US presence they're subject to all the same laws that allow the NSA to spy on you in the first place).
You could technically achieve this, but the countries which could be candidates for replacing the US in this position are not Brazil and would also spy on traffic. So unless this is yet another pissing match where idiots go in with the slogan "Anyone but the US", making the internet non US centric is a gigantic waste of everyone's time and money. I mean does anyone seriously believe that if Chinese companies displaced the US ones that China wouldn't spy on everyone, or that the Europeans wouldn't either also spy or allow the NSA to spy?
...as if the United States was the first, last, and only country to hold a government that spies on its own citizens in some way?
Are we really THAT naive to think that A) the United States invented this concept, and B) no other government thought to do it too?
It's mentalities like this that shock me more than anything Snowden could reveal. I find mass ignorance far more alarming, as it tends to hint as to what governments are yet capable of doing to you. To all of us. While the deaf and blind vote for it.
We were ignorant enough to pay for and allow a program like PRISM to come to fruition. Sitting back assuming that no other country has a similar or same capability is like assuming no one masturbates because people don't talk about it.
The US, over the coming decade(s), will maneuver itself into insignificance, what with the deplorable state its infrastructure is in, its surveillance state, its ridiculous and money-devouring War on Terror, the antipathy its permanent and futile interventionist wars in developing countries. Already now, practically 100% of the start-ups I see with cool new stuff are not US American anymore. They are European, mostly. As a South African singer put it, a few years ago: "The sun is going down over America".
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
The most common reasons governments want to have non-US "internet governance" these days are that they want to restrict free speech and free reading by their citizens, or restrict some kinds of commerce by their citizens (US restricts gambling, drugs, etc.) There are other issues; most governments used to have telecom monopolies, either state-run or quasi-nationalized, though the 90s liberalized much of that away. Some governments would like more money to stay in their countries, or keep people from buying goods online that are heavily taxed locally.
It really irks me when international groups get together to talk about internet policy, and advertise their shindig as being about "ending the digital divide" or "providing connectivity to Africa" or other noble-sounding goals, but actually devote most of their agenda to governments wanting censorship. These days, of course, the NSA is giving them a good excuse to want internet governance so they can do their own wiretapping in case the NSA isn't sharing.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
That's not going to make it a separate "Internet". It will only allow selective resolvent of names, but TCP/IP will still work around the globe. Which means hacking and probing by NSA or other 'security' organizations will still be just as happy. You'll just not be able to resolve names outside your DNS structure.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
It is not unjustified to inquire about a source no matter what you may feel about the subject. For all your accusations of people being rude all you had to reply with is "I don't have a source", instead you went on a defensive rant about it.