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As ICANN Gains Full Oversight Of Domain Name System, Some Wonder If It Means the US Has Given Away The Internet (bbc.com)
The U.S. has given up its remaining control over the Internet. The formal handover, which took effect on Saturday, followed a last-ditch attempt by a group of Republicans to block the move. They had argued that the US concession would open the door for authoritarian governments get control of the network of networks, leading to greater censorship. From a BBC report:A judge in Texas has put the kibosh on a last-minute legal attempt to block the controversial decision for the US to give up control of one of the key systems that powers the internet. It's a move being breathlessly described by some as the US "giving up the internet" to the likes of China, Russia and the Middle East. For starters, while they can take the credit for inventing the underlying technology, the US never "had the internet" to begin with. Nobody did. It's a, duh, network. Decentralised. That's what makes it so powerful. But there are bits of internet infrastructure that some people and governments do have control over, and that's what this row is all about. One of them is the DNS - Domain Name System. This is the system for looking after web addresses. Thanks to the DNS, when you type bbc.com, you're taken to the correct servers for the BBC website. It saves you the grief of having to remember a string of numbers. That pairing of names and numbers is kept in one great big master file, the land registry of the web. The only organisation that can make changes is Icann, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. As of Saturday 1 October 2016, Icann will no longer be under US government oversight.
It's the smell of Freedom!
They had argued that the US concession would open the door for authoritarian governments get control of the network
Rather it has been liberated from the control of an authoritarian government.
If only they'd built a wall around it before September hit.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I'm so brainwashed I remember Obama being President during 9/11! And I remember Hillary Clinton giving specific permission for the hijackers to enter the US, while she was "Secretary of Anti-US Terrorist Operations" a position made legal by Obama while he was hanging out in Mecca renewing his terrorist "Death to America" vows for the Saudi government!
The concern is that in most respects, the US offers one of the wider definitions of freedom of speech. It's not perfect, but it really is better than most. Given US control, you can expect that to be reflected in management of the system.
US control is gone. So we will see what that brings.
Thinking about freedom of speech issues in Europe and the middle east, some countries have applied restrictions that far exceed those imposed by the US. Germany, Iran, etc. come to mind. So the question arises as to how much influence they will be able to exert upon the new management.
Oh well. Brave new world, folks. Onward!
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I mean, presumably if I have a server somewhere, on Google cloud, AWS, at home, whatever, and it it has a public IP address, then I can have it serve up IP addresses of all my other machines when I give it some name. With whatever naming scheme I might like to use. I can make my own IP address lookup system.
Yes, absolutely. This is how I block advertising and malware sites, I set up a DNS server that resolves 20,000+ domains to 0.0.0.0 and pointed all my devices at it. Nothing is preventing you or anyone else from setting up a DNS server, the only challenge would be convincing others to use it, if that was your goal.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
A relative of mine was freaked out about this because pundits made it sound like these countries would be in a position to dictate policy over how we run our slice of the Internet. When I explained how the Internet works and how the US has absolutely no obligation to ever follow their dictates, even going so far as to fork the DNS system if absolutely necessary to keep them from controlling our slice of the Internet the reaction was "then... what's the big deal?"
It seems a lot of people angry about this don't understand that the federal government has precisely no legal obligation to give a flying fuck what other governments think about our domestic internet policies. So if we want to let the NSA steal all of North Korea's secrets and drop leaflets in North Korea showing installation instructions for TOR and how to get to the NSA's cloud hosted wikileaks clone for the juiciest data the DPKR doesn't want its people to know, the rest of the world can't do anything to stop us--just like they can't right now.
The US government could easily militarise Icann in an instance if it wants to. Don't think for a second this wouldn't happen if push came to shove. The US still has control over the entity so long as Icann rests inside US borders.
The only thing critical contributed by the US was TCP/IP. Sure, for a time the US was custodian of the top-level part of the DNS system, but if they had misbehaved too badly, it would just have been taken away from them forcefully. That would have been rather easy, as the majority of the top-level DNS servers are not located in the US anyways. One level below, the US was never relevant except for some domains. Country-specific domains were always under control of that country. Even .com and the like would have been removed from US control if abused too badly.
So, no, nothing was really given away, because the US never had real power over the Internet.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I predict this thread will be full of alt-right jackoffs who don't understand how the internet works and who for some reason hate the idea of privatizing ICANN, but have been hollering for the US Postal Service to be privatized for decades.
What's next, confused alt-righters? You gonna argue for nationalizing the energy industry, phone companies and ISPs too? Make up your goddamn minds.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I think, countries with the most prison inmates hate freedom.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
The reason other countries distrust us is because of experience.
"When the rest of the lot on this rock wants to kill 13 year girls for getting raped?"
I'm Australian. By "the rest of the lot on this rock" (ie non-Americans) you are classifying me among those that want to kill these 13 year old victims.
You are telling me that everybody outside of the USA is automatically a criminal and deserve every bit of hell that you can give them.
And you wonder why non-Americans are suspicious of Americans.
Reading all the comments and seeing that the vast majority of people posting have absolutely no clue how the DNS works makes me wonder if there are still nerds here.