ICANN Meets Annan 221
CypherOz writes "The Australian reports a meeting between ICANN chief Twomey and Kofi Annan and the role the UN may play in the naming game. " We've talked about this before as well.
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ICANN Meets Annan
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There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.
Grumble (Score:4, Insightful)
UN wants to rule the internet.. (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:Funny Quote (Score:2, Insightful)
hmmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Grumble (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, you can run your own DNS system which is totally independent of everyone else's if you want. The internet is cool like that.
Re:If (Score:5, Insightful)
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I just hope that if the UN gets involved, they come in against Verisign and any other large businesses who wish to screw with things. I'm not all for the UN controlling things, mind you. But if they do have some say, I hope its on the side of reason and open standards and fair, reasonable practices.
Actually the real question would be would the UN have any actual POWER to enforce the rules they set. They don't have much power now, so UN mandates get ignored quite often when it's convenient, so Verisign would probably just do what it wanted and ignore the UN mandates. It could actually end up being much WORSE than it is now.Re:Like the UN would be any faster... (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think these issues have any need for a fast paced organisation. I would rather prefer a stable, yet slow organasation to handle these issues.
Re:Like the UN would be any faster... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Funny Quote (Score:1, Insightful)
Jeroen
Where have we heard this before (Score:5, Insightful)
I sure have heard [theage.com.au] the term "United Nations to take a greater role" line before.
The gathering grew from December's UN World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva, where the world's leaders failed to reach consensus on governing the Internet and punted the issue to a task force that is supposed to report to Annan in 2005.
When was the last time world leaders manage to reach a consensus?
It ended Saturday with a closed-door meeting of diplomats.
Transparency of internation politics.
Computer industry officials at the meeting were skeptical of a UN role, but they agreed that some kind of international body could be useful in coordinating language issues, security and getting the Internet into developing countries.
Heard that before [dailyvidette.org]
Most believed an international body had no right to regulate the content of Web sites, a concern for countries like China and North Korea
And not the US? Oh wait, they have DMCA [blackboxvoting.com]
"ICANN has to be more international and it has to be more transparent," said Talal Abu-Ghazaleh, vice chairman of the UN Information and Communication Technologies Task Force.
UN Transparency = Closed Door Meetings
ICANN also chooses who controls the country codes -- like ".us" or ".uk" -- that define each country's piece of real estate in cyberspace.
The rightful code for Britain should be GB. But the British snatched UK, which should have gone to Ukraine.
It has yet to decide the future of Iraq's ".iq".
Bush's War Against IQ ;)
Twomey denies any US government influence in ICANN's work.
"I have never once seen the United States' foreign policy have any impact on this process," he said.
deja vu?
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Re:Funny Quote (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Like the UN would be any faster... (Score:5, Insightful)
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And UN is suspectible to political pressue considerably more then ICANN. What a can of worms will open if UN will deside wich country should have wich domain name suffixes, and who shouldn't have suffixes at all. And Taiwan is not an UN member at all. What if UN start removing existing suffixes for political reasons ?
An incredibly good point, I hope someone mods you up. I'm sure that China would start the pressure to have Taiwan removed immediately and I'm sure Israel would start lobbying for Palenstine (.ps IIRC) to lose its domain. Actually the net would probably come to a screeching halt while the UN fought over who deserved a domain or not.Despite the concerns expressed in the article by critics, the US has taken a fairly non-political oversight role with the Internet and ICANN. True that might not stay that way, but at least as things stand now, ICANN is probably far less political than any UN governed Internet body would ever be.
Cite Your Sources (Score:5, Insightful)
The UN under Kofi Annan has become as corrupt as gangland Chicago.
What are your sources?
I'm not disagreeing with you, but I'd like to see some details.
-kgj
Re:This is what is wrong with this idea. (Score:1, Insightful)
With all the problems that go on in the UN why are they a better choice then the US.
Because they don't represent a single nation state.
Can you please explain to me why a nation that predominantly speaks English and Spanish aren't putting in any effort to resolving issues for Chinese and Arbic speakers?
Oh wait, there's no need to explain it to me - it's fucking obvious.
Re:Grumble (Score:5, Insightful)
The last thing we need is an international body trying to make us subject to all the laws in the world, in spite of the contradictions in law everywhere...
For example, I wonder how many sites discussing the history of WW II would be allowed? Germany has some pretty strict laws about anything relating to the Nazis. It's not particularly clear to me that you could even, say, cite Hitler's writings or show pictures of historical artifacts without running afoul of it, even should you (rightfully!) condemn the horrible things that happened during that war.
Besides, we already have countries fencing in their own little bits of the internet (first China, now France as I understand it... probably others, soon)
That said, DNS probably could be a bit smarter about, say, using unicode instead of ASCII for URLs... Though I have to wonder just how confusing that might make things if there are now who knows how many glyphs that all look too similar (new avenues for typosquatters, no doubt)
Re:This is what is wrong with this idea. (Score:5, Insightful)
Because then it wouldn't be a single country forcing its view of how things should be done on everyone else?
The UN has got a lot of criticism recently for being slow. Of course it is quicker and easier to make unilateral decisions. Getting consensus with a large group takes time.
The UN might be in considerably better shape if the USA put it weight behind it and didn't try to put it down all the time. There has been a lot more UN bashing recently since Bush got into power. It's not really suprising when you consider he had hardly been outside of the USA before he became president - an increadible state of affaird for a country that traditionally has been so good at foreign policy.
Re:Grumble (Score:5, Insightful)
The United Nations is not and cannot be a world government. It's not a government at all. It lacks the legitimate authority to govern anything.
I don't wanna get into a big thing here. I just want to be clear on this.
Re:This is what is wrong with this idea. (Score:4, Insightful)
With all due respect, the main problem going on in the UN *is* the US. The UN aren't perfect, but in fact they're doing quite well, and would be doing great if they weren't undercut at every turn by US administrations who use UN-bashing to score cheap popularity points with their voters. (Something similar can be seen in Europe with respect to the EU: the national governments like to take credit for any positive effects while blaming the negatives on Brussels.)
Seems Like the Wrong Way to Do Things (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds to me like the lesser of two evils--we've all seen the types of politics involved in the UN. Frankly, I'm not entirely sure I _want_ more democracy in how the "Internet" is run. And let's be straight about it--they're not talking about peering arrangements, IP address space, whatnot--they're talking about the DNS.
The current hierarchical system has its problems, but the increasing number of non-US root servers should at least disabuse anyone of the notion that an overly zealous US could, at the drop of a hat, just turn things off.
What I'd like to see from the UN, maybe, is increased sponsorship of things like discussion on proposed standards, dissemination of information, encouragement of the spread of technology and freedom of information to certain restrictive third world countries, whatnot. I'd rather not have it involved in the technical development of our dear, functional, essentially stupid network.
Re:This is what is wrong with this idea. (Score:1, Insightful)
Have you been living in a cave on Mars? Google "oil-for-food" for starters.
The US not paying its UN membership fee?
Have you ever been a dissatisfied customer? The last recourse of a dissatisfied customer is to refuse to pay the bill.
The US blocking security resolutions?
Don't complain about the US. Complain about the UN Charter. It gives arbitrary veto power to all of the permanent members of the Security Council. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, as a whole, is up for debate, but it's how things are.
Or the problem of the US ignoring the majority of the UN and the security council?
That's funny, the way you used "majority" and "UN" in the same sentence there. You do realize that the UN is an unelected, undemocratic body, right?
Re:Grumble (Score:4, Insightful)
Yikes! Thank goodness the UN isn't actually a global government with sovereign power over anyone. The UN is basically a soap box for third-world dictators to scapegoat developed countries for the problems their own corrupt governments are actually responsible for. The UN really needs to be reformed (e.g., France out of the security council, Germany, Japan, and India in would be a better approximation of great powers; and of course countries without consensual governments should have no vote in the general assembly or be eligible to chair any committees), but I don't see this happening anytime soon.
However, even with reforms, the UN should have no power over the structure of the internet: the internet today is essentially just a large NAP of private networks, and has none of its own structure. Even the use of ICANN's private DNS servers by the vast majority of users on the internet is just convention, and any country or organization can run their own root servers and lobby others to use them. Any attempts to centrally control these systems will ultimately result in the system's primary users (those who will no doubt be screwed by the UN's dictator-centric model) routing around the regulations.
Bottom line: thank goodness the internet is peer-to-peer. The users truly have the power, and don't have to take it up the ass from a central authority.
Cheers,
Kyle
Perhaps you haven't heard but... (Score:5, Insightful)
If I have to explain why the UK has the legitimate claim on the
Yes, people (including politicians and the media) treat the terms "The United Kingdom" and "Great Britain" as though they are interchangeable, but I think you'll find they do the same thing with "The United States [of America]" and "America" too.
But if you're reasoning held true then the TLD country code for the US should be
Bottom line: the UK's use of the
Oh, and by the way, diplomacy is rarely about reaching a concensus; it's about reaching a compromise: it's just a pity that some governments have conveniently chosen to forget that.
Re:Grumble (Score:3, Insightful)
The Domain Name System is a large, multifaceted "thing". The UN is simply not qualified to either own it, or regulate it.
The UN should have a voice in some parts of the process, especially to ensure uniformity among nations, and to ensure that third world countries who spend most of their valuable assets trying to find food, let alone Internet access/presence, don't get shafted as regulations evolve and the Internet grows.
What needs pure reform is ICANN itself.
Re:Grumble (Score:4, Insightful)
Considering the abundance of books, films etc. in Germany about the Nazi era I'm pretty sure that it is legal to use symbols, citations etc. in historical context (that is, as long as you don't use them to glorify national sozialism, make a Hitler fan page or whatever).
I'm not entirely sure what all the tasks of ICANN are, but I guess regulating who can show what content under which domain never was part of them (and should never be).
Re:Like the UN would be any faster... (Score:2, Insightful)
This really isn't a fair criticism, as the UN has often been quick and highly efficienty when it counts. For instance, when the UN administered the Iraqi Oil for Food program, it oversaw a highly successful program [nationalreview.com] for redirecting money intended for starving children and judiciously placed it into the bank accounts of UN officials, international leaders who helped prop up UN policies, critics of US and British administrations and even terrorist institutions. Annon's own son, Kojo Annon, helped implement and oversee the program and made sure no worthless Iraqi children would gobble up funds that would be better spent on new limos, jets, castles and other critically important rewards for the UN officials and their friends.
Likewise, UN weapons inspectors were ruthlessly effective at avoiding the embarassing weapon discoveries in their host nation of Iraq (this is appropriate protocol, mind you) and were exceptionally diligent in advising their hosts with sufficient notice to permit them to relocate the embarrassing items prior to inspection.
Yes, I'm sure Internet domain administration and oversight will be well served. Innovative new registration practices will be enacted, such as domain quotas and scoring (requiring a U.S. firm pay 1000x what a Nigerian firm would to renew the domain, and giving the Nigerian firm a head start to reduce the world's inequities). Imagine the joys of receiving spam from pepsi.com. Wouldn't you like to see a McDonalds-branded spam for penis enlargement? The UN would certainly provide equal opportunity for third world nations to have a try at established US, European and Asian trademarks (oh, expect for the French ones, of course. But that's just a matter of cultural protection, just like how it's not bigotry of the French to prohibit the wearing of religious attire, but try that in Britain or the States and you'd have the ambulance chasers from the world court after you).
Information Super Highway... TO HELL (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Grumble (Score:4, Insightful)
But it could be. Delete someone's DNS records, and the site will drop off the Internet. Sure, it's still there, but it can't be accessed without knowing the IP address, and how many are going to start changing their DNS settings back and forth for different sites ?
I can just see it - China lobbying for removal of all anti-Chinese-government websites, Germany demanding the removal of every website which mentions the words "Nazi" or "World War II", and everyone else trying to remove anything offensive for anyone. While I'm usually for international cooperation, I don't think taking DNS from a corporation who carries anyone who pays and giving it to a bunch of well-and-not-so-well-meaning politicians is a good idea.
We must have a working Freenet [freenetproject.org] before this comes to pass - the Net is too important to leave to politicians to rule.
Re:If (Score:3, Insightful)
The reason people complain about the U.N. is generally that they haven't a clue what to EXPECT it to do. There are things the U.N. does very, very well through EcoSoc and there are things the U.N. isn't equipped for at all (see: waging war, NATO). There are dubious issues behind the IBRD and the IMF, but they _do_ serve a purpose as no other entities can. Then there's the ICC. Without the U.N. we wouldn't have created that venue for trying all of the world's Slobos and Saddams... not that this administration seems to care about that when they have a perfectly good illegal concentration camp.
Re:Grumble (Score:1, Insightful)
Untrue. Such a body would not actually be a government. It would lack legitimacy, which is a necessary condition for sovereignty. An unelected body, or for that matter an unelected autocrat, cannot be considered a sovereign government, because such a government lacks legitimacy.
In other words, and to put it very simply, before somebody can tell you what to do, you have to give them that authority by electing them, directly or indirectly. Until that happens, they're just some asshole bossing you around.
Four hundred years ago, the great governments of Europe were composed of asshole bossing their subjects around. Things changed. I'd be very surprised if they could ever go back. The genie of representative democracy, if you'll pardon the expression, is out of the bottle.
Re:Grumble (Score:2, Insightful)
The reason why that is not quite clear to you, is that perhaps because you have never been to Germany or spoken to any Germans who grew up in the post-war era...?
Look, I'm not German either, but I know that it was (is?) quite common that kids in Germany would read those speeches in school, undress that rhetoric, so as to make sure they'll never fall into that trap again.
It couldn't occur to you that when Richard Perle is calling for a total war, he's saying the exact same thing as Goebbels did in 1943 [calvin.edu], the Germans know that, because they've been through that speech countless times, and they know fanatism when they see it?
Re:This is what is wrong with this idea. (Score:1, Insightful)