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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.
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.
Surrender the power of media and communication of the world to Facebook?
Sounds like a good idea. Not.
The Internet could be run globally if the idea was to keep it open for everyone and not censor anyone. But since it would rather be demands for censoring here and there globally and locally it's complete garbage. Power of it handed over to EFF, TPB, GNU and such possibly ...
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.
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).
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
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."
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.
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.
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.
We need to fix the domain name system such that it's a technical issue rather than a legal issue. Decentralize it.
Like trademarks, several items in the Internet require uniqueness. Domain names are one, IP addresses another, protocol numbers are a third, autonomous system numbers for Border Gateway Protocol are a fourth, and I could go on.
SOMEthing has to make a decision, to avoid collisions, and in some cases (such as protocol numbers) the namespace is small and should not be assigned lightly.
Doing this any way other than by a decision making authority is difficult. While there are some computational approaches for doing it algorithmically, they aren't easy - and you're left with the issue of which network of servers is authoritative for a given name space, i.e. how do the operators of a set of servers claim to be more authoritative for THEIR namespace than someone else claiming the same space? Trademark? Bang: Back to the "authority assigned/approved the assignment of a name" solution.
I'd love to see a non-authority-based solution developed and deployed. But I'm not holding my breath waiting for it.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I've wondered if a block chain method could do the job...
When the king heard the words of the Book of the Law he tore his robes.2Kings22:11
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.
----Message from Zionist Overlords----
Your location details have been recorded. Be prepared to assimilate. You shall conform.
----Message End----
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