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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."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5tZMDBXTRQ
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
The day may be approaching when some countries will have their own DNS roots and root servers. That's been threatened before, but now it's more likely to happen.
There is no way to defend an undersea cable from the submarine that will be splicing into it far out to sea after a ship accidently drags their anchor across it close to shore.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
It wasn't all that long ago that most stories about internet freedom covered the abuses of North Korea, China, and the Islamic Republics. Of course there were always a few comments, usually from our brave AC's, who claimed the US did the same but was better at hiding it. Bless all the slashdot anonymous cowards, keep up the good work.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
In reality, although Brazil President Dilma Rousseff is none too happy with the NSA's sketchy surveillance practices
In reality, getting a 'non-USA' internet won't do anything to stop the NSA. What difference does it make who gives out DNS names and IP addresses? (because that's what they mean when they say non-USA internet).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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
That is not what they declared, building local cloud, secure email services and infrastructure is different from "creating it's own internet" and I never heard this wording here, only in "international" press. The big difference is that when someone talk like that it gives the idea that it will be separated from the rest of the internet. That is not what the Brazilian government is proposing.
The national constitution (I'm Brazilian) states that the State has to provide the basic rights that are not met otherwise (if you can't buy water the State has to provide it, there is free medical care, the best universities are free, etc). Since private communications are a basic right (our constitutuion and the universal declaration of human rights), they are planning to offer alternatives for people who care.
Honestly, to force local clouds seems like a double win. On one hand you make companies accountable for our citizens rights, on the other hand - the one I think is the main point here - it creates investments, infrastructure, brings technology and high tech jobs. The cables to Europe are a need, our internet sucks. I hope they make some cables to China and Russia too, as online gaming is better over there.
But mainly, there is no censorship here, Brazilians will not be separated from the internet and nobody in the country thinks that even a possibility. Specially since this government is the one that fought against censorship in the past, you know, during the US created military dictatorship from 64 to 86/90.
There Internet (Arpanet) existed before WWW. WWW is a subset of the Internet.
Yes, but what was it? One more obscure communication protocol.
The WWW Internet is a global phenomenon now. And the WWW Internet was invented by a physicist who was trying to solve a real physical problem.
He was trying to solve a problem of distributing scientific papers among CERN scientists. He did it during work time paid by CERN and on the CERN's computer.
The main database of the Internet, MySQL, is also an International project.
It is just not true that the Internet is sort of an US present to the world. It is not.
We thought that the US government is playing a positive role for the Internet. Until E.S. revealed what is really going on.
Instead of working together with other governments to fight spam, cyber crime, etc. it all came down to the total carpet spying on us, to creating back-doors. It is not nice at all.
This is a common misconception. The WWW is not merely stuff transmitted over TCP port 80 on the Internet. It's an information space that has the ability to use the Internet as a transport mechanism. It's not a subset of the Internet, it's a higher level abstraction than the Internet.
Anything addressable by URI is a node in the WWW. For instance, POTS telephone numbers are leaf nodes because you can address them with tel:. They are on the WWW but they aren't on the Internet. Something can be on the WWW and not on the Internet and vice-versa.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Ever use email? Dropbox? Online games from your XBox or PC? FTP? VOIP? Bittorrent?
All these and thousands more are internet protocols that don't use WWW.
And, by the way, we do have multiple Internets (with a big I). Read up on Internet 2. And there's lots and lots of internets (with a little i) that you don't know about because they're not connected to the Internet (with a big i)
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
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
"You cannot build The Planetary Datalinks here. The US have already completed this project."
And now they get to spy on everyone else for the rest of the game.
Sure, but we can slow the NSA down a lot if they have to take their data home by US Mail, because it won't go through international Data Diodes placed on choke points all over the internet.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Sorry, WWW is the web - nothing else.
But, yes - commonly, when people say "the internet" they do mean the web.
tel URLs may be part of 'the web' in the sense that you may put tel:-links in your web pages -- but that doesn't make tel: or ftp: or telnet: or gopher: whatever other protocol identifier you may have "the web".
The Web was invented at Cern, not the Internet - the Internet has been around long before then.
If you can still find it, maybe have a look at Ed Krol's "The Whole Internet" (see wikipedia) - a book published in the "earlier" days of the WWW - one that helped really helped popularize "the net"...
With that, the web itself IS a subset of what the internet is - the mere fact that it allows for URL schemes to link to non-www resources doesn't make it less of a subset; unlike gopher, ftp - which didn't have those links...
So Brazil will develop also his own OS, is own hardware, CPUs, routers, and firewalls? idiots. The bigger problem of all is reliance on Windows.
Their own internet might simply mean "not connected or dependent upon" the current network
I have seen nothing to indicate that Brazil is thinking of not allowing packets to be routed to the rest of the Internet, or even just to US; they are thinking of allowing packets to much of the rest of the world to be routed there without passing through the US, but that's another matter (and that appears to have been an idea originated in South Africa, well prior to the Snowden revelations).
Given that the national language of Brazil is portuguese I would be amazed if there is much US-based information available in that language.
Given that the majority of well educated people in Brazil also speak English reasonably well, I would not be surprised if they regularly access content in English from the United States.
I live in a non-English speaking country myself, but the majority of internet use I see around me is on English language websites.
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
And U.S. workers average ~40 work hours per week (42 for men, 38.5 for women), whereas German workers average 35 hours per week, so if you are measuring per hour, Germany wins, but if you are measuring per work week, the U.S. has a 14% advantage due to amount of time worked, and the U.S. wins.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#United_States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#European_Union
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.
Iran has already done it. It has built an Intranet like network which connects to outside world through few gateways. The transition of the network users to the new Intranet is being done at the time being and will complete in year.
The main purpose is the:
1- Avoid the internal Iranian traffic to travel over the internet (i.e. unknown countries). ....
2- To control in/out traffic (deep packet inspection, control access to outsider websites, attack and spying control, allow access to Iran-only websites just from inside Iran, emergency kill switch).
3- Force Iranian organizations to host their website in Iranian data centers.
4- Save traffic costs.
5- Flourish local hosting and cloud business and local peering between ISPs.