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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."
That's not how you beg for us to give you our old toys.
The GAO is probably right, it doesn't require an act of congress, but the lawsuit only has to delay it long enough for Trump to become president. If Hillary becomes president, then it's pointless.
It could cause problems if domain names are influence-able by governments hostile to free speech, but If it gets too annoying, we'll all just switch to another name server. They can't keep the speech itself down, only certain domain names. My point is, that in the worst case, it's not the end of the world, and the Google index is much, much more important.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I've known this has been coming for nearly 15 years. Why would they sue now?
1. Because they didn't think it would actually happen and 2. Because old fucks who don't even know how to use email or the difference between an IP address and your home address are elected to make laws about technology that they have 0 clue about.
The only thing of importance IANA has power over is the DNS root zone, but that is just meaningless (yes, lots of real estate value connected to it but in essence its meaningless). If google would be bought by the chinese it would be far worse.
They are afraid and uneducated, not right. There is a difference.
I wonder what his progress is and yes the US constitution clearly says both houses must vote for Obama to do this
http://saveie6.com/
It's an election year. And another lawsuit for Republicans to fundraise money off of.
do it like the communist brother country of north korea and opt out of the imperialist domain name system controlled by the united states! Enter bare ipv4 addresses instead! Its much better because everyone who owns a domain is a filthy capitalist who lives off the hard work of other people! Down with the imperialist west!
What is better has nothing to do with all this. A lot of those countries, that some Americans do not want to trust with co-managing a bit of the infrastructure, simply will not take no for an answer because they in turn do not trust the US.
Bottom line, share it or it gets forked. That wont make anyone happy and is even worse.
And lets be honest, there is not much harm that can come from this By now countries have much better ways for controlling their neck of the internet than corrupting the core infrastructure. They just don't need to.
This whole thing is mostly a pissing contest between national ego's.
And finally, if it turns out the US really is unhappy with the result, they can always fork it themselves.
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
A role or a position is not something you can own. The internet is an international organization thing that doesn't belong to any country. The way it works is decided between the countries, and changing the way it works can be subject to voting or negotiations, but talking about property in this context is either retarded or plainly dishonest.
That our authority over DNS is legally US government property in any sense the framers would have agreed upon, even stretching that concept of property to include intangible property.
Even if you can argue that DNS is American government property, it's pretty useless property. Since it is largely administered in a decentralized fashion, if the rest of the world wants it can set up its own DNS system and have people in their country point to their preferred root servers.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Look you dirty millennial, get out of my series of tubes.
It's not really about Republicans or Democrats, just about abuse of power and taxpayer dollars. This is people who are clearly taking money from the taxpayer to advance their own political interests. Even the "anonymous" submission to slashdot is peppered not with the names of the states or the importance or lack of importance of the lawsuit, but just with the names of the attorneys general involved.
It is political posturing, pure and simple. The attorneys general should be fired for wasting government time and taxpayer money, and adding frivolous burdens to an already overburdened court system.
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..
Right for the wrong reasons is still right.
Thank you creimer! The statement you made indicates that you are not asleep when it comes to politics!
So your reasoning is to cede power to a larger, less organized body so that we're less impacted? Isnt it equally true that a larger less organized body is less willing to address issues raised by those they impact, even if that impact is thru inaction to begin with?
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
Please excuse my ignorance, but won't the opening the Web to other countries make it easier to cause mayhem??
They are just pulling their inner racist card. Afraid of anyone and anything different from them so we can't let someone else have control or be in our neighborhood, etc. Same can be said about their moronic, clueless arguments against gun control. They fear monger and don't do anything or KNOW anything of any value at all. If they think our freedom of speech is going to be impacted even slightly by a change in who governs ICANN they are idiots. You're not being moved to Iran simply because ICANN is governed by an international body, as it should be.
Individual countries have already governed or tried to govern over their little tiny corners of the internet.
Your logic makes no sense at all.
Even if one considers the ICANN handoff to be a terrible plan; that still leaves the "and a state would have standing to block this why exactly?" problem unsolved.
I'm having trouble thinking of a reading of the constitution where one of the several states gets to stop the feds from making a change in management to a Department of Commerce contractor(handling a job previously done by a DoD contractor) overseeing the outgrowth of a federal military research project.
It'd be like Vermont going to court because they think that selling F-15s to the Saudis is a terrible plan. They may well be entirely correct; but even pretty minimalist readings of the constitution tend to give the feds most of the foreign policy power.
I'm deeply unclear on what the world thinks they'll get from ICANN that they haven't under US administration; and also unclear on what we have to gain from changing the situation; but I'm still baffled as to what possible standing state governments have on the issue.
In an article published on Ars Technica today, ICANN's president of the global domains division says it's no big deal:
the Commerce Department's involvement "is a sore point for a lot of other governments." That's a mindset Vint Cert, Google's Internet evangelist and former ICANN chairman, also holds. "It's time to show that the Internet doesn't require government oversight," Cert told Bloomberg. "Other governments look at that and ask why should the US government have this special position. It isn't necessary any more."
Meanwhile, those same governments who are complaining, exert large scale censorship of the Internet in their countries.
The internet is an international organization thing that doesn't belong to any country. The way it works is decided between the countries, and changing the way it works can be subject to voting or negotiations,
Tell that to the people in China, Iran, North Korea and many other countries whose internet access is severely restricted by their government.
I'm guessing you're one of those people who thinks anyone who is white is racist by default, and any racist remarks directed towards white people can't ever be racist.
Then you wonder why white people are angry.
It's about time we have a president who really gets the cyber.
https://youtu.be/bYJ_H2c5IWc
You are welcome on my lawn.
So either share the ball, or the other kids will just buy their own ball and won't let the US play.
The internet has been a wholly commercial entity for decades now.
If the government wanted to keep control of it, they shouldn't have handed it over, practically for free, to the various commercial interests that now have a stranglehold. It's a bit late to be complaining about it being "US property".
That's all well and good, in theory, but when it comes right down to it, who ultimately has their 'finger on the button', so-to-speak, and can the free world really trust them? Are they incorruptible? Completely unbiased and objective? Also, think about this: Trying to decide anything at all by committee, or getting anything done in a realistic amount of time by a committee. Malfeasance? For the moment, let's say 'no'. Some of the member countries dragging their feet on something they don't like and don't want? More likely than I care to think about. Getting all political about it, using their position on the committee as leverage? Also more likely than I care to think about.
The internet has flourished in many ways because it's been controlled by a liberal free market country like the United States. The US is all about free speech, free flow of ideas, etc - much more so than any other country on Earth.
For most of the countries on Earth the idea of free speech (as in "say anything you want") is an alien concept. Go ahead and say something bad about the Thai royals in Thailand. How about registering "putinsucks.ru"? Have fun in the gulag.
Hey, you're going to create a website that competes against the national phone company? Good luck with that, little toad. You're going to blog about how government ministers are idiots? Yeah, goodbye to that too.
It'll happen slowly, and accelerate over time, like everything.
It only takes one bureaucrat to decide that zombo.com is a threat to the world order, and bam it's gone.
If anything, the whole-hearted embrace of the "world internet" here shows that most slashdot readers never left their parents' basement.
People seem to be forgetting that IANA _and_ ICANN are on the chopping blocks. Forward look ups could use an alternative service, but what if someone just takes half your IPs away and gives them to someone else because they don't like what your sites do?
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I'm guessing you're one of those people who thinks anyone who is white is racist by default, and any racist remarks directed towards white people can't ever be racist.
Then you wonder why white people are angry.
You live in a society where if you utter the word "nigger" you're branded a racist if you're white, and an elightened african american if you're black. And this is independent of the context where such word is used.
It's like saying only women have the right to use the word "clitoris" or "vagina", and if a men utters it well then he is a sick piece of garbage. What if he happens to be a doctor ?
What garbage. Not a single one of your contentions makes any sense.
How hard do you have to work to be this clueless? Or does it come with The Privilege?
Please tell me this is satire.
This is a non-event at worst
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
You live in a society where if you utter the word "nigger" you're branded a racist if you're white, and an elightened african american if you're black.
Except nobody equates using that word with enlightenment, even if the user is black. Some black people may use it in certain situations, but its meanings are very context dependent.
However, even if the word didn't have such complex baggage, it is not remarkable that people who are familiar in some way can use terms amongst themselves that they would not want others to use. For example, a married man would likely object to other men referring to his wife as "honey", "sweetie", etc. There is nothing inherently wrong with those words, but using them in the wrong context is innapropriate.
Similarly, a father may introduce his son as "his boy", but that doesn't mean calling people "boy" is appropriate.
It's like saying only women have the right to use the word "clitoris" or "vagina", and if a men utters it well then he is a sick piece of garbage. What if he happens to be a doctor ?
Yeah, its nothing like that. Not the least reason being that those are anatomical terms and not racial slurs.
NTIA has had oversite of ICANN for about 20 years now. What have they done in that 20 years? .xxx domain. That's it.
They blocked creation of the
So what will we be losing?
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.
Yup... and?
Limiting the topic to just DNS management... can you explain in what way that 96% of the world population is unhappy with the benevolent dictatorship the US has had over the internet for all of this time?
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
For good or bad this will happen. The most direct effect I see is monetary. ICANN can now set their share of the revenue from each domain name with complete freedom. It is now 0.17 cents, I think!! I see that increasing "A LOT" in the future..
;) As said elsewhere if problems come up the internet will try to re route ;)
The other thing will be attempted global laws and regulations placed upon all internet users (crypto?, etc) to satisfy governments. After all every government whats to read "ALL" the communications in order to protect their people.
Whether these will be good or bad who knows. Only time will tell.
But it is going to be interesting
ICANN includes IANA with it. IANA is the authority for IP address ownership. If you don't have an IP address, no amount of fucking with DNS will allow you to be reachable.
The status quo is such that the US government doesn't seize ownership of either domain names or IP addresses, except those that are registered or otherwise managed within its own jurisdiction. Sites that the US government really hates (thepiratebay for example) don't have a problem existing so long as their names and numbers aren't any of those delegated for use within the US. There hasn't been any indication at all that this will ever change.
If governance over the whole thing transfers elsewhere, there isn't any telling what new rules can be added. Examples could include international laws being enforced in ways that they've never previously been enforced, such as WIPO rules being applied to kill sites like thepiratebay.
The Democrats are no strangers to censorship. Recently, for instance, they have proposed imprisoning (and worse) "global warming deniers". By and large, leftists are the more interested in silencing free speech.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Sites that the US government really hates (thepiratebay for example) don't have a problem existing so long as their names and numbers aren't any of those delegated for use within the US.
That's only because it never occurred to the MAFIAA to take the case to a US court. "This court has jurisdiction because all the good movies are made here, so anyone pirating movies is doing business with California" or something.
Just a thought, but perhaps it's for the best that ICANN gets handed over before Sweden gets an investor-state arbitration treaty with the US.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Except they have no legal standing to bring this suit, and they know it. They are doing this ONLY because it guarantees their re-election.
Election year.
Then if your logic is true, and it belongs to the US then the US is allowed to give it away and the attorney generals of a few disgruntled states have no legal standing to object.
The fact that those countries can control access to the internet just helps prove that the US isn't in control of the internet. Those countries ignore the dictates from the US, they ignore the dictates from the UN, and they'll ignore the dictates from ICANN no matter who technically controls ICANN.
And that censorship will neither increase nor diminish based upon whether the department of commerce occasionally notices that ICANN exists.
NTIA has had oversite of ICANN for about 20 years now. What have they done in that 20 years? .xxx domain. That's it.
They blocked creation of the
So what will we be losing?
Doing nothing is a very good thing. Think of all the somethings an organization that appointed Saudi Arabia chair of the human rights commission could do.
I smell a conspiracy! A certain organization has a vested interest in not letting China or Russia have any say in internet governance whatsoever. That organization is...
Nevada...
Arizona...
Texas...
Oklahoma...
Conspiracies are such fun. Now we'll have to hear about this one for a few decades after it gets thoroughly debunked.
Welcome to my conspiracy-nut petri dish!
No the president can't
It requires an act of congress. Obama is violating the constitution and the administrative procedures act.
That's only because it never occurred to the MAFIAA to take the case to a US court. "This court has jurisdiction because all the good movies are made here, so anyone pirating movies is doing business with California" or something.
Just a thought, but perhaps it's for the best that ICANN gets handed over before Sweden gets an investor-state arbitration treaty with the US.
I think if they were able to do that, they would have already. They tried SOPA/PIPA afterall, and those would have been much worse because they'd even impact youtube, whereas going after ICANN wouldn't do anything to youtube.
They know that it's going to be very difficult to influence US law after what happened with SOPA, so now they're going after international law via treaty organizations. And, guess what we're handing ICANN over to?
Let me play devils advocate for a second. The federal government will always have jurisdiction over the DNS servers in the US. If US dns servers are forced to use a new authority, there's nothing IANA can do about it. The FCC would have no problem finding the means of enforcing it. Also many other countries I think would follow our lead if the DNS system became bifurcation. Either way our government will find ways to gain regulatory power.
Exactly. ICANN and IANA don't exist because they have a mandate from the US government, they exist because there is a consensus that they're doing a reasonable job. You don't own an IP address because IANA says so, you own an IP address because the people who configure the BGP routes for backbone networks agree to send packets for you to the place that you've asked. They currently do this because they perceive the assignments made by IANA (and then subsequently by national organisations) to be fair and equitable. If it looks like the USA is imposing too much control on IANA, then their authority goes away and there is likely to be a new consensus about whose assignments become the real ones (probably with a long interim process where bits of the Internet were broken or unreliable).
Ironically, a lawsuit like this is exactly the sort of thing that would push the consensus away from the USA.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The infrastructure in Europe and Asia would disagree. If the US drops offline the internet would still exist. It is not like it was even ten years ago.
It's not a global asset it's a US asset we designed and built that we have been nice enough to let others use.
What like the GPS system? The original design and infrastructure may have been American designed, but the internet as a whole nowadays very much is not and you don't own it anymore than England owns the English language.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
No, they are doing it because the Obama administration happens to be the administration in charge while the plans proceed. If it had been a Republican administration, it would be a new, glorious day for freedom from "The Government".
You do realise that the US has used its ownership of ICANN and IANA to seize websites belonging to Iranian, Iraqi, Afghan and other countries nationals right? Simply because it labels the owners of those websites a particular way...
Fear? It's a matter of ceding control, so it is not fear but distrust that motivates resistance.
Wow... so ignorant.
No - none of them will be in charge.
Has anybody even READ the proposal ?
After the hand-over there will be one FEWER authoritarian governments in charge of the DNS root then there are now. Not more, less.
No government oversight at all - from any government.
Everybody on the stake holder list is NOT A GOVERNMENT.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
So worst case scenario - somebody tries to cease your IP. Since no governments whatsoever will have any say in this after the fact all the stuff about Iran and North Korea is complete bullshit but maybe some private corporation may really dislike your page telling the world about the cyanide they dumped in your towns' drinking water or something.
Somehow this multistakeholder group of non-government actors get convinced to start ceasing IPs in an oppressive manner.
That's the day the IPV6 transition actually happens. We don't have even IANA managing those - they don't need management because the supply exceeds the maximum theoretical demand a thousand times over.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Such complete bullshit.
The US were fairly heavily involved in some of the pre-internet stuff that the internet would later be built on. But the US only contribution to the core of the internet was Vint Cerf's internet protocol. Everything else was collaboratively developed by people from all over the world, much of it with no US involvement at all. Including the internet's killer app - the world wide web, which was built at CERN in Switzerland.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Isn't it ironic that the stated reason the right wants to block this is 'to prevent governments from censoring the web' (conveniently ignoring that it will REDUCE the power of governments, both foreign and US to do anything - hell now they can't even ask the US to do it via diplomatic means... when literally the ONLY thing the US dept. of commerce has DONE with this oversight- EVER was an act of censorship (they blocked the creation of the .xxx domain).
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Umm no, since the internet is the property of the United States. Epic Fail.
Except they are not right. Move along Potsy.
Umm... we did, and it's currently called "The Internet". It just made sense to let other countries use it too.
Do you have any other blindingly obvious epiphanies you'd like to share with us? Like water being wet, the sky being blue, or grass being green? I never said or even implied that we're corruption-free, only that they're going to be worse, so how about you shut the fuck up and stop wasting everyone's time with your useless drivel?
What do **you** mean, "you people??" Aaaaaaaand the ending credits, 'cause you know you wanna: https://youtu.be/kFz7rZY_DDI
Instead we may see fast shutdowns of sites which hurt some peoples feelings as in the minds of Germany or France, the content of the website is 'hate speech'
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
How so? What part of the constitution? It's a minor relationship with a private non-profit corporation in a minor branch of a lesser department that many legislators want to defund. Having to have congressional approval for this low level an action is extreme micro management.
oh bullshit.
"the rest of the world is scary"
also bullshit.
198 countries in teh world, 150 of them have freedom and rules emulating the western concept of such.
the functions of ICANN and IANA absolutely should be under mutual control via the UN.
the fact our own government is actively seeking an internet kill switch is proof we cannot ourselves be trusted with sole control of it.
all this bullshit is is the typical xenophobic fear of other countries conservatives typically display at every opportunity.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
but distrust based on ignorance that motivates resistance.
FTFY
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
whats really amusing is how these idiots even think they have standing to sue
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
198 countries in the world.
150ish of them have freedom.
the only thing truly holding the UN back is the fact we gave several nations extra special voting rights.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
so we're not supposed to mention things that poke holes in your theory ?
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Wish I had moderator points to upgrade you, for you are correct
The original ICANN wasn't intended as a government body at all and INANA did nothing particularly valuable in sustaining the pool of IPv4 addresses, so why is this a big deal now?
Because President Black Man, that's why!!
With unemployment down, the deficit slashed, and a host of other things, if Obama was trying to destroy the US he's been remarkably unsuccessful at it.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
That would be the insanely obtusely named property clause.
AKA Article 4 Section 3 clause 2
Going beyond the theory proposed by the AG's this would also come under the Advise and Consent for treaties with foreign governments as well.
Not surprised people have forgotten the basics of the constitution Obama is a law professor and he seems to have forgotten all of it.
There's nothing to do with foreign governments here. ICANN basically controls it all anyway as a private corporation, with the department of commerce doing nothing at all as far as management. The only change is that instead of doing nothing but nominally being in charge, the department continues to do nothing but removes their name from it.
The US government does not own the internet. It just has some administrative relationship with the private corporation that controls a subset of top level domain names. No property is being given away.
And besides this has been in the works for FIFTEEN years! But it's an election season and so politicians need a hot button issue to distract everyone from important stuff.
IANA doesn't issue individual IP addresses. It allocates blocks of addresses, and assigns them to regional Internet registries, which then in turn allocate them in their respective regions. So it can't deny you personally an IP address. At most, it can deny your entire country an IP address block, but that is basically the cyber equivalent of nuking someone - it's just not going to happen, because the whole thing will go down if anyone tries.
But the US only contribution to the core of the internet was Vint Cerf's internet protocol.
You misunderstand: That IS the internet. Anything else you might be referring to (like the world wide web) just runs on top of it, and the internet exists with or without it. Any other definition of "the internet" may as well include Facebook or Microsoft Internet Explorer because these things are equally relevant. You can argue that DNS and routing protocols like BGP are integral to its success, and you'd be correct, but those not only came way later, but are both optional and replaceable (in fact a replacement for BGP is already in the works.)
That's the day the IPV6 transition actually happens. We don't have even IANA managing those - they don't need management because the supply exceeds the maximum theoretical demand a thousand times over.
That is incorrect, IANA delegates superblocks to RIRs just like with IPv4.
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rf...
This HAS to be done, or else it would literally be impossible to configure BGPv3 (and higher) to determine how to route traffic in the backbone.
oh bullshit.
"the rest of the world is scary"
also bullshit.
198 countries in teh world, 150 of them have freedom and rules emulating the western concept of such.
And not every western country views freedom of speech the same way. The fact that you think otherwise tells me that you aren't terribly educated. For example, have you seen the GNAA spam on slashdot lately? In most western countries, that's considered a hate crime and can land you in jail. Not so in the US. In Germany, *any* speech or other symbolism about Nazisism can land you in jail (even so much as goosestepping, even if you're doing it as a joke, can get you in a LOT of trouble there.)
It's because of this that US is by far the most relaxed when it comes to free speech. This is a fact.
the fact our own government is actively seeking an internet kill switch is proof we cannot ourselves be trusted with sole control of it.
Are you really dumb enough to think an internet kill switch would work internationally? Even if the US government seized control of ICANN and began "killing" the internet that way, it wouldn't happen very fast at all. ICANN delegates IP address control to IANA, and IANA delegates IP addresses to the various RIRs (for example, the North American RIR is ARIN.) Even if the US government told IANA to "kill" the internet, first it would have to go to the RIRs and tell them that their IP addresses are all revoked. Assuming that the RIRs complied (and I really doubt they would) the RIRs would then have to tell all of the ISPs within their jurisdiction to change their BGP configuration. This whole process would take some time to pull off (probably a few days,) so it would totally defeat the intended purpose of a kill switch.
The absolute best the US government could do to kill the whole internet is suddenly tell all of the US based backbone providers to reconfigure BGP to claim ownership of all of the world's IP addresses (in other words, literally a global route poisoning,) but they don't need control of ICANN to do that. And even if this did happen, all that would be required is for non-US based backbone providers to simply kill their BGP peering neighbor relationships with US based backbone ISPs and the rest of the world would be up and running again, regardless of whether this "kill switch" was active.
Either way, you'd have to be pretty dumb to think that ICANN is in any way useful as a kill switch. Can it be used destructively in the long term? Yes, absolutely, but that is a much different thing than a kill switch.
Besides, the idea of a kill switch was championed by the same idiot (Obama) who is championing giving up ICANN. He obviously hasn't thought either through very well, because if one were to kill internet access, even domestically, its consequences on the economy would be far more devastating than any terrorist attack that it's supposed to help prevent, which means that he would be doing groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda a favor since their primary goal of terror attacks is to damage the US economy.
This is true, however in principle IANA can reclaim an IP address from a RIR, who will then have to reclaim it from the ISP.
Have they ever done that? No.
Do they have a process for making such a request? No.
But the thing is: If governance changes hands, then the policies (and their actions) could very well change.
Sure. But they only have real power insofar as states agree to treat them as the ultimate authority. Which is very unlikely to be the case if they tried to implement such policies.
Consider that we have a UN-managed organization that handles mail and post on international level - Universal Postal Union. In fact, it's over 130 years old, predating UN itself. And yet no censorship resulted out of it, aside from what the countries themselves implement in their respective jurisdictions (which they can always do regardless, as sovereign states). Why? Same reason - if UPU were to get too heavy-handed, the drawbacks would outweigh the benefits of a single standardized mail exchange system, and large players would simply withdraw.
>You misunderstand: That IS the internet.
It's really not. There are dozens of protocols for network addressing and when the internet actually became big the IP had long ceased to be anywhere near the best one. It was archaic long before the internet spread off university campusses.
The internet's success came from the lack of government or corporate control - not from the technology, there were more advanced large scale networks before anybody outside academia had ever even heard of the internet. It displaced them due to lack of owners - not because of the technology. Cerf himself has said there are things he would do differently if he could do it over now. Many of which he wanted to do even then but the machines which arpanet ran on at the time (mostly PDP10's) simply didn't have the processing power to handle (like built-in by-default encryption).
Anyway, IP is not even the lowest level protocol on the internet. What about the routing protocols ? What about the hardware protocols ? Those had improved over the years and, in fact, have proven to be better for a true internet BECAUSE they were easy to swap out.
We are tied to IP only because of the cost of changing, not because it's the best available tool for the job - hell we can't get the world to even adopt the best available version of IP.
You overstate and greatly overestimate the important of IP to the internet. If one of the other early large networks with more advanced address protocols had offered the lack of either government or corporate control the early internet had - the internet would have died out before the 1990s even hit. As late as 1991 most computer scientists were convinced an information superhighway was coming and convinced it would not be the internet which was an archaic piece of technology that was simply nowhere near the best we had.
The one thing they hadn't counted on was the attraction of a lack of centralized authority.
So removing one of the last vestiges of centralized authority can only strengthen the internet's sole good attribute.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Then we build a new addressing protocol and a new routing protocol that doesn't need any centralized system. A peer to peer addressing scheme where you request one from a pool and you keep the one you got until you release it.
Do you think any part of the internet is not replacable ? We've already replaced most parts several times.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Time to setup a parallel network.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Sure. But they only have real power insofar as states agree to treat them as the ultimate authority. Which is very unlikely to be the case if they tried to implement such policies.
Imagine a scenario however where they reclaim an IP block from say Asia and then issue it to North America. Whatever ISP now has the IP block is probably going to change their BGP configuration to claim ownership. That will affect far more countries than just the one that now owns it, and I suspect that backbone providers not within the affected Asian country would go with whatever IANA says.
if UPU were to get too heavy-handed, the drawbacks would outweigh the benefits of a single standardized mail exchange system, and large players would simply withdraw.
It would be possible to withdraw from a mail system because ultimately it still remains possible to deliver letters with or without a central authority. However if you don't have a universal agreement on assigned names and numbers for the internet, the whole thing just doesn't work. For an example of what that would look like, look at what happened when Pakistan decided to blackhole youtube by poisoning the BGP route tables.
https://www.cnet.com/news/how-...
Better not insult the prophet.
(((:-{)>8
^ Dude with boobs Mohammed (didn't shave though).
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Look at some of the nonsense the UN general assembly wants and shudder. Thank dog they are powerless.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Ok, come up with one then.
Personally, I don't think it would be possible without sacrificing speed in a really bad way. You wouldn't be able to rely on things like summary routes, which means backbone routers would be considerably slower under the weight of much bigger and more complex routing tables (which also means that you probably couldn't rely on ASICs being practical either.) You probably couldn't rely on the existing prefix length (ipv6) or subnet mask (ipv4) system at all (which uses dead simple AND operations to calculate packet destinations.) You'd also by necessity have to go through a network discovery period, likely even on the client side like TOR has to do, each time you need to connect to a host.
You do know that there were dozens of more advanced routing prototocols developed in between the IP being created and the internet becoming mainstream right ? The most common was X.25 - and frankly if an X.25 network was the Mona Lisa then IP was the drawing on your fridge that your 3-year old did in crayon.
All those massive privately owned large-scale networks (mostly country-wide) which prolifirated in the 1980s under various governments and corporations had their own routing protocols, most made IP look primitive. The success of the internet over those networks was down to one thing and one thing only - the lack of a corporate or government control, which was mostly a result of it being primitive compared to the other networks which were around at the time. It was not the technology, it was the lack of authority and direct profit motive.
Ultimately entities trying to either control content or profit from all content on the network could not compete with a network where all the control and profits went to the person putting it on the network without any publisher's cut. Even if that meant using a less advanced technology.
You are thinking of a decentralized routing protocol using terminology that comes from how it's done now - but why ? The best approach would be to completely ignore everything the internet (and it's routing protocols) did - and frankly everything everybody else did as well - and design it from scratch. Instead of a hierarchical design like IP and DNS uses - use a complete peer-to-peer addressing scheme. A machine joins, requests and address, the network hands out a free one - and it keeps it until it releases it or doesn't use it for a certain time, and then the network simply prolifierates the path to that address over the peer-to-peer network much like DNS updates happen.
It's not like swapping out the internet's routing protocols is hard - we've done it 4 times (each new version of BGP essentially obsoleted the old one and replaced it). It was easier to swap out the routing protocols than the IP protocol because there are a lot fewer routers than connected machines on the network and you your need to support legacy systems is smaller.
It may sound insurmountable to build an entirely new network on the same cables that replaces the internet with something better but it really isn't - the internet actually did that to dozens of other networks.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
You do know that there were dozens of more advanced routing prototocols developed in between the IP being created and the internet becoming mainstream right ? The most common was X.25 - and frankly if an X.25 network was the Mona Lisa then IP was the drawing on your fridge that your 3-year old did in crayon.
Either you're joking or you're on crack. If you reversed your logic (i.e. calling x.25 inferior) it would make a LOT more sense. X.25 has basically no modularity whatsoever, and in fact was created before the OSI model was even a thing, which means that the number of things you can use it for and its overall scalability is shit. X.25 furthermore isn't at all analogous to IP because the whole thing much more closely resembles a layer 2 protocol, only it happens to specify some details that would in today's terms be considered layers 1 an d3. Also, because X.25 specifies what the physical layer looks like (which was unreliable as hell) the vast majority of the specification is all about error correction. It's also for this reason that it's slow as shit.
In fact, you know what technology replaced X.25? Frame relay. And frame relay was considered slow, so it was later replaced by MOE and MPLS.
All those massive privately owned large-scale networks (mostly country-wide) which prolifirated in the 1980s under various governments and corporations had their own routing protocols, most made IP look primitive.
IP probably looks primitive to you because, unlike everything else you mentioned, it only has one purpose: Facilitating the transfer of information between networks. That's it. Everything else is handled elsewhere in the OSI model. In fact if you care to notice, IPv6 is even less complex than IPv4. The simplicity is an advantage, not a drawback.
It may sound insurmountable to build an entirely new network on the same cables that replaces the internet with something better but it really isn't
Dude you really have no idea what the fuck you're even talking about. I shouldn't have even bothered replying the second I saw you advocate X.25 as being somehow superior, but I had already typed it by the time I read this.
International relations are complex. In many ways the situation is one of a Hobbesian state-of-nature, where the only one you can trust is yourself. Under such conditions, it doesn't matter whether or not you understand what you might be giving up, it only matters that something is being given up as that necessarily weakens your relative position.
I don't think that's the right approach to this particular issue, but it is in others.
Were these websites on the local country's TLD or .com, .org, etc? .com and others are US property, when you start doing business on US property, you become subject to its laws. This will not change no matter who controls IANA and ICANN, as every country still has jurisdiction in its own TLDs.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?