United States Cedes Control of the Internet 508
greenechidna writes "The Register is reporting that the U.S. is relinquishing control of ICANN. The story states:
'In a meeting that will go down in internet history, the United States government last night conceded that it can no longer expect to maintain its position as the ultimate authority over the internet.
Having been the internet's instigator and, since 1998, its voluntary taskmaster, the US government finally agreed to transition its control over not-for-profit internet overseeing organization ICANN, making the organization a more international body.'"
Prioritized Citizenship? (Score:5, Insightful)
Disclaimer: I am an American. One thing I find myself asking not only myself but other Americans is what is their primary citizenship. What I mean by that term is which political boundary (if any) supercedes all?
Are you a citizen of the United States first? A citizen of Texas? A citizen of Chicago? A citizen of the Bronx? A citizen of North America? A citizen of yourself? At what point do you consider yourself a member of a community that will look out for other members?
Occasionally, we catch ourselves engaging in activities that would indicate we are world citizens first and citizens of the United States second. I know it's a tough concept to comprehend but we do send aid to foreign countries, we do attempt to help other countries no matter how much we fsck it up or act in our best interest. So there's some amount of talk about the United States actually being a part of the world. This act of ceding internet control to an international organization is a step in that direction.
Is it a good step or bad step remains to be seen and can be easily debated. One thing is clear, it sends a message to the rest of the world that the United States government is conscious of the rights of other governments. And this isn't a case of we need to help their economy because if it tanks, so will ours. On the surface this actually appears to be a gift of some little amount of power. This is not a historically common occurrence for a country such as the United States. Are we becoming more aware of the world political climate? I certainly hope so.
Headline is deceiving (Score:5, Insightful)
The Wild (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Prioritized Citizenship? (Score:5, Insightful)
If so, that would be the exact wrong message to send. We are conscious of the rights of people. Governments are simply organizations created by those people for the purpose of protecting and enhancing those rights, and to they extent they do that, we should respect them, and to the extent that they do not, we should not.
Re:Has The Register become The Inquirer? (Score:5, Insightful)
In the status quo Internet traffic is not very censored or controlled by the US and things just plain work. I think this is a very good arrangement.
Re:Has The Register become The Inquirer? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, right. (Score:3, Insightful)
Let me be the first American to ... (Score:5, Insightful)
It (he/she?) knows very little about American culture and hasn't seen recent polls [msn.com] about the dissatisfaction of the electorate with the present administration.
Re:Headline is deceiving (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Prioritized Citizenship? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:concern (Score:1, Insightful)
* Does the United Nations always act in their own interest?
* Does the United Nations have hidden agendas?
* Does the United Nations pressure poor countries to raise votes in favor of a specific country?
* Is the United Nations responsible for failures that occur when certain member nations does everything in it's power to slander, ridicule and disrupt?
What?
Re:Prioritized Citizenship? (Score:3, Insightful)
Earth
Re:Prioritized Citizenship? (Score:2, Insightful)
Disclaimer: I am a driver. One thing I find myself asking not only myself but other drivers is what is their primary routes. What I mean by that term is which of these highways (if any) supercedes all?
Are you a driver of the United States Interstate Highway System first? A driver of Texas's I35? Do you drive in downtown Chicago? The Bronx? Do you drive all around North America? Do you just stay at home? At what point do you consider yourself a driver of an automobile that will look out for other drivers?
Occasionally, we catch ourselves engaging in activities that would indicate we are world travelers first and travelers of the United States second. I know it's a tough concept to comprehend but we do stop to help hot women change flat tires, we do attempt to allow others to merge in front of us no matter how much we fsck it up or act in our best interest. So there's some amount of talk about the United States actually being good drivers. This act of ceding control of the merge point today is a step in that direction.
Is it a good step or bad step remains to be seen and can be easily debated. One thing is clear, it sends a message to the rest of the world that the United States drivers are conscious of the rights of other drivers. And this isn't a case of we need to help their vehicle because if it stalls, we'll probably hit it. On the surface this actually appears to be a gift of some little amount of power. This is not a historically common occurrence for a driver such as Anonymous Coward. Are we becoming more aware of the other drivers around us? I certainly hope so.
Re:No doubt! (Score:1, Insightful)
I think there's a lot of evidence out there that shows many American adults could stand to go through remedial sociology studies. Hell, look at the President of the United States!
Re:Let me be the first American to ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Control of the Internet (Score:5, Insightful)
Glad you said "story"... (Score:4, Insightful)
File your story under "fiction" because both analogies you gave are inaccurate. In fact, they're so contrived that it makes it obvious that any attempt to dissuade you from your partisan viewpoint will be futile.
Therefore, I won't try.
Re:Headline is deceiving (Score:3, Insightful)
This can only be good... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Let the UN control the internet? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not a good idea. But a better idea than leaving it to Bush's successor.
Re:Holy Shit (Score:3, Insightful)
The US chose to make it free and open, and this is a Good Thing.
The attitude of the rest of the world that the US is somehow false for choosing to manage it carefully, rather than just hand it over to, say, Kofi Anan and his *cough* able *cough* UN team, smells of a full diaper to me.
No one has prevented the rest of the world from devising its own protocol and implementing it.
Go ahead!
If the energy wasted whining about "those guys are evil because they won't give us their toys" were usefully diverted to accomplishing something, then global warming, world hunger, and the inability of the mainstream media to report facts would have long since been solved.
OK, I'll admit the last problem cited is insoluable. Please do not blame me for dreaming.
Re:Domain suffix migration? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not any more than we'll see the US/Canadian telephone international code change from anything but 1. It's just not worth the hassle to change it.
Re:Prioritized Citizenship? (Score:4, Insightful)
The election process is not really answering to anyone, because it happens before most governments get into power, and it is such a convoluted process that even those who have something to answer won't necessarily do it.
Putting the 'International' in Internet (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Prioritized Citizenship? (Score:1, Insightful)
And aren't corporations treated equivalently to people under US law?
Thats the only way that statement fits reality...
Re:...net neutrality? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Internet as a Sovereign Nation (Score:4, Insightful)
But that's just talking about the US. World-wide, social norms vary in multiple dimensions. Things like nudity in public, language, age of consent, pornography, viewing the faces of women are tolerated in completely different ways across different nations. You cannot hope to apply a common set of rules governing decency without seriously pissing one or more groups off, because decency is strongly defined by local norms and customs. It is not an intrinsic property of all people with one set of rules that's "best" for everyone, as much as some people would like to believe.
The only problem I have with ICANN is that it's too political and its members too selfish. Open everything up, do the right thing that balances technical and non-technical needs, be transparent, document, and absolutely refuse to cater to your benefactors. I personally don't think that ICANN can be effective in its current form.
Re:Question about ICANN and net neutrality (Score:2, Insightful)
What it would mean eventually is that rather then net-neutrality you'd likely get some UN resolution to tax the internet usage of first world countries to run fiber to the palaces of third world dictators...and there would be no way to fight it.
The failing of the UN (?) (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe that was the plan of the USA all along?
Seriously though, many problems of the UN stem from problems its members make (e.g. sovereign nations). It's only as strong (or inept) as those countries that make up the UN and have to decide when to act and when not. Some countries actively undermine the UN, and thus, obviously, this has its repercusions on the UN as a whole.
The USA shouldn't shout to loud in this regard, since it's often *they* that contribute in a major way to make the UN inept and incompetent, using its veto arbitrarily and destroying a united policy.
Re:Let me be the first American to ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe, but the author's editorializing is unprofessional, unjournalistic, and a good reason to not take the Register seriously (not that I ever have).
Re:Domain suffix migration? (Score:3, Insightful)
Each country has its own naming scheme beneath its country code domain. The US, originally, was based on geography (which might be part of the reason companies didn't register names there; who would want to visit www.widgets.saint-louis.mo.us when they could get www.widgets.com?) Other countries adopted more useful hierarchies, which is why you tend to see more example.co.uk names. The US recently eliminated the geographical taxonomy, though, so people can register whatevertheywant.us.
American punter doesn't understand Reg style shock (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, yeah, if you actually read the articles, then you find out what the story is actually about! Craziness. I'm used to just reading the headlines and then convincing myself I fully understand the situation and pontificating about it and why the author of the story I didn't read is wrong! That's what I learned here on
Seriously, this is called "style" and the Register has one where they make the title sensational, humorous, or both, under the apparently unreasonable assumption that you'd actually bother to read the article within if you wanted to know what the story was. If you really want to be able to just scan the front page of their website and feel like you've gotten a good summary of the day's IT news, then you are at the wrong website.
As far as the content of their stories, these vary quite a bit in quality, but when they're on, they're on. One of the other things that bothers a lot of Register and Inquirer detractors is that they publish rumors based on non-official non-PR-Newswire conversations they have with industry contacts. They do a good job of explaining where they got their information and how realible it may be, but again this requires reading the article. Also this means they can be wrong, but when they're right they get information out that doesn't show up on other sites that only consume official corporate press releases for months.
If these things bother you, then these are probably not the IT news sources for you. That's fine if you don't like them, but don't go around calling them the IT equivalent of the Enquirer. As news organizations that actually attempt to investigate things that you can't learn just by reading press releases, they're a step above most other IT rags, which I guess makes all of them the Weekly World News.
Re:Holy Shit (Score:5, Insightful)
Gore and the Internet (Score:5, Insightful)
You know who wrote that? Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn. If anybody's qualified to talk about Gore's contribution to the early days of the 'Net, it's those two.
Original Document [interesting-people.org]
Look, in the early '90s, 6 years before Slashdot, when there were less than a 1/4 million hosts on the 'Net, Gore introduced the Act that would ultimately fund the development of Mosaic. In the '70s, Gore was pushing support for networks, when nobody was talking network. Through the '80s, he pushed for consolidation of disparate government networks.
In the '90s, he drove the Clinton administration's focus on the 'Net. Was that administration perfect on technical issues? Far from it. But Gore was generally a positive force. He pushed against the CDA (which was getting rammed down the admin's throat riding on the Telecommunications Act). He was wrong on key escrow, but he pushed back on Clipper.
The Internet was not built exclusively on protocols and software. It required funding and political support. Gore has been a net positive force for us. Nobody is going to take us seriously and stand up for the issues that are important to us if we eventually go after everybody who does just that.
Re:Prioritized Citizenship? (Score:4, Insightful)
Neh, we are conscious of the right of people to choose their government. If we completely ignored the government and listened to this "right of the people," we'd be obligated to pull an Iraq in every other country. People cede their rights to the government, which is a body with some collective rights of the people that uses those to preserve the rest of the collective rights of the people. The only valid case in which the US can recognize the rights of foreign peoples over their government is if the government has overstepped the role that the people give it.
This anarcho-populism-at-all-costs attitude on Slashdot is starting to get on my nerves. Have you guys never read The Social Contract or even Two Treatises? There is a legitimate function to government, and so long as the government stays within the social contract, it is meaningless to oppose it.
Re:Has The Register become The Inquirer? (Score:1, Insightful)
The US retains nothing. If the US wanted to enforce anything crucial that the EU does not agree with, the EU could create its own root servers and the result would be two internets. The US can't afford to let this happen. So in fact they have no power.
Re:The failing of the UN (?) (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Has The Register become The Inquirer? (Score:2, Insightful)
*re-reads*
Re:Has The Register become The Inquirer? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Has The Register become The Inquirer? (Score:4, Insightful)
And I'm sure you'll keep saying it again, so long as you don't understand British humour. As the other reply in this thread stated, RTFA if you want to know what the story's about. The titles are often witty and filled with puns or references to previous events. I'll bet you watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail then complain about how it's a vague and misleading portrayal of history too, right?
Re:Has The Register become The Inquirer? (Score:5, Insightful)
That should be the motto of all patriotic people. So simply stated yet so true. I have yet to read a convincing account of what problems exist solely because of US control over some aspects of the Internet.
Careful now (Score:3, Insightful)
While I'm hardly a fan of the UN (outside of WHO, who are tremendous), let's not start blaming everyone for the sins of a few. It might not work [bbc.co.uk] out [washingtonpost.com] well [cnn.com] for your arguments in the long run.
(And before the arguments over "librahal traitor" start, I'm ex-military.)
Re:Backbone? What backbone? (Score:3, Insightful)
The I believe that the overall history of this country proes thats tatment.
Of courxe, some yahoo is going to post some specific case where this is not true, completly ignoring the fact that this is a gener statment.
Good question.
internet (Score:2, Insightful)
To the "international community" go start your own network, leave ours alone.
Re:Has The Register become The Inquirer? (Score:4, Insightful)
On a more practical side though, you'll have to get all DNS servers to use the new zone files pointing to the new root servers. And that bit probably won't be easy at all.
Re:This can only be good... (Score:3, Insightful)
If you refer to the UN, world bank or alike, you have to realize that first member states make ridiculous rules and then lament the fact that the body can't work when following those rules or that it doesn't follow "its own" rules when practicality asks for a bit of rule bending.
Look at vetoes in the UN security council for instance and you have to admit that it won't ever function as intended. Look at all those projects that are supposed to get their own funding and you just know that 60% of time is spent finding funds instead of working towards stated goals.
And if the majority of your funds come from country X, well, then you know who'll write the rule-book on that project.
If funding depends on playing by one nation's rules, then you know you won't ever have a truly international body. This last remark explains the very difficult relationship between the US and the UN. Just about every couple of years the US holds the UN hostage over its funding. It's the only country that does that. By now the EU and its member-states combined are I think its biggest donor, and in relative terms, countries like Holland, Canada, Norway and Sweden are HUGE donors, but the US still holds a disproportionately large influence over the UN, because of these tactics. Spying on the secretary general doesn't help either, I think...
And so on and so forth.
I'd say, given the rules, it's remarkable how well some of those organizations functions.
You know what my grandfather always said? (Score:2, Insightful)
Look at what the international community did to the UN. I really don't want the internet in the hands of those morons.