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US Tech Firms Urge Congress To Allow Internet Domain Changeover (reuters.com)
Dustin Volz, reporting for Reuters: Major technology companies including Facebook, Google and Twitter are urging Congress to support a plan for the U.S. government to cede control of the internet's technical management to the global community, they said in a joint letter dated on Tuesday. The U.S. Commerce Department has primary oversight of the internet's management, largely because it was invented in the United States. Some Republican lawmakers are trying to block the handover to global stakeholders, which include businesses, tech experts and public interest advocates, saying it could stifle online freedom by giving voting rights to authoritarian governments. The years-long plan to transfer oversight of the nonprofit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, is scheduled to occur on Oct. 1 unless Congress votes to block the handover. The California-based corporation operates the database for domain names such as .com and .net and their corresponding numeric addresses that allow computers to connect. In the Sept. 13 letter, a copy of which had been reviewed by Reuters before it was sent, the technology companies said it was "imperative" that Congress does not delay the transition.
It isn't just authoritarian governments -- many other democracies have no First Amendment-like protections.
When, not if, censorship decisions come down the pike, well, congratulations.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
ICANN has been gradually selling off what little control they have left over the years as it is. Their utterly idiotic decision to start selling off gTLDs to the highest bidders was one of their boldest of all moves but they really haven't had much relevance for some time. There aren't many things left to do to make it more deregulated and still have any kind of resolvable DNS.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
One of those "major technology companies" is not like the others...
... of "values" or because of government bullying.
It's 2016 and information still wants to be free.
The Internet is already too censured and ruled by a few with mostly Facebook and Twitter being in charge of so much content (Google is more tolerating I guess), none of them should censor and remove shit.
The large firms will have the clout to influence the net, small players and individuals will be trampled.
I read the article and I feel like nobody is being very forthcoming with the real motivations behind wanting to cede control of this to the "global community" or NOT wanting to.
How much does it cost U.S. taxpayers to maintain control of the domain name database? Or does it actually generate considerable positive revenue? (ICANN says it's "non profit" but so was our Major League Football association for a long time, as well as MasterCard.)
Why do companies with a big web presence, such as Facebook, want control to go global? Is there some problem they've experienced in the past where they can't get a domain registration in a timely manner because it's all U.S. based?
I can understand the concerns of the Republicans trying to block this transfer, if there's really no evidence ICANN isn't handling everything well as it stands today. The Internet WAS an American invention, based on our military network. It may indeed be a global thing today -- but I'm not sure it's wise to give away global control of the domain registration process if there's not a valid argument for why it would improve the efficiency of the process? (In other words, doing so just on some philosophical idea that "Global Internet isn't really global if domain database for it is run in the USA" doesn't sound like a good enough reason to change something that's worked well this whole time.)
I would had run my own freedom communication platform if only I had a jurisdiction to do so from.
Try to uphold as much of full freedom of speech in the US since you are one of the few where that kinda is a thing. Everywhere else it's accepted or even viewed as good that people aren't allowed to tell their opinion or spread new ideas.
If they take away our porn, it's "Katy, bar the door!".
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I get a bad feeling for the transfer just from the list of supporters: Facebook, Google, Twitter, Amazon, Cloudflare and Yahoo. It feels, to me, that they are not doing it for freedom but rather for money. They are going to have services or other means of making money off the transfer where they cannot do it currently.
However, this is just a feeling. I would like to understand it better for why they want it. Time to read since the article is scant on details.
Is anyone finding ICANN to be lacking?
This is like the argument in Captain America: Civil War. Sure the Avengers don't have oversight by the world governments, but it's not like they weren't doing good things.
It seems like the current players, just want to cement control.
None of those companies has a primary business that's technology. They are social media and advertising companies that use technology. Automotive companies are more technology oriented than those companies.
Why not just use blockchain based approach and use namecoin? It is safer, decentralized, etc..
Is probably the least evil group that could be running the internet. The UN and ICANN are both corrupt and could easily be dominated by small despotic nations. In fact the UN is dominated by small despotic nations now. The US government, at least, is generally pro free speech to a fault and is merely content to watch, as opposed to making people disappear.
The US invents the internet (as the summary says), but, no, someone else should have it (i.e. the people who were too lazy/risk averse to build it).
This is basically rewarding the mediocrity of the world, and soon mediocrity will be enforced on the internet (only the radicals who are Jihadists and Marxists will get a pass).
Censorship is all fine and dandy, until it impacts something you actually agree with. For example, you are no longer allowed to express the opinion that you just expressed.
Yes, I don't actually have the power to shut you up, but if you truly believe in the merits of censorship, you will voluntarily cease such communications. But should you continue, that will be taken as you supporting freedom of speech.
I see a lot of posts about "why".
Well the reason is that if the US doesn't give up control, countries have been threatening with building their own internet infrastructure to run in parallel.
If these countries (Brazil, Russia, etc) did create a "second internet", then Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc, would all be shut off from their customers in those regions.
Can't do the math?
They get a lower customer base, lower potential profit, lower actual revenue. Unless the spend the R&D on developing their platform to conform to the "second internet".
" the technology companies said it was "imperative" that Congress does not delay the transition"
I can't think of a better reason to delay the transition, than giant multinational tech corps are insisting "it's the best possible thing".
Let's remember that as venal, stupid, and parochial as the US Congress is, they at least have a *purported* interest in the greatest good for the public. Twitter? Facebook? Google? None of them even have that, aside from the crocodile-tears of social responsibility their multi-jillionaire founders occasionally shed between their fleet of private jets and their nine-figure homes.
-Styopa
n.t.
We are going to regret this. This is one of stupidest ideas to ever, only a delusional democrat would support this "globalization" crap!
This is just a bad ideal all together.
I can't stand ICANN, anybody but them. If anyone looks at the curcus that is ICANN they would see that ICANN could not run a popcorn stand.
For some reason this sounds to me like one of those situations where we say to ourselves, "What could happen if we cede control of the internet's technical management to the global community?" Then, six months, or a few years down the road, we look back and say "Ah ... that's what could happen; wish we hadn't done that."
Has the UN done a good job at anything? The blue hats have committed terrible crimes, that anyone else would have been executed for.
They are almost as corrupt as the World Soccer, and Olympic Committees.
We need to fix the domain name system such that it's a technical issue rather than a legal issue. Decentralize it. Let there be no central power or government who can control it. We should setup something similar to BitCoin for domain names and the infrastructure to go around it.
Haven't been keeping up with current events, have you? YouTube is demonitizing (thus killing) channels that don't meet their vague as all hell "guidelines" that include "political or controversial content". Wanna guess what is happening?
Well those "#killallmen" "DieCISScum" and "lets kill whitie" channels? They are all fine, none of them are being affected no matter how racist and sexist they are, but any that call them out on their bullshit or point out SJW insanity like Trigglypuff? Well I hope you didn't need that channel for anything,they have even shut down a channel multiple times that does nothing but host news broadcasts of crimes from around the USA because it makes the BLM movement look like shit by showing who they are protesting for.
Considering the fact that the head of Google is the CTO of the Clinton campaign should not make this surprising to anyone, but between this and Google manipulating search results to aid Clinton they are about as fair and balanced as Jezebel or Twitter.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Globalism provides for one goal and one goal only: stripping wealth from the middle classes of the wealthiest nations and redistributing it to the global elites so they can use that same money to purchase the developing world and enslave it, too.
these days, I sorta regret voting to open The Connected Internet to commercial users.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
That's true, I haven't seen many good arguments either way.
> (ICANN says it's "non profit" but so was our Major League Football association for a long time
TEAMS in the NFL make money. The NFL *league office* doesn't make money, so it has no income taxes to pay (almost none, anyway).
The league office is not and never was a 501(c)(3) *charity*. It was a 501(c)(6) business league, an organization which does not itself make money, but exists to help other (tax-paying) businesses make money.
From the beginning, 'internet' was designed to be composed of multiple separated networks. An intranet here, connected to an intranet there, using internet technologies....out comes the 'Internet'.
There is NOTHING preventing countries, companies, government, communes, families, cities.... from setting up their own separate internet, with or without US control of the naming authority. Just silly.
The politicians are afraid of being compared to Jimmy Carter's giving up the Panama Canal (designed, built and maintained by the US until 1999).
The US didn't get any compensation for that act but, all-in-all, the canal still seem to be fulfilling its purpose - for the US and the rest of the world.
3 globalists ran by jews for jews, who do not give a single shit about the United States of America.
Now you know why they are urging this change and urging it fast. Zionism always has the sneakiest conniving agenda which subverts entire nations to uphold it's despicable practice.
I wish I weren't voting for Clinton. :(
It's finally happened and I can't sit on my Libertarian fence any more. :(
By the time the alt-right is done, we'll have Jim Crow laws again. :(
Soon you will learn that - all over again,
This is meaningless outside of symbolism.
Anybody can set up an alternate root server, and the only thing that makes any particular root server's assignments valuable is if ISPs in general use it. At worst, if ICANN (or any successor) abuses control over the root servers, there will be a few weeks until everybody switches to a fork under new management (probably under a consortium of businesses led by Google anyway). And as the so-called US government oversight of the current servers is entirely without any practical effects at all, so would be "surrendering" it.
The fact that US "control" keeps generating news stories is the obvious reason to give it up; it causes antagonism and controversy without adding any value at all.
Trump isn't that bad, man. Read his books. They personally helped groom me into a MNC CEO.
Trump is highly intelligent, passionate and a great innovator, and he loves helping people.
Isn't the United States Government an authoritarian government, in that it is really under the control of the corporations that buy the politicians?
1. No one is under any obligation to pay you to say whatever you like. Demanding to be paid for your arbitrary content is absurd.
2. You know #killallmen was a joke mocking people like you who took it seriously, right? It mocked war video games and people who take sentence fragments out of context.
Why don't you set up altrighttube.com to fund these videos? There might actually get a market, I mean look at Breitbart.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Obama administration and they are very eager to get this done within his last few months in office, out of fear that Trump might get elected and not be stupid enough to fulfill their desires in surrendering the net to the globalist orgs.
Prepare to pay a new internet tax to the UN.... for your own good, of course.
For my entire lifetime the UN and various affiliated NGOs have been trying to get oversight of various human activities transferred to unaccountable international organaizations with the openly-stated goal of then adding a UN tax to fund the UN directly rather than from piles of money allocated by national governments. As long as the UN gets its cash from places like the USA, the lawmakers in the USA can demand transparency and accountability and threaten to withhold or reduce funds. The UN officials hate this. They think of themselves as a global government that is above national governments and should not be answerable to them. The last time I saw this play was with the proposed "Law of the Sea" treaty which had all sorts of good-sounding peace and doves talk, but in the fine-print added a tax on fishing, oil exploration, and sea-based minerals activity that went directly to the UN.
When the sales guy talks really fast and urges an immediate purchase, WALK AWAY.
Most business transactions that are BAD for you are wrapped in a banner of "ACT NOW!", "Be one of the first ten callers!", "This bargain expires in only 12 hours!", "We only have 3 left!", "A deal THIS good may never come around again!", "Don't Miss out!", etc.
A good deal that benefits both parties equally is usually not offered with a time-pressure tactic. If it's good for all parties, then all parties are perfectly happy to keep the option open to do it at any time.
Just sayin' [wink]
Caveat emptor
These are the same that are actively censoring us already, imagine the internet in the hands of the globalist controlled UN:
Facebook: ...
Merkel had Zuckerberg cancel the facebook page of this girl.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
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Social Media CEOs Embrace Black Lives Matter; Censor Critics
www.beforeitsnews.com/politics/2016/05/social-media-c... ...
May 18, 2016
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"And isn't it an amazing coincidence how Twitter began this censorship purge
immediately after a member of the Saudi royal family became Twitter's 2nd biggest share holder."
Twitter Recruits Crazed Feminist to Police Free Speech
https://youtu.be/OAI2SWIvrkc
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Twitter Sides With ISIS And Muslim Terrorists, Shuts Down
shoebat.com
Mar 08, 2016 Twitter Sides With ISIS And Muslim Terrorists, Shuts Down Accounts Of Anonymous And Others Who Report Islamic State Accounts
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The Inevitable Heat Death of Twitter
https://youtu.be/iR9dXU8MV0o
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Twitter accused of shutting down Hillary critics | The American Mirror
www.theamericanmirror.com/twit......