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US Agency Lines Up Broad Support For ICANN Transition (pcworld.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from PCWorld: A U.S. agency has lined up broad support for its plan to end the government's oversight of the Internet's domain name system, despite opposition from some Republicans in Congress. The U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) on Thursday released statements of support for a plan to end its oversight of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Among supporters of a plan, developed by the ICANN community, to transition ICANN's domain name coordination functions to a multistakeholder governance model are Amazon.com, Google, Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Facebook, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the Computer and Communications Industry Association. NTIA on Thursday announced it had reviewed the community proposal and found it meets the agency's criteria for allowing the ICANN privatization plan to move forward. The community plan maintains the openness of the Internet and maintains the security and stability of the DNS, said NTIA Administrator Lawrence Strickling. It does not replace NTIA's oversight with another government organization, he said, although that's been a fear of some critics of the NTIA plan. On Wednesday, Ted Cruz proposed a bill, the Protecting Internet Freedom Act, that would prohibit the U.S. government from relinquishing its role with respect to overseeing the web's domain name system (DNS), unless explicitly authorized by Congress.
In which we recognise the benefit of the bill to society is inversely proportional to how beneficial the name of the bill suggests it is.
The only real failing of ICANN has been the failure to reclaim IPv4 space from the Class A holders. All those /8 spaces should be divvied up.
Given that those companies could be sharding those spaces and selling/leasing that space, but aren't, kind of hints as to the lack of sensible behavior we'll see by spinning off ICANN to a bunch of corporations.
As for ICANN running itself, well, there's certainly no incentive for any corporation to take it over or somehow subvert the authority for their own benefit.
Having the US government run it may suck, but it's probably the least sucky solution all round. They did build the damn thing in the first place, and haven't done a terrible job.
Just remember, boys and girls, privatization of a utility generally doesn't result in better service for the end-users, but does result in some people making a huge pile of money.
Well, some Democrats also oppose this bill. So, I guess there is opposition from both Democrats and Republicans, but you only mention the Republicans, presumably to make them sound "evil". Congratulations!! You've officially arrived as a member of the press!!
On one hand, the US actually has abused its control over DNS. It has revoked domain names for political reasons.
On the other hand, there is good reason to believe other countries would be even worse.
Ultimately, I think ICANN is a weakness in the internet architecture that should never have existed. Rather than handing it over, it should be abolished altogether.
This discussion has been done to death and every time it's been shown to be a waste of time and effort. The "burn rate" for IPv4 addresses outstrips the number of IPv4 addresses that could even potentially have been reclaimed in this manner was (and still is) such that it would, at most, have bought just months before complete exhaustion - and that still didn't really take into account the explosive demand for connectivity in China, India and other countries, or for the growing demand for mobile data (not just phones) and IoT type devices. ICANN made absolutely the right decision not to bother attempting this; it would have been expensive (you just *know* lawyers would have got involved), time consuming, mostly futile, and wouldn't have provided any real benefit anyway.
Given that you mention "some people making a huge pile of money" in connection with ICANN's failings, I'm rather surprised you didn't being up ICANN's decision to open up the gTLD system without any form of sane oversight/control of what new registrars were able to do to at least try and prevent the overwhelming majority of them becoming the cesspits they are. That essentially pointless cash grab is definitely one of ICANN's failings, and one that's likely to get a whole lot worse now that the inherent bias of an English language using oversight committee has been removed; I'm fulling expecting to see non-roman script equivalents of all those malware peddling gTLDs - run by equally incompetent and shady registrars - coming on line within a matter of months.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Net protocols, new dns system.
Yep, some form of distributed DNS system will be a good idea. Expect to see it start happening in the next 6mo and gaining adaption and the countries who are pro-authoritarian or demanding everyone use a government ID to go online(S.Korea, EU, etc) to try making it illegal.
Om, nomnomnom...
Giving back a /8 adds about 1 month of not 'running out' of IPv4, really it's not that important.
New things are always on the horizon
That word community. Sounds caring sharing doesn't it? ICANN is technically a non-profit. In reality it's been a huge gravy train for all aboard. You can see that in all the ridiculous top level domain names they've spat out which have created a lot of confusion and added no real value but lined the pockets of ICANN's staff and partner businesses. So let us ditch the bullshit pure and simple: these latest changes are new ways for them to make money.
>Just remember, boys and girls, nationalizing a utility generally doesn't result in better service for the end users because there's little incentive to innovate.
Just remember, boys and girls, it's impossible to "nationalize" something that was built by government in the first place. You cannot take from the private sector that which the private sector has never had.
And I say this as somebody who is strongly in favor of this move - and defended it hugely in yesterday's story about Cruz's opposition. This is a good move, but I would prefer that instead of a bunch of corporations the control shift to an international coalition of non-profit non-governmental organisations. I even suggested that the US be represented by the EFF and the ACLU.
This is a job where both corporations and governments are imminently untrustable. Mind you that describes just about every job ever, but in this case it is even more critical than usual.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Interesting thing to note: I know Americans can never contemplate the idea that anybody may have freedom who isn't American let alone have MORE freedom in some ways but just bare with me okay. Here in my country - guess who does NOT run the country TLD. That's right - the government. They have no control over the TLD assigned to the country. .com and despite that the charity has too much money. They buy infrastructure, expand infrastructure, maintain it and pay salaries and still have cash left over - which they spend on charity projects, I managed quite a few of those which were about providing technology access to some of the poorest schools on earth.
When they tried to claim it was theirs to control - the people who do control it (a non-profit) shifted it to a foreign server and a massive revolt made the government back down very fast.
They also don't control any of the core second-level subdomains beneath the country TLD. In fact, none of THOSE are for profit entitites EITHER - they are all run by non-profit charities. When I say charities I mean it, the commercial subdomain rests with it's only registrar -a non-profit, the result is that the cost of a domain here is less than 10% of what it costs to register a
It's perfectly possible for key DNS infrastructure to be managed perfectly with neither government NOR corporate control - neither socialist nor profiteering motives - and the ENTIRE country has gotten NOTHING but benefit from this arrangement. No negative side effects observable whatsoever.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
The system is working and working fine. If other countries want to manage a DNS they should build their own Internet.
You misspelled "They have good infrastructure because anyone earning over $50,000 pays 50% on their taxes."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
ICANN became a corporation - in every meaningful sense of the word - some time ago. They stopped acting like a government organization long ago and have focused on profit for years now. The "leaders" of ICANN entered into a machine that was fairly effective and orderly, now they have created dysfunctional chaos and arbitrary mish-mash instead. While the government isn't a fix-all, a cat walking across a keyboard repeatedly could make decisions that would be equally as beneficial as the idiots running ICANN.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
A few places are comparably free, but the vast majority of the world's population, regretfully, continues to live under regimes considerably more oppressive than the US. And I'm not talking just the usual suspects — like China or Russia — generally respectable places like India can be quite intolerant of unpopular opinions and authoritarian in controlling the information networks. It may seem crazy to Americans, but Germans and Brits, for another example, routinely get arrested simply for saying the wrong things on social media — in the US attempts to criminalize "hate speech" are still duly resisted.
Not to mention certain sunny locales, where one's had can be removed for apostasy.
Reducing America's control over the Internet will — inevitably and by definition — increase the share of control by these governments.
We've seen this before — UN's "Human Rights Council" is a good example of it. All of the things about it, that the so called "Liberals", dismiss as "myths", are actually quite true. It will happen to the Internet's governance — inasmuch as it needs any — as well.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Their doing a pretty shitty job with IPv6 too. I recently got the run-around with ICANN / AT&T trying to get IPv6 PTR records fixed. I was implementing a postfix server on an external IP, and google kept giving me "this message does not meet IPv6 sending guidelines regarding PTR 550-5.7.1 records and authentication. " This sent me down a rabbit hole, contacting AT&T and ICANN. AT&T said the SOA of my assigned IP was with ICANN, ICANN said the v6 was a multicast and AT&T needed to fix that...which then AT&T said the only was to fix it was to sign up for their "Managed Services" and pay them more $$$. This whole "we must transition to IPv6!" is being co-opted by corps into a non-technical money grab. I pay extra $$$ per month ALREADY for my subnet, apparently this doesn't cover IPv6.
As it turns out, the REAL issue was implementing IPv6 on the mail server, adding my client's external IPv6 address into the postfix relay conf, and then it started working. Google is misleading with their "PTR" message; it can be fixed without SOA PTR. If anyone is curious, I made a tutorial on my site on how to figure out your IPv6, the conf files to edit, etc.
What does the US possibly stand to GAIN by relinquishing control over this?
If there is no net gain for us, they why give it up?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Here's the thing.
ICANN transition isn't going to be to some benevolent non-profit like it is where you are. It's going to be a worst of all worlds situation.
Expect:
1) The religious freedom of Saudi Arabia
2) The political freedom of North Korea
3) The IP freedom of the United States
Yep, some form of distributed DNS system will be a good idea. Expect to see it start happening in the next 6mo and gaining adaption and the countries who are pro-authoritarian or demanding everyone use a government ID to go online(S.Korea, EU, etc) to try making it illegal.
I have been thinking about this for some time. My first idea was how to deal with the problem of when governments dictate to the root servers that domains should be erased or the nameservers changed, against the will of the domain owners. I was thinking of changes to nameservers so that they keep a historical database of changes in the IP addresses of a domain's nameservers and some way for end users to add some token to a domain name to indicate they want to use the older (correct) nameservers instead of the current (stolen) ones.
Now I am wondering if it would be possible to have a parallel DNS system where a blockchain broadcasts changes in the root DNS information (domain name to nameserver IP) and the domain owners sign changes so that everyone knows that the change is authentic. To willingly transfer a domain, the owner could give the signing keys to the new owner. As a parallel system, a caching resolver could first look in the blockchain, and if the domain is not participating, then go to the root servers. One obvious issue is how the real owners would prove initial ownership when registering with the new system. Maybe proving that they control the domain by creating a specific host record in that domain?
A dingo ate my sig...
My thought is....
What does the US possibly stand to GAIN by relinquishing control over this?
If there is no net gain for us, they why give it up?
How about respect in the international community. Oh, sorry. The US doesn't care about that kind of thing.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Having ICANN't run itself?
Wait what??
A can of can't??? A can of can't???
This is a local shop, for local people. Theres nothing for you here.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Treating DNS as a key to free speech around the world, and protecting from the commercial abuse and deceit of DNS wildcards or the riduculous number of toplevel domains, would gain even more respect.
>Are you a nudist?
Sometimes. And I find that debates are much more enjoyable when everybody is naked. Some people you can admire while they talk, others you can laugh at. Just imagine how much more informative the republican primary debates would have been had the participants been naked ? Instead of arguing about who has the biggest hands as a proxy for penis size, we could have just seen who has the biggest dick. Instead people got it backwards and voted for the guy who WAS the biggest dick.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
And your evidence for this is ... what exactly ?
I mean, I think you were trying to use a slippery-slope fallacy but if so you didn't even do that very well since you failed to show any slope.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
No...we really don't care what the rest of the world thinks about us....why should we?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
No...we really don't care what the rest of the world thinks about us....why should we?
Of course, you have the worlds 'best' military, you don't need to care what they think any more than the school bully needs to care what other kids think of them.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.