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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.
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.
I think I could argue that the kinds of commercial censorship that the US engages in are less damaging to freedom of speech and political freedom than the censoring of political speech that is usually referred to when we talk about censorship.
And I say that as an unrepentant, unashamed pirate who thinks that copyright is a bunch of hooey.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc would get into the parallel networks, but it would be through the countries' gateways/filters. This implications of this are not good for the people in nations controlled by thugs.
China is the modern day case study for a for a parallel internetwork-domain system (via the great firewall).
The ".com" and other country specific versions of Google, Facebook and Twitter are all blocked by this firewall. There is self-censored Google.cn and Facebook.cn, but Twitter hasn't decided to get into the parallel network game yet (and get in bed with the censorship)...
The result is not really theoretical, you can look at the current situation and draw your own conclusions
Of course this is just a scaled up version of what is done in corporations already. If you are surfing the internet from work you likely are on a parallel internet that has domains censored today. The real issues are simply the scale of censoring and the laws and forum for arbitration of conflicting interests (e.g., is my-company.biz.com and my-company.biz a conflict? how about awatch.com and awatch.apple.com?)