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Four States Sue To Stop Internet Transition (thehill.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: Republican attorneys general in four states are filing a lawsuit to block the transfer of internet domain systems oversight from the U.S. to an international governing body. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt and Nevada Attorney General Paul Laxalt filed a lawsuit on Wednesday night to stop the White House's proposed transition of Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) functions. The state officials cite constitutional concerns in their suit against the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, U.S. government and the Department of Commerce. "The Obama Administration's decision violates the Property Clause of the U.S. Constitution by giving away government property without congressional authorization, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution by chilling speech, and the Administrative Procedure Act by acting beyond statutory authority," a statement released by Paxton's office reads. The attorneys generals claim that the U.S. government is ceding government property, pointing to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) review that "concluded that the transition does not involve a transfer of U.S. government property requiring Congressional approval." Paxton also echoed Texas Sen. Ted Cruz's warnings that the transition could harm free speech on the internet by giving Russia, China and Iran a voice on the international governing body that would oversee internet domain systems. "Trusting authoritarian regimes to ensure the continued freedom of the internet is lunacy," Paxton said. "The president does not have the authority to simply give away America's pioneering role in ensuring that the internet remains a place where free expression can flourish."
The latest push to transition oversight began with a 2009 agreement between NTIA and ICANN. The agency, though, noted that the goal of completely privatizing the domain name system dates back to 1997, and that the U.S. government reiterated that goal when it partnered with ICANN a year later.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/03/18/us-transfer-internet-control-years-in-making-fueled-by-foreign-pressure.html
How exactly then will this work when one DNS server has a record for one Ip address and another points to another such as an anti Putin site?
DNSSEC.
Due to the nature of DNSSEC, so long as the root is trusted all DNSSEC-enabled domains (assuming they're part of a signed TLD) are protected from such forgeries.
A large-scale attacker could certainly setup their own DNS infrastructure that's essentially the same as the standard system but with some minor modifications to redirect specific domain names to systems they control, but this would cause DNSSEC failures (assuming the resolver supports DNSSEC).
One would think that Attorneys General are good enough lawyers to understand the concepts of legal standing and tangible harm. But if they had they wouldn't have wasted taxpayer dollars filing suit on these grounds. Politics as usual in the good old USA.
We are the 198 proof..
Isn't that a pretty easy one? Unless you adhere to a reading of the constitution that allows for virtually no federal government activity at all(in which case ARPA probably shouldn't have ever had the cash to spend on the project; and the Department of Commerce either shouldn't exist or should be a tiny fraction of the size and scope); the US government clearly has the authority to spend allocate DoD funds to an R&D project deemed to be of military interest; to hire somebody to handle the technical work bundled under the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority; and to transfer the contract for the same functions over to the Department of Commerce once it became clear that civilian and commercial applications of the technology were where the action is.
.com bubble, companies trying to get users to point to their nameservers so that they could sell shitty vanity domains were a dime a dozen; and nobody even argued that US nationals had any duty to abide by ICANN-defined names and numbers; it's just that the market value of DNS servers that live in a strange world of their own turned out to be pretty limited). ICANN's authority, to the degree it has any, is founded in the fact that it's a pain in the ass to administer and maintain systems that have drifted out of compatibility with what the majority is using.
That doesn't mean that the US has any right to get other people to care what its DNS servers say; what media types it defines, etc; but it takes a pretty narrow reading of their powers to suggest that they don't have the authority to set up a body to publish that sort of thing in the hopes that others will adopt it because being compatible is more valuable than getting to DIY every aspect of the system.
So far as I know, nobody has ever claimed US authority over 'DNS'(indeed; back in the heady days of the
Even today, and for years now, DNS servers and other infrastructure routinely flout ICANN in situations where the benefits are greater than the costs(oddball hostnames on LANs; lazy content blocking by providing bogus IPs for sites you don't want users getting to, just choosing your own damn port because you feel like running your protocol on it, etc.) They pay more attention in places where incompatibility would hurt more: competing claims on various TLDs would get to be quite a mess; your life would really suck if your pet flavor of IP starts to differ enough that you need custom routing hardware, that sort of thing.
Nobody needs ICANN's blessing to just ignore them; but it's pretty easy to justify the Department of Commerce paying some people to be DNS jockeys.
Yes, but not all democracies are really democracies. And most of the ones that call themselves democracies don't have the free speech protections of the United States.
Even the United Nations own Universal Declaration of Human Rights doesn't guarantee free speech (or any rights for that matter).
Article 29 (3) These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.
What are the "purposes and principals" of the United Nations and how likely are they to change over the years?
All countries, including the US, already have input into ICANN. Check out ICANN.org to see how they work and what is being changed.
.xxx domain.
The Dept of Commerce is not renewing their contract with ICANN so oversight reverts to ICANN itself. The Dept of Commerce has been "hands off" with ICANN for 20 years. Only once have they taken action, blocking the
So we are not "handing over" anything. Unless you consider a government agency that takes no action as something that can be handed over.
ICANN, a US non-profit corporation, will continue to operate as before, taking input from the same companies and countries.