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Ted Cruz Proposes Bill To Keep US From Giving Up Internet Governance Role (washingtontimes.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Washington Times: Internet legislation proposed Wednesday in the Senate would prohibit the U.S. government from relinquishing its role with respect to overseeing the web's domain name system, or DNS, unless explicitly authorized by Congress. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), a division of the Commerce Department, currently oversees control of the DNS, a virtual phonebook of sorts that allows internet users to easily browse the web by allocating domain names to websites the world over. The NITA has long been expected to give up its oversight role to a global multi-stakeholder community, however, prompting lawmakers to unleashed a proposal this week that would assure the U.S. government maintains control unless Congress votes otherwise. The bill, the Protecting Internet Freedom Act, "would prevent the Obama administration from giving the Internet away to a global organization that will allow over 160 foreign governments to have increased influence over the management and operation of the Internet," according to a statement issued Wednesday by the office of the bill's co-sponsor, Sen. Ted Cruz. Specifically, the bill aims to ensure that the NTIA's relationship with the DNS doesn't terminate, lapse, expire or otherwise end up cancelled unless authorized by Congress, while a separate provision would guarantee that the U.S. government's exclusive control over .gov and .mil domains remains intact. In the UK, the controversial Snooper's Charter -- or the Investigatory Powers Bill as it's officially known -- has been passed through the House of Commons by UK MPs.
Any country, or any company, or any kid with spare time can set up their own root servers, their own TLDs, and their own domains. Then with the authority of laws, policies, or a note passed around the local high school, users can be convinced to point their resolving to that custom DNS, bypassing anything the US government wants to do.
The whole notion of maintaining control of the internet is somewhat asinine.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
It's not like the US has an unblemished record of openness and propriety when managing this either.
The US has stronger laws and a stronger tradition and culture of supporting freedom of expression. According to a Pew Research poll published in this week's Economist, 80% of Japanese, 70% of Germans, and 50% of French, think the government should be able to silence people offending others. In America, only a quarter felt the same. The next closest countries were Canada and Britain, both at about 40%.
US stewardship of the Internet has not been perfect, but I doubt if others can do better, either individually or collectively.
Agreed. It's not like the US has an unblemished record of openness and propriety when managing this either. The US has seized domains names and banned activities they don't like. Europe is actually much farther along on ensuring preservation of internet liberties, data protection, etc.
Actually that's not true at all. The US seizes domain names only within its own jurisdiction, just like everybody else. However Europe, and especially China, Russia, and numerous third world countries, have expressed a desire to force other countries to censor speech, regardless of the other countries laws. Case in point, France wants Google to censor search results in ALL of its domains.
The US hasn't had anything even approaching an equivalent.
IANA would put the stuff in control of mostly engineers, but most countries don't want it there, they want it at ITU. At the same time, if you are worried about corporate control and abusive use of the DNS system you could look no further than ITU. ICANN is it's own hotbed of money being funneled into the pockets of connected people but they can't even shake a stick at all the slush funds and money changing hands at ITU, hell ICANN probably learned the game from ITU.
ITU would be a disaster for the internet DNS. Every tin pot dictator would be trying to get domains shut off for saying bad things about them. And at ITU, they would succeed. The DNS would rapidly devolve into a censored piece of crap.
80% of Japanese, 70% of Germans, and 50% of French, think the government should be able to silence people offending others.
That's precisely why we need to make that as difficult as possible.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
You were able to post which speaks volumes...
There's zero difference between the Chinese trying to censor Tienanmen Square and what the RIAA tries to do, and because of that, the US government is no better at protecting "free speech".
Yes, there's quite a difference. If the RIAA/MPAA could bring down just any domain it wants, then public torrent trackers would have a very hard time even existing. The reason they are able to float from domain to domain is precisely because the USA doesn't have jurisdiction over non-US TLDs, which means that US based corporations can't obtain a court order to shut them down either, unless they have a presence in another country and go through the legal channels in that country. In the case of TPB, there's an organization called BREIN that was able to get a takedown of their .se domain recently, but it took them a VERY LONG time to do so.
However you'll never see any purely US based entity get a domain seizure for a website registered in another country unless that country's government specifically consents for that to happen. The US government does not, and there are no indications that it will ever, seize another country's TLD.
In fact, what the US actually controls is what you call the root domain, which is just a dot. For example, www.slashdot.org is actually www.slashdot.org., just the last dot at the end is always implied and never shown in most client software. When we talk about "keys to the internet" what we're really talking about is who ultimately owns the dot at the end. In France for example, the US delegates complete control to France the ownership of the "fr." top level domain, and doesn't set any terms for what France can or cannot do with it.
Now, if we turn this over to some international entity, like say the UN, they can and probably will set terms for what a country can and can't do with their top level domain. The first thing that comes to mind is mandating that countries de-list sites that speak negatively against a particular religion, or just in some way sound negative against some kind of ethnic group, regardless of whether or not that is what a site is. For example, they could set rules requiring that slashdot should be delisted unless it outright deletes posts that have GNAA material, and that having them downmodded just isn't enough.
If you want to argue that said international entity won't require such censorship...then I have to ask...what exactly does anybody gain by turning it over to an international body? And again, I need to emphasize, the US doesn't set any rules for what websites can and can't say. Other countries can even host ISIS propaganda websites, pro-drug websites, copyright infringement, and everything else the US government hates with a passion, and the US still doesn't intervene, nor does it have any kind of "unenforced policy" or anything of that nature. When a country owns a TLD, it's theirs to do as they please.