US Keeps Control of the Internet 1057
Adam Schumacher writes "As a result of a a deal reached late Tuesday, the US and ICANN will maintain control over the Internet's core systems. A new body will be created to provide international oversight, which will, of course, have no binding authority."
No binding authority.. (Score:2, Interesting)
they can waste tons of money on useless and ineffective programs, treaties and resolutions, and atleast know that they "feel" better doing it, even if it doesn't do anything anyway.
Congrats for the UN..
US still does all the work.. and they get to sit around like the useless body they are.
Re:and who better than the US... (Score:2, Interesting)
"Latin languages" (Score:5, Interesting)
I suppose they mean Latin alphabet, yet Urdu and Arabic are both written in the Arabic alphabet (possibly with a few Persian-style letters more?). Anyway, I look forward to my first spam with a Chinese address. I can already see the scams: PCs without Chinese fonts that trick users into clicking on a blank link...
Re:I'm sure the US will listen to everyone else... (Score:0, Interesting)
Re:and who better than the US... (Score:4, Interesting)
Can't even discuss Nazi history there.
Can't trade Nazi memorabilia.
Suggestion of Great Britian, possibly. They tend to have their heads screwed on straight. Canada, our 51st state? What would be the difference?
Always good when there's a no-yelling solution. (Score:5, Interesting)
How much control? (Score:3, Interesting)
I know that such a movement already exists in the DNS world (see, for example, OpenNIC [unrated.net]).
So, while I resent that one organization - worse, a corporation - has so much power over the Internet, I don't think it's as big a problem as it could be.
Re:this is good news (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd love a secondary DNS system (Score:5, Interesting)
While I think that the US has done a pretty good job so far of staying hands-off, and I don't think that many countries would do as good a job, it's not impossible that in the future they'll start to abuse their position and do things like
Second, it's great leverage against Verisign.
Remember the
Finally, IIRC, we use the ISO country codes for CCTLDs. That's probably the thing that most countries want to have input on, since it allows them to legitimize claims to country status in the public's eyes. As long as ISO codes are used, the DNS world isn't making any huge political statements -- it shoves the political burden off to ISO (who probably doesn't want that, but it produces separation of red tape and techies, which is a good thing).
Re:Still good (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually wgen the Galileo project began, the US did just that - and unlike the Internet, Europe (and others) are actually PAYING for the whole thing themselves and they still wanted control.
Why would the US give up control? That's dumb! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The Minutes Of The Meeting (Score:3, Interesting)
It comes down to one thing:
Where would you like the corruption to be?
It is that simple. Someone wants to make some money somewhere. If you hand it over to the UN, then we'll have an "oil for bandwidth" scandal. If you keep it here, then... well... then all of the historic political battles will continue and those who are lining their pockets will continue to line their pockets.
Re:This makes sense...for now (Score:5, Interesting)
I suspect IP space will be the problem.
There are some four billion possible IP numbers. Of these, some 2.4 billion have been allocated. Of those, some 1.3 billion are allocated to organisations in the United States.
The EU has a little less than twice the population of the United States. India and China each have over four times the population of the United States.
Can you see the upcoming problem, people?
Either we reform the system so that IP space is more evenly allocated, or we go to IPv6. Four billion is not going to be enough once China and India really start getting wired. Once IP space gets scarce it gets valuable, and that's when the US government will think of export tariffs on IP space, and other governments will think about splitting the internet.
Re:The Minutes Of The Meeting (Score:5, Interesting)
The verisign thing? ICANN did *nothing* - verisign backed down due to public pressure. ICANN's punishment for them? To reward them with the
You have the
Re:and who better than the US... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The UN can take control when..... (Score:4, Interesting)
Do you pay your HTTP royalties to Europe on a per-request basis, or have you gone for an annual fee basis?
Re:The Minutes Of The Meeting (Score:3, Interesting)
As for defending ICANN, I think most people are willing to live with the devil they know than the devil they don't. ICANN's level of ineptitude is a known quantity, whereas the introduction of a different group from a wider range of countries and political agendas may introduce all kinds of new horrors.
Re:THBBBPPPPPP!!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Or more precisely, the Internet isn't going to break like the UN threatened to do. Of course, such a move would have carried little (if any) weight. US netizens would continue about thier business, mostly oblivious to the loss of the rest of the world (except for email, that would be a pain) while the rest of the world screams bloody murder at their stupid governments because they can't reach many of the sites they use daily. (Slashot being an example of this.)
That's assuming, of course, that the member countries actually had any way of shutting things down. They have control over their domains, but the machines are still handled by ICANN. Attempting to sieze those machines would have meant police or military escalation. And even then, they still couldn't break much. They would then need every DNS server to redirect to a new root server controlled by the UN. (Since it's doubtful that the UN could gain access to the primary root servers.) They could redirect the IP address, but then things would get even dicer for them, and increase the yelling and screaming from the populace.
In the end the UN did the right thing. They stopped throwing a hissy fit and let sleeping dogs lie in exchange for a token method of voicing their opinions on DNS allocation. Did it buy them much in actual authority? No. However, they now have a central method for disseminating any complaints to the public. (i.e. Rueters: "UNCANN, released a press release today [criticizing/congratulating] the latest moves by ICANN.")
Re:The Minutes Of The Meeting (Score:3, Interesting)
You have the .xxx backwards - it was actually a good idea
The only way .xxx is a good idea is if you require all pornography sites to move there. Otherwise it's alleged purpose (making it easy to filter porn) becomes moot. Without that as a reason to deploy it then it becomes a red light district that exists for no other reason then to make it easier to find porn. The US Government would have be overwhelmingly behind it if you could have sold it to them as a way to make filters easier and more effective.
And even if you could sell it like that -- what's pornography? Does a site advocating Topfreedom [wikipedia.org] need to register in .xxx if they include pictures? You and I would probably say they don't.... but many prudes (in the US and Europe -- don't pretend it's only an American thing) would say they should.
.xxx was a disaster waiting to happen.
Phew... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The UN can take control when..... (Score:4, Interesting)
Dear US,
Please find enclosed an invoice for the following developments:
payment terms: 28 days.
Warm regards,
Europe
Re:and who better than the US... (Score:1, Interesting)
Great ... (Score:2, Interesting)
The capper is that they ship people off to get tortured for them in client states under a program of 'extraordinary rendition' because both International law and US law says that torture is illegal ... but they still really want to do it, anyway. Their own Senate tries to curb that nasty behaviour but the President threatens to veto their attempt and the Vice President works around the clock to get exemptions for the CIA. I guess there is too much of an investment in those gulags to give up without a fight.
The Project for the New American Century, indeed! I just wonder what kind of century it will be ...
Re:Get our of your hole (Score:2, Interesting)
292,000 American soldiers lost in WWII is more soldiers than any other allied nation except for possibly Poland (6 million deaths, but not sure how many were soldiers). If you include civilian deaths, France lost 600,000 people and Great Britian and Italy last low to mid 300's. Our Pacific coast was very close to being attacked.
People that talk like the grandparent poster are just ignorant of history or out of touch with reality, desensetized by media and entertainment.
Comment removed (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The Minutes Of The Meeting (Score:3, Interesting)
You do know that is what this is all about, right. A distributed database that is is *impossible* for anybody to "control". Not even all the root servers are in the US. And those that are are ran by volunteers, most of whom likely disllke Bush and his policies as much as you and I do. They only really listen to ICANN as a courtesy. ICANN certainly has no right to tell them what to do. And you are free to point at other root servers [unrated.net]. I do.
Simply put people continue to use the current system because it works and fits their needs and wants. If they ever did do anything really evil people like you would whine about it while people like myself would route around it like the damage it is and then make it possible for the rest of you to do so.
So please I beg you point to or explain in some way how anybody "controls the Internet". It is simply put, impossible to do so. God are we really at the point in space/time where someond reading and posting to
Yeah! (Score:1, Interesting)
This shows just how important it is to elect a High Noon [filmsite.org] Texas cowboy to the White House. They get things done. The world needs someone as President who faces down both the dictators and the Eurowimps. (Both have their equivalents in High Noon.)
If we'd have elected Gore in 2000, he'd be droning on about how, having invented the Internet, he could give it to anyone he wanted, and promptly given control to nasty regimes such as Iran, North Korea and China, perhaps slipping another campaign donation from the last into his pocket.
And if we'd elected "War Hero" Kerry in 2004, he'd have asked himself it giving up the Internet would keep him from marrying a third rich wife if rich wife #2 dies. No, would be the reply from his handlers. Or if it hinders his buying $3000 French bikes. Again they say no. Last of all, he would ask if it would make the French and Germans like us. On being told it would, he would promptly give up control to those same nasty regimes, perhaps with a provison that lets European corporations get rich joining U.S. corporations (i.e. Cisco) in censoring political free speech on the Internet.
Let's hope this do-nothing committee follows in the footsteps of all the UN's other do nothing committees and pockets their checks and merely holds conferences in expensive hotels. It's a small price to pay for a free Internet.
--Mike Perry, Seattle
Some actual facts (Score:5, Interesting)
The goverment, IBM and ICANN were exerting pressure on them to sign an agreement with ICANN which placed them under ICANN's aegis. Up to this point they had nothing to do with them.
It was feared NSI would "go rouge" and I guess it's ok to say now that there were root servers at NSI that did not carry just the legacy root. Only a handfull of people knew about these but they were a beautiful thing to run dig or dnsq against.
If there was no accord reached with ICANN and NSI was effectivly out of the business it built then one scanario was they'd just keep going and ignore the USG and ICANN and expand the root zone. They owned the IP's the root servers ran on in more than enough cases.
I asked what would happen if they did this before a fallout with ICANN occurred and was told the a.root would be declared a national security resource and the Army would simply come in and run it so don't even think that. Since this CTO used to be in Army intel. I figured he had a good understanding of this. IBM coerced NSI to sign with ICANN (at the famous secret meeting nobody can talk about because of an IBM NDA) and this stuff was all dropped very quickly.
But the lesson is there: the DNS is whatever the US wants it to be, period.
If you rely on somebody else to tell you where the
Primary the root instead http://cr.yp.to/dnsroot.html [cr.yp.to]
Re:Get our of your hole (Score:3, Interesting)
Agreed. For the USA, the KKK is generally a better example, being a racist discrimitatory group, homegrown, etc. It's just that them and the Neo-nazis have sorta combined.
Our first amendment rights mean that the government can't stop you from spouting stuff*, and indeed, if somebody beats the snot out of that extremist, it's the person doing the beating that the police will arrest. It's just that, like one of the more recent KKK rallies, the spontaneous(or planned) response will tend to be extreme. People consider it worth the assault charges to chuck D sized batteries at KKK members. It can also become hard to arrest them, given that there was a crowd of hundreds screaming back, compared to not even a dozen KKK people.
I mean, when six KKK people want to march, the city involved generally has 3-5x cops assigned to protect them, because 100x protestors tend to show up, and they aren't all nonviolent.
*As long as you're not advocating illegal violence, support for terrorists(see first rule), outright lying with malice, etc.
Re:If the UN took control (Score:3, Interesting)
Your message just show that you have no idea of how the UN works, you just read the Republican propaganda, right ?
Re:Get our of your hole (Score:3, Interesting)
Look up the definition of the word "understatement", please.
Stalin was planning an invasion to Western Europe
That's a brilliant argument, because proving it's negation is so very difficult. After all, how can anyone truly *prove* that no such plans existed? Only circumstantially, and circumstantial evidence is ever so much weaker. But consider this: not all armies are created equal. Invasionary armies (e.g. Nazi Germany) have to focus on things like mobility. The country's military-support structure must be geared toward handling supply lines stretched thin by distances. The type of intelligence gathering you do is specific toward expansion. Conversely, defensive armies focus on defense-in-depth - supply bases throughout conflict territory, lesser emphasis on high mobility. These considerations affect everything - airplane and tank construction, armaments, etc.. The Red Army, as it existed in 1940 was not of an invasion type. There were no built-up depots for rapid offensives into enemy territory. There was little to no mechanized infantry, etc..
An invasion doesn't take a day to create. Hitler worked on it from roughly 1933 onwards. First offensive operations were in 1939. Throughout 1933-1937 Nazi Germany was not a creditable military threat, yet we see no buildup of invasionary armies in the Soviet Union. Thus: had Stalin had plans for invading Europe, invasionary armies would have been created in this time, and further, had such plans existed, Germany would not have stood in the way. The emergency war preparations that took place roughly between 1936 and 1941, when war between Germany and Russia broke out, created an army intended to defend Russia in the coming conflict. Stalin, realizing that Hitler's Herrenvolk doctrine would eventually lead to a war involving the SU prepared the country for a defensive war. And to address everyone's favorite complaint, the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact was not an honorble one, but it did by the SU what it badly needed - time. Stalin was prepared to hold off hostilities for as long as possible to gain time to prepare a defense.
Now, to address the underlying emotional point of your statements - it amounts to no more than a categorical hatred of Stalin, irrespective of his actions or motives. This comes from the fact that America hates Communism more than it does Fascism. I would go so far as to say America doesn't really have a problem with Fascism. Never mind that the Nazi ideology, which people seem to believe as being relevant advocated racial supremacy and genocide. After all, they were only killing "inconvenient" people, right? This is why American businesses kept up trade with Nazi Germany, and basically got slapped on the wrist for it (remember Prescott Bush, anyone). This is why Allen Dulles wanted to negotiate with Himmler for a separatist surrender of Germany to America, so that the war could be turned against the allied Soviet Union. This is why Nazis got respected positions in the scientific community in America.
I won't try to claim that Stalin's actions were not brutal. They almost certainly were. However, the fact is this: his methods won the war, and it's certainly not up to some armchair strategist to claim, 60 years later, that things could have been done diffirently with the same victorious result. Maybe America would be ok with Nazi Germany runnin Europe - after all, they paid on time. But somehow, the rest of the world wasn't so much ok with it. And the history has been re-written so much, that without a thorough re-examination of the evidence, your arguments amount to parroting American propoganda, which, under the circumstances is more than a little self-serving.
Re:This lie again.... (Score:3, Interesting)
If what I said could be construed as "hate speach" then what does it make what you said?
It's not hate speech per say. It's the typical "I hate America so I'm going to run my mouth without any figures to back it up" bullshit that I've come to expect from too many people on the Internet.
What is it with so many Americans and their over-sensitivity and complete inability to take critiscm or tolerate people who think differently? It's almost like insecurity. Pretty pathetic from the most powerful nation on the planet.
And there you go again. Given a chance to defend your arguments about half of the deaths in the 20th century being caused by the United States you resort to bashing us. I have no problem tolerating people who think differently then I do. I do have a serious problem with people who run their mouths about something without anything to back it up.
And it's funny you should accuse Americans of insecurity when the French are so insecure about their culture that they tried to rename "e-mail" because they didn't want an English word in their language. Care to venture a guess as to how many words in American English came from other languages and cultures?
Re:Conviction (Score:2, Interesting)
Do you think all the people who were tortured by Saddam Hussein broke laws? Do you think that's the reason people thought Iraq was an evil regime, that it had evil laws? No, the reason was that it arbitrarily arrested people and tortured them, they didn't have to violate any laws for that to happen.
I don't care if you don't like Guantanmo Bay. It's part of America now, and because of its existence (among other things), America can no longer claim to be a free country. America is a shit country now, and it's partly your fault because you didn't stop this torture and bombing which is going on, and as far as I can see, you're doing nothing to stop it now. Instead you spend your time posting on Slashdot.