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.

Comments

What's that smell?

[lxs]

It's the smell of Freedom!

Re: What's that smell?

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL, no. We must have different ideas of freedom. This gives businesses more power over this aspect of the internet. I'd rather have a government with a constitution that protects free speech and free expression running parts of the internet like DNS rather than turn it over to businesses, whose primary interest is their profit. If profit and freedom are in opposition, what do you expect the business to support?

Re:What's that smell?

[AmiMoJo]

It's fine to ICANN, it says so right in the headline. ICANN is a US corporation, under US law.

It's not really a big deal. Eventually the root DNS system will have to come under international control of some kind, likely distributed so that no one country can make unilateral decisions.

But that's not what this is, this is just removing the last bit of direct control that the US government has, which is a good thing. It needs to be put beyond direct political control.

Backwards

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Backwards

[mikeiver1]

Pardon me for trying to understand your stance on this but are you actually going to tell me that the US, who literally invented the internet under grants from DARPA, was suppressing freedom of speech and the exchange of ideas on the internet? IF so I am pretty sure I can't get my head up my ass far enough to ever see things from your perspective. The control of the internet has now been seeded to the likes of Russia and and China, two of the most active suppressors of free speech and the exchanging of ideas on the planet right now. We will not even begin to touch on the middle eastern dictatorships and their bent on internet "freedom" The real problems are soon to come with the active suppression of domains coming down from the top level DNS servers that are now under the control of foreign actors. This opens up the possibility of site redirection and suppression on a scale that has only been seen thus far in places like China, Russia, and the middle eastern dictatorships. The US is not a perfect steward by any stretch of the imagination to be sure but it was still far better than what is coming down the pipe at us now.

Re:Backwards

[F.Ultra]

But what does the First Amendment have to do with anything? ICANN was never part of the US government so how could the constitution dictate how and what ICANN did? They only had a contract with the US government that stated that the Department of Commerce would veto any changes to the root file. And since that veto lead to the dismissal of the .xxx top domain one does wonder how that decision was in line with the First Amendment.

Re:Backwards

[Man On Pink Corner]

OK, so let's take a look at these ominous-sounding acronyms, one by one.

CDA is the Communications Decency Act. It makes sense to start off with this one because it not only has the most Orwellian name, but it also represents one of the earliest assaults against online freedom of expression by American politicians. In the US, our legislators face no penalties when they pass overtly unconstitutional laws, but the laws themselves still have to survive court challenges. This happened more or less immediately with the CDA, and the result was genuinely ironic. The only significant part of the CDA that survived was Section 230, which is what releases server operators from responsibility for information posted by their users. So the CDA is actually one of the most important pieces of legislation protecting free expression on the Internet.

COPA Like the problematic parts of the CDA, the Child Online Protection Act was almost immediately struck down, this time in its entirety.

DMCA Another two-edged sword. Some believe that freedom of expression and copyright laws are mutually exclusive. I'm sympathetic to this point of view myself, but the fact is that our Constitution explicitly authorizes Congress to regulate "intellectual property." Unsurprisingly this is also true of essentially every civilized country on Earth. All of them, in the US's place, would have ended up with a DMCA-like law of their own. The differences is that similar legislation in those countries wouldn't have had to conform to the First Amendment. Much like the CDA, one of the parts of the DMCA that survived court challenges is the "safe harbor" provision that has proven to be vitally important to the growth and maintenance of a more-or-less free Internet. Look what's happening in the EU, for instance, where you're no longer allowed to run an open WiFi access point. The DMCA and CDA are what keep this kind of bullshit from happening in the US.

COPPA is the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. It doesn't address free speech, unless your idea of free speech is the freedom to collect personal information from children under 13 without their parents' supervision. If that's your idea of free speech, we're done here.

CIPA, the Children's Internet Protection Act, is problematic from a free-expression standpoint. But it is also strictly limited in scope to schools and libraries that receive government funding. It has no effect on the rights of any private citizens or organizations.

DOPA ("Deleting Online Predators Act") is one I hadn't heard of. It was introduced in Congress but appears to have made no progress toward passage since 2007. It's not the law, so it's not relevant.

COICA, "Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act," and its successor PIPA, "Protect IP Act" also were shelved after widespread protests.

SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, was basically an attempt by the content industries to buy a legislative end run around the DMCA's safe harbor provision. Like the DMCA it comes into play only in the context of copyright law. Like PIPA, it failed to pass in the wake of widespread protests.

CISPA, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, doesn't appear to have anything to do with freedom of speech. It "allows for the sharing of Internet traffic information between the US government and technology and manufacturing companies." It wouldn't be affected one way or the other by the ICANN transfer and isn't germane here.

It's not clear what you mean by "the USITC requesting site blockings." Presumably another case where the right to infringe copyrights collides with the right to free sp

Re:Backwards

[ceoyoyo]

You're right. In this context, the US first amendment is a lot weaker than what most western countries have. The entire US "bill of rights" has that awkward phrase "Congress shall make no law...." Congress doesn't have to make a law to get a private company to yank your entry in the DNS database, and restrictions on the actions of the US congress don't mean anything for any non-US government, and only apply to other US governments, mostly, via a supreme court decision.

The UN itself has this:

Article 19.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

which is pretty apropos.

The US supreme court has maybe been a bit more zealous in many cases about shooting down interpretations of the exceptions than in other places (they have upheld exceptions, of course). But that can change with new justices, it's not at the level of actual constitutional law.

Re:Make The Internet Great Again!

[Overzeetop]

If only they'd built a wall around it before September hit.

It's the reporting

[MikeRT]

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.

Re:It's the reporting

[Dutch Gun]

I had to explain the same thing to my mom, who was concerned about how we were "handing over control of the internet". I told her that this was sort of like handing control over the entity that assigns unique telephone numbers to people, but it doesn't control the phone lines themselves.

Besides which, the internet is somewhat resistant to change of *any* sort, as evidenced by the extremely slow adoption of things like IPv6 and DNSSEC, both of which would be very useful, but simple mass inertial keeps adoption rates down. So, any radical changes by these bodies would likely just be ignored not only for ideological reasons, but for practical ones as well.

Re:Different ideas, indeed

[Lisandro]

You should read what Reporters Without Borders have to say on the matter: http://12mars.rsf.org/2014-en/ .

Re:Different ideas, indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

How much influence? About as much as they currently do.
The nations of the world are already on the advisory board of ICANN, including China, Russia and the various Middle East nations. The US doesn't lose influence, and no other nation gains it. The only change is what court ICANN answers to. You know those people who use the courts to seize domain names and transfer ownership by force? Those are the only ones who stand to lose anything... and their astroturfing is the big reason everyone's so terrified about the USA 'giving up the internet'.

The US never "owned" the Internet.

[gweihir]

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.

Re:The US never "owned" the Internet.

[Shane_Optima]

"Discovery"? Like how radium was discovered?

Yes, as you imply, clearly the WWW is the most important foundational piece of the Internet. Not the invention or popularization of markup languages or Arpanet or Telenet or any of the other early American computer networks.

Re:Different ideas, indeed

[fyngyrz]

The problem there is that they are mixing up surveillance issues with speech issues; the one is distinct from the other in some very important ways.

Surveillance is out of control pretty much everywhere, if for no other reason than the bad actors are running completely loose worldwide. Government and corporate. Speech, however, can exist in a country that allows it, regardless if a government is looking at it, or not.

Reporters tend to do their own gnarly things with speech anyway; they have a soapbox, and it is almost impossible not to serve some viewpoint when on it. I do wish the news was, you know, news, and not opinion, but even picking what stories to cover (and so, by extension, what stories not to cover), some issues get attention, and others don't. That happens at the editorial, reporting, and news consumer reading level, often with leverage from advertisers applied quite strongly.

In the context of that kind of mess, I still wave a flag for being as free as possible to say what you want.

Re:Different ideas, indeed

[fyngyrz]

The only change is what court ICANN answers to.

Yes, that's precisely what I was saying. It's a huge change, one that could bring additional restrictions on speech.

Thanks for putting such a fine point on it. :)

Re: Lovely

[dunkelfalke]

I think, countries with the most prison inmates hate freedom.

Re: Different ideas, indeed

[PatientZero]

Citation needed please. What politician had their right to free speech shit upon?

The entire population of Iraq when the U.S. unilaterally disabled the .iq gTLD and Wikileaks domain in the leadup to the Iraq War.