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.'"
Has The Register become The Inquirer? (Score:5, Interesting)
U.S. Unlikely to Yield Web Oversight Yet
Federal officials seem inclined to extend a deadline for privatizing control of the Internet's address system.
By Jim Puzzanghera, Times Staff Writer
July 27, 2006
WASHINGTON -- The federal government appeared unlikely to relinquish oversight of the system for assigning and managing website domain names after a Commerce Department hearing Wednesday raised broad concerns about giving an obscure Marina del Rey nonprofit unsupervised control.
read the rest [latimes.com]
Re:Has The Register become The Inquirer? (Score:5, Informative)
However, assistant commerce secretary John Kneuer, the US official in charge of such matters, also made clear that the US was still determined to keep control of the net's root zone file
Is this a time paradox?
Re:Has The Register become The Inquirer? (Score:5, Informative)
Even the original article is contradictory:
Not really -- it's more like the US's position is contradictory or more realistically, a facade:
So the US is more than happy turn over administrative control of the Internet domains to ICANN, but retains the right to control the root structure. In essence, ICANN becomes a semi-legitimized world front for the Internet. Other countries can't claim they don't have control over the process now, and the United States retains the true power. This will appease a few countries but on the whole nothing will change. In the end, the US hasn't given up a thing but a bloated and malformed beaureaucracy anyway.
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.
Lotsa internets (Score:3, Funny)
Oh, goody, lots of internets! Can someone send me one? I already have my own tube.
Re:Has The Register become The Inquirer? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Has The Register become The Inquirer? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Has The Register become The Inquirer? (Score:3, Funny)
and Al Gore was seen screaming "You can't have my baby! You'll never take my baby!"
Pedants take note: Yes, I know he never said he invented it. No need to reply.
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:2)
Anyway, I am eager to get to the bottom of these contrasting reports. The US has asserted in the past that it will not hand over control, so I was shocked when I read this writeup. What are the disadvantages of the current system?
Re:Has The Register become The Inquirer? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Has The Register become The Inquirer? (Score:3, Interesting)
In other news, GP is in the running for most modded post ever. From 1 to -1 all the way up to +3.
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.
Re:Has The Register become The Inquirer? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Has The Register become The Inquirer? (Score:5, Informative)
ICANN is making policy decisions (such as which gTLDs to add to the roots and resolution of disputes over domain names) when its authority to make these decisions is murky at best. It has made policy decisions, such as ceding control of
Re:Has The Register become The Inquirer? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Some things are matters of principle. Because the Internet is a major international information conduit, its neutrality and transparency need to be preserved at all costs. I am spooked just by the very demand of the US to maintain the upper hand "just in case"... what if someone pisses off the yanks in the future, and they choose to cause trouble? It's the
Re:Has The Register become The Inquirer? (Score:5, Interesting)
"I have to give it to ICANN. The group tried to help VeriSign to save face by asking it to voluntarily remove the service when the first request could have easily been an order and not a request. Rather than take that opportunity, VeriSign rejected ICANN's request."
ICANN took the action that had to be taken in a gradual manner that it thought was fair to Verisign. After the latter party refused to comply, they fixed the situation with an order. It should never have happened in the first place, but ICANN did everything they could have to fix the situation.
Re:Has The Register become The Inquirer? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Has The Register become The Inquirer? (Score:4, Funny)
You'll be sorry when ManBearPig comes to your town, just ask Al Gore if you don't believe me.
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
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?
Holy Shit (Score:3, Funny)
I think my head is going to explode.
Re:Holy Shit (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Holy Shit (Score:5, Funny)
Don't worry, I'm sure it was a mistake and will be fixed in USA V2.1
Re:Holy Shit (Score:3, Funny)
Aha! You foolish Americans have walked right into our trap! You see, this was all an elaborate RestOfTheWorld plot. We've been working on stealing the internet for years, but we needed someone on the inside to make this final blunder in order to set the rest of the plan in motion.
Unless you pay us 10 million billion dollars, soon, your lottery ball reserves will run dry, and the internets' main series of tubes will become clogged with streaming movies and poker chips. And then, with bandwidth reduced to a
Re:Holy Shit (Score:5, Funny)
you went throught all that just to get what we already owe you?
Re:Holy Shit (Score:2)
I am not sure whether that is more amazing or the fact there is acceptance that there are nations beyond the frontiers of the USA
Either way this is a good thing.
Re:Holy Shit (Score:4, Funny)
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 wh
Re:Holy Shit (Score:3, Interesting)
I believe you're correct, that its been blown slightly out of proportion, but it's still "The Right Thing To Do," no matter how small and insignificant in the grand scheme of things. I don't agree that it's become a huge issue, but if nobody complains, legislators are going to keep doing what they want.
If it does become a big issue in the media, which side do you think Americans are going to take? Its going to become another pawn issue in the Ultra-Manly U.S. Pride game and the gov't will never give it up
Re:Holy Shit (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Holy Shit (Score:5, Funny)
I can't argue with that. You guys even elect them!
Re:Holy Shit (Score:3, Funny)
I must have missed that story. However, if something like that did happen, I would bet the ACLU would be in there in an instant fighting for the religious freedoms of the students, as they have so often.
...net neutrality? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:...net neutrality? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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: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.
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:Prioritized Citizenship? (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, the stance of our government naturally sways with the prevailing ideologies.
Speaking as a liberal, I should take care when I characterize the position of my conservative friends. However this idea of the rights of other governments seems to me to bear on the paleoconservative/neoconservative ideological split.
The classic paleoconservative Burkean theory is that a stable government deserves a kind of deference, because it's continued stability is, ipso facto, proof that it meets the needs of its subjects or citizens. Interactions between governments are based on national interests, and while the outcome for individuals may be unfortunate (e.g. dying to obtain access to strategic resources that he as an individual may have little chance of benefiting from directly), the nation as a whole prospers. In this view, national sovereignty matters, although the sovereignty of other states can sometimes be violated in the national interest, there is an understanding that in most cases a kind of reciprocal recognition of the rights of sovereign states is important.
In practice liberal outlook on foreign policy is not altogether incompatible, although peripheral disagreements are common. Burke himself was a Whig after all, although from the conservative wing, and a sympathiser with the American Revollution. The distinguishing characteristic of a liberal is the belief that progress is possible and worth pursuing. Liberals are deeply suspicious of realpolitik, the the pursuit of naked national interest at the cost of human progress. This suspicion taints not only the end, but the means, namely military adventurism.
However, most of the time paleoconservatives and liberals aren't that dramatically different on a pragmatic level; most of the time other governments were to be left on their own, with occasional swings towards interventionism for idealistic or self-interested motives. These swings are checked by the other side, and the result was a general consensus that at times made allowances for humanitarianism, at other times pragmatism. This balance produced a consensus on the policy towards communism, the policy of containment, although at times this swung more towards military adventure than the extreme liberals wanted. It also produced the complementary policy of detente, although this smacked of appeasement to extreme conservatives. Both these policies were supported by the segments of each side that were closest to the middle.
The neconservatives, however, are a different animal altogether. They aren't conservatives or liberals. It's really unfair to the conservative side to call them neoconservatives. They're more like an amalgam of what is hated most on each side of the conservative/liberal split. They share with the most naive of the liberals a faith in their ability to create progress. They share with the most blockheaded conservative a blindness to the negative consequences of unlimited pursuit of self interest. That's it in a nutshell: neocons combine the naivte of the worst liberals combined with the blockheadeness of the worst conservative.
The natural check on the violation of soveriegn and individual rights that conservatives and liberals each have are missing from the neocon viewpoint. The liberal believes that war retards human progress. The conservative doesn't believe that human progress happens can be achieved by any deliberate plan or stratagem including war, and so will avoid war if there is no clear national interest. The neocon, however, sees war as a means by which human progress can be advanced, and so will pursue it, not so much at the deliberate cost to the national interest, but with the same faith that the progress will serve the ultimate national interest by which the liberal pursues cooperation and understanding.
Re:Prioritized Citizenship? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Prioritized Citizenship? (Score:3, Insightful)
Earth
A little silly (Score:5, Funny)
Or perhaps you are for the "People of Earth". How touching! Except how can you declare an allegance with every single person on earth, some of which may not want you to exist.
Perhaps you are just for "Life on Earth". If so, would not your best chance to help out all life include dedicating yourself to the role of fertilizer? Otherwise, even if you are a vegetarian, you life on the death of many other organisms.
Such global statements of purpose simply seem to indicate you have put no real thought into what you mean to accoplish by your declaration.
Re:Prioritized Citizenship? (Score:5, Interesting)
Just think about online activities. Most of them aren't country-specific anymore (I'm thinking about things like online gaming, or even here in Slashdot). Everybody is connected, no matter where do you live. I feel the way you're describing. I'm a citizen of the world, and since I've been using Internet (when it became massive here around 1995), being Chilean is just one more tag I carry. Is the place where I was born and raised. But it doesn't mean I only think about my country and I don't care about any other place. I have the impression that many U.S. ppl are just too much into their own bubbles and don't realize there are more countries outside. Like when I met my fiancee's parents (Texan people). They had a very wrong idea of what a chilean woman would be or look like. And they were impressed when they met me:P (points for me lol).
What I'm trying to say is, when everybody starts opening to the rest of the world, political limits will become just that.
Re:Prioritized Citizenship? (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Headline is deceiving (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Headline is deceiving (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Headline is deceiving (Score:3, Insightful)
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:The failing of the UN (?) (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Headline is deceiving (Score:4, Informative)
The US, and not NATO, was the force pushing for intervention. Reading main-stream news, we all remember how frustrated the US were with hesitant European nations. The problem with intervention, which anybody with half-a-clue at the time knew though, was that everybody was killing each-other at pretty much the same speed. This was a well-known fact, although our media did their best skew it by making the serbs out to be the bad guys. It's also a well-known fact that the massive genosides started after NATO intervention (which incidentally actually made the serbs 'the bad(est) guys'). Reading up on the reports and the analysis after the war is scary reading though; make no mistake, the Yoguslavia-intervention was a massive blunder and seriously worsened the situation.
It took US balls to choose a random side to back and bomb the country back to the stone-age.
UN Peacekeeping missions (Score:3, Informative)
I know people who had relatives in Srebrenica, and I also know at least one person who was helping the Serbs rape/kill there. Wanna tell them again who's the idiot?
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.)
obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
Re:obligatory (Score:3, Funny)
That's good, because, as others have pointed out, TFA would make it seem that we haven't.
Re:obligatory (Score:2)
Re:obligatory (Score:4, Funny)
ICANN
The Wild (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The Wild (Score:2)
Agreed, this is a ruse typical of other US maneuvers. Make the body impotent, then when others demand fairness, hand them the body instead of the power.
Internet as a Sovereign Nation (Score:4, Interesting)
Hopefully though, an international body can agree to some basic tenets so that we can establish so we can limit trivial laws and lawsuits due to localized laws.
Re:Internet as a Sovereign Nation (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Internet as a Sovereign Nation (Score:4, Interesting)
Despite a lot of "hype" and cyberpunk novels glorifying the Internet as somehow "more than the sum of its parts" - it really boils down to being a really big wide-area network.
The "value" of the Internet can shift from "incredibly useful" to "nothing but junk" or anyplace in between, and that has to do with the quality and amount of content people choose to hang off of the ends of the network.
I think sometimes, we get too caught up in treating the "Internet" as a single entity filled with information and shared by the whole world. In reality, it's just a "grid" that allows everyone's computer equipment to interconnect (or not, as they so desire).
Rather than making this network into a "soverign nation", I think what is best is letting nations make their own decisions as to the "good" and the "bad" of interconnecting their part of the "grid" with other countries. It would be (in my opinion) unfortunate if a country like China decided they simply weren't benefiting enough from allowing traffic to and from U.S. based systems - but it'd be their leaders' option to cut themselves off from us completely if they so desired.
Indeed, this may end up happening.... Certain nations decide to break off from the "global" Internet, and only connect with specific other countries. I think, if this does happen, it will only be temporary - as they learn how much they're missing through those policies.
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.
concern (Score:4, Interesting)
I must be missing something (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm just glad to see that the obvious is being recognized.
Great... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Great... (Score:2)
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:Let me be the first American to ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Let me be the first American to ... (Score:3, Informative)
How does this apply to ICANN? The author of the article is expressing his skept
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:Let me be the first American to ... (Score:2)
If all of the electorate in the US, or even a large majority were mindlessly patriotic, the administrations support would be much higher, ipso facto.
Domain suffix migration? (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Domain suffix migration? (Score:5, Interesting)
- .mil to .mil.us .gov to .gov.us
-
Re:Domain suffix migration? (Score:3, Insightful)
Each country
In response to... (Score:2, Funny)
ICANN, and now you can too!
Neoconservative response. (Score:3, Funny)
“It's like letting the terrorists win!”
Thank heavens (Score:2, Funny)
Uncle sam wants you ... (Score:2, Interesting)
So what does that mean now?
It means two things, piggy:
first it means that the US government can now hold someone( ICANN in this case) responsible for what happens in the internet
and second the government can now concentrate their efforts on how to tax it!
Bombs away!!! ICANN you're next!
Control of the Internet (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Control of the Internet (Score:5, Informative)
And since the Internet is relatively useless without a mechanism to locate hosts on it, and since nobody seems to be willing (or able) to consider alternatives to DNS (such as a proper directory service that could be immune to intellectual property disputes), the DNS root is the key to that.
Of course, ICANN encompasses more than just the DNS root, including most of the functions other organizations previously had, including the relatively mindless allocation of numbers for protocols, IP address blocks, etc.
Neighborhood (Score:5, Funny)
two things... oh my (Score:2)
Backbone? What backbone? (Score:4, Funny)
Correction (Score:4, Informative)
just a correction, the internet wasn't invented in the US. it was developed by Tim Berners-Lee
You're confusing the internet with the (world-wide) web. The internet grew out of Arpanet, which was funded by the US, in (IIRC) about 1970. It quickly grew beyond the borders of the US, and people from several countries contributed to its development, but in the early days, most contributors were American.
The Web is what Berners-Lee developed at CERN, much later. It's just one application of the internet, others being ftp, telnet, and email.
What a sad day it is (Score:5, Informative)
The internet was created in the US, once called ARPANET.
When a government committee, headed by Al Gore, decided to let the public access ARPANET they renamed it 'Internet'.
Hence the reference to the often misquoted Al Gore quote.
Tim berners-Lee created the WWW.
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.
This can only be good... (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Putting the 'International' in Internet (Score:3, Insightful)
I, for one, welcome our new unfettered domains (Score:3, Funny)
Ars Technica disputes it (Score:4, Informative)
Re:US Surrenders? (Score:4, Funny)
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:Let the UN control the internet? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not a good idea. But a better idea than leaving it to Bush's successor.
It's a step up. (Score:3, Funny)
Still a step up from being run with the efficiency and integrity of the US government.
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.