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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."
They are afraid and uneducated, not right. There is a difference.
It's an election year. And another lawsuit for Republicans to fundraise money off of.
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.
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.
It's symbolic, not meaningless. There's actually a lot of meaning there...
About the only thing worse than having the UN (the majority of members of which are not democracies and don't have much value on free speech) control it would be having GoogleAppleFacebookUmbrellaCorp controlling it.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
This is a non-event at worst
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
Establishing that knowledge *can* be property is necessary, but not sufficient to establish that any piece of knowledge *is* property.
But at stake here isn't knowledge; it's administration.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It's not really about Republicans or Democrats, just about abuse of power and taxpayer dollars
I just assumed the Attorneys General involved were up for re-election, or had their eyes on a Governorship or something. I also know the real reason why they are wrong about this, it's because Lyin' Ted Cruz thinks its a good idea.
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.
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 US is only sometimes a democracy. At the state level we had to basically drag them kicking and crying into equal apportionment, and even then we still have totally messed up representative districts continually being redrawn to cement power relationships. Even a mere 50 years ago it was common place to have grossly unbalanced legislative districts (disproportionate apportionment), denial of voting rights to a very large fraction of hard working and law abiding citizens. The US is new to democracy and still stumbling over it.
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.
No the president can't
It requires an act of congress. Obama is violating the constitution and the administrative procedures act.
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.
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
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 *
Investing a private company over behaviour that was almost certainly criminal fraud... yeah that's the same thing.
Oh wait... no - that's literally the government's single most important job. It's the one job even the fucking libertarians think the government SHOULD be doing: investigating and prosecuting crimes to defend the liberties of the peoplel
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
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.