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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.
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!!
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 *
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
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.