US' Capitol Hill on the Internet

Anguirel writes "Wired has a few stories from the Hill. First up, ICANN gets a hearing before the House to answer questions about proposed fees. Next, House Majority leader Dick Armey denounced the UN e-mail tax saying it's just the UN being greedy and trying to profit from the Internet. Finally, Y2K conspiracy theories gained some credibility as a conference on the President declaring martial law was held by the US Reserve Officers Association. "

Comments

Re:US controlled? maybe. Net controlled? Yes.

[sjames]

I find it interesting the number of government, quasi-government ond international bodies that actually think they have some authority over domain names (and the number of individuals who think they're right).

DISCLAIMER: I'm not saying anything about ICANN here (yet), but feel free to take this as a bash of WIPO, NetSol, the Clinton administration, etc...

DNS is set up by convention and volentary adherance to RFCs published by the IETF. The many parties involved volentarily go along with this because it's already in place, standards in general are a good thing, and peer pressure to do the right thing. This is as it should be.

If our current DNS system gets FUBARed by the powers that be, there is no law saying another system can't be put online by the people and businesses that use the net. Anybody with a big enough server can run DNS as long as they don't interfere with the operation of the current system. I can serve the domain www.aint.Igreat if I choose to. You can configure your system to use my server if you want to (just set your named.conf to consider my server authoritative for the .Igreat zone)

There are a few of those now, and a few Wins and other resolvers that can be accessed as well. They remain fringe servers because they're too small to handle a large load, and not everybody can access them. That could change if the current DNS gets FUBARed. The current system has no basis in law, and new systems are not prohibited (or prohibitable).

Re:Executive Orders

[Kintanon]

These laws have been around for a very very very long time under certain disaster laws enacted around 50 years ago, about the same time the gold standard was removed and welfare was created.

Also, for those of us who are economists you should know that it only takes 2% of the people how have cash in the banks withdrawing that cash to cause our banking system to collapse. There is FAR FAR more money in the world than actual currency. So if 2% of the population decides to be on the safe side and pull their cash out of the Stock Market and Banks, then we have an economic collapse.

Also, these "fringe" people aren't going to be reacting to the problems, they are going to be causing them. A lot of people believe that Y2K is going to be the end of the world, a huge disaster, or something very very close. So they are going to go crazy on new years eve and cause a lot of the problems they fear. Can you imagine having a few hundred thousand people in each city who are primed for the end of the world, and the power goes off for 45 minutes because of an ice storm or something? Or the power goes down for an hour because of some obscure Y2K problem... anything could be enough to turn those people into a raging paranoid mob bent on looting and burning the city. That sort of situation would easily convince me to delcare martial law if I were president, and with everything working so much more efficiently without Congress, well... why bother to lift it? Just boot congress and get a REAL "government" going!

What I'm talking about isn't exactly far fetched if you know a little bit about human nature, and if you have ever worked in phone tech-support you know how paranoid the average idiot is if something he/she doesn't understand happens.

Kintanon is reachable at sleffer@hotmail.com