EU, UN to Wrestle Internet Control From US 1974
Anonymous Coward writes "The Guardian is reporting that the EU, obviously unimpressed with the US's refusal to relinguish control of the Internet, will be forming several comittees and forums with a mind to forcibly remove control of the Internet from the United States." From the article: "Old allies in world politics, representatives from the UK and US sat just feet away from each other, but all looked straight ahead as Hendon explained the EU had decided to end the US government's unilateral control of the internet and put in place a new body that would now run this revolutionary communications medium. The issue of who should control the net had proved an extremely divisive issue, and for 11 days the world's governments traded blows. For the vast majority of people who use the internet, the only real concern is getting on it. But with the internet now essential to countries' basic infrastructure - Brazil relies on it for 90% of its tax collection - the question of who has control has become critical."
The UN has finally lost it (Score:3, Insightful)
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. The internet root servers are working fine. The UN has presented no compelling arguments as to why it should be turned over to an overly beaurocratic entity that has a poor track record for making joint ventures work. In absence of a compelling argument, the only thing that the UN should hear is, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!"
Keep in mind that the root servers are currently under the control of a private organization. While the servers themselves may reside in the US, the organization that controls them is a true international entity. The US government does not exert direct control over ICANN, and will not agree to do so in order to satisfy a UN hissy fit.
I can only speak for myself, but I would be ashamed of my government's actions if I lived in one of the UN countries that is pushing this resolution. I think this quote from the article sums it up:
"The idea of the council is so vague. It's not clear to me that governments know what to do about anything at this stage apart from get in the way of things that other people do."
Amen.
This again? Where's the problem? (Score:3, Insightful)
It will be officially raised at a UN summit of world leaders next month and, faced with international consensus, there is little the US government can do but acquiesce.
Is that a fact? Right or wrong have you looked at our Government lately? Do you really think that international consensus will bother us in the least?
I'm sure my friends in Europe will take exception to this line of reasoning but why shouldn't the US retain control over the root servers? We built the Internet in the first place. Do you really want to see it turned over to the UN?
In the early days, an enlightened Department of Commerce (DoC) pushed and funded expansion of the internet.
Not only did we invent and build it -- we paid for it. That doesn't entitle us to something? The British got to define the Prime Meridian based on their global empire. Subsequently this has defined GMT. Wouldn't it make more sense for GMT to be based on New York (the center of the World Financial System and headquarters of the United Nations)? Isn't that whole argument just as silly as insisting that DoC hand over the root servers? Where is the problem here that they want to fix?
i suggested this in the previous discussion (Score:5, Insightful)
non-governmental control? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:2, Insightful)
And on another note, the US should not necessarily control the internet. It is used by many people around the world. Its not even like the US invented it, either...
So... (Score:4, Insightful)
-theGreater.
PS: Yes, I realize only the -summit- was in Tunisia; I needed a smaller country to make my point.
Please god not the UN (Score:3, Insightful)
Prediction (Score:2, Insightful)
Even though most of the eventually flamewars will have nothing to do with the DNS, it's all about US-bashing on slashdot. Offtopic be damned, Slashdot wants pagehits, and trolling anti-US sentiment is the way to do it!
Who should have control? (Score:5, Insightful)
But if we mean the millions of small and large (e.g. China) internets, each of these can and probably should be owned.
The problem of root DNS servers appears to be an artificial one, relatively easily solved if there was the political will to relinquish control and allow the free creation of arbitrary top level names. There are parallels where control has successfully been relinquished and the results are a nice mix of anarchy and order, suiting everyone. Newsnet is a good example.
Re:This again? Where's the problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:non-governmental control? (Score:5, Insightful)
I honestly don't believe that any government has the right to control it. What needs to happen is for private citizens to take it back.
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:0, Insightful)
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Learn some history dolt, the UN ran for quite some time while the US refused to pay its dues. You think thats some kind of a threat now? "Waaaah waaaah! Give me what or I'll pay you even less than $0!" The worst the US could do is kick them out of the country, and they'd probably be happy to relocate to a country where security means more than just making peoples' lives inconvenient and pandering terror to soccer moms.
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:4, Insightful)
Quite frankly... (Score:2, Insightful)
Funding (Score:2, Insightful)
We should have pulled out of this idiotic thing a long time ago, and perhaps this will be the final straw. Once can hope.
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:2, Insightful)
Agreed. Now find me a "time of need" in this situation. All I see is a bunch of member countries who want control of the toys, and have no clear direction on why or how they need them.
I surely cannot see the US resigning from the UN and flexing their military might at other membercountries of the UN simply because they dispute who should control the internet.
If they're going to try to "force" the US, I can certainly see the US resigning. The UN has been nothing but a pain for the longest time, passing resolutions that no one but the US is supposed to carry out. Then when we do carry out UN resolutions, we're censured as being an "empire builders" or "warmongerers". Isn't it nice that so many countries can tell us what to do while they sit on their high horses?
The next natural step after resigning would be to setup defensive positions in case someone wants to take it farther than that. I'm hoping that the member countries would be smart enough to leave things alone and recognize that a US resignation would be their own fault.
And on another note, the US should not necessarily control the internet.
Again, the US doesn't "control" the internet. ICANN does. Check the first letter there: International
Its not even like the US invented it, either...
I hope that was sarcasm? Because you may be surprised at what you find in the history of the internet's invention.
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:3, Insightful)
The fact is that the Internet has moved beyond the national level. Whether you like it or not, the US' role WILL WANE. Taking a hard-line stance will, potentially, simply ensure that the rest of the world forms an international network to the exclusion of the USA. Your choice... share or be marginalised and excluded. Put another way, share your toys or perhaps in a few years you'll be the one asking to share ours.
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:2, Insightful)
Huh? You can't be serious. The US did invent the internet [isoc.org], and has always owned and controlled the root servers. ICANN was created to take direct government control out of the equation, but it is still overseen by the US government (I'm not sure which branch, but I think it's the commerce department).
I, frankly, think the EU and UN are acting like a couple of spoiled children. "wah wah wah, we want the internet! wah wah!" Sheesh. We designed it, we built it, we control it. End of story. If they want to use it, great, and they should be thankful to us, like they should be thankful to us for a great many things, for opening it up to everybody around the world. There was no requirement for us to do so, just like there is no requirement for us to turn over root server control now. If we choose to, that's our business. If we don't, that's our business too.
I'd like to see what happens if the UN passes a resolution "requiring" us to turn over server control. Let's see them enforce that. It'll be just another example of how far beyond the UN's original mandate that organization has gone, and how useless and impotent it has become as a result.
The UN, dictatorships and the Internet... (Score:5, Insightful)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but won't dictatorships that terrorize their people have the same ability to vote in important matters as democratic countries? Hasn't there been a history of less than decent governments being represented in, say the Security Council? I mean, what is China doing there?
Regarding the Internet, I'm leaning towards saying "if it ain't broken, don't fix it". It's working OK the way it does today (although Verisign needs to get the boot). I also want to make sure that China and other such governments have no say over my Internet connection.
And the EU sure seems to be taking the hardball approach to this! I can't even see how they can possible force the control away from the US. They will be making complete fools of themselves if they end up splitting the Internet. Unlikely, but I'm sure they are willing to do so just to prove that the EU has the balls to stand up to the US...
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:2, Insightful)
Why should any foreign government merely trust ICANN to run the Internet smoothly and fairly? Being a private company ICANN is controlled by a board that can choose to allocate resources in ways disregarding world politics, traffic flow, advances in technology, country-specific regulations (that aren't the US), and the like. It is a very dangerous bet to just presume that ICANN will continue to work in everybody's best interest for all time.
The argument of "if it ain't broke don't fix it" seems a little optimistic. What is to say that ICANN will continue in its current form and direction in the future? Or in response to shifting allegiances and political realities? Or, perish the thought, in response to profitability? As a central part of the international infrastructure it seems naive and dangerous to allow a private entity with no direct input from those involved to serve as the sole architect and arbiter of the Internet.
(and all this is aside from the various complaints that have been levied against ICANN over the years)
Re:This again? Where's the problem? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This again? Where's the problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
No. Because then the date line (meridian opposite of the prime meridian) would pass through heavily inhabited zones (Asia) rather than through the Pacific, which would be kind of disruptive.
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's see how long the US holds together without the monetary support of the rest of the world. If countries like China were to just stop buying your government debt (let alone trying to get rid of it) then you won't even be able to pay for your mighty military. You've already given up control of your country and destiny to foreign powers who could crush you and the global economy if they had to.
And people with your attitude wonder why there is so much rampant anti-Americanism around the world today. You're too arrogant and conceited to see it. Thank goodness 99% of the Americans I know are fantastic people and don't live up to this stereotype.
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:4, Insightful)
As for the UN and EU split, that was a distinction made by the fine article, and one I only carried as far as the article did. Beyond that, we are speaking purely of the UN. The UN *has* made resolutions, then failed to act on them. The UN *has* censured the United States for acting on those resolutions. The perfect example of this has been the Iraq war, which was a UN resolution that the UN got upset about when the US took action. Do you deny these things? If so, please be more detailed.
It's easy to say, "ha ha, you're wrong", but it's much more difficult to carry on a reasonable ccnversation.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:2, Insightful)
LOL! What "military might?" Our military is spread so thin right now that we can't even mount an effective rescue operation in our own goddamn country, much less go to war with the entirety of Europe!
Don't let your arrogance override your common sense. That's what got George Bush into this mess in the first place.
-Eric
Re:Which country invented it first? (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh by the way the UK invented postage stamps. Can we have control of the world's postal system please?
Re:i suggested this in the previous discussion (Score:5, Insightful)
WHAT WILL THEY GRANDSTAND OVER!!??!!
I mean, who ever got elected for making sensible arguments. You get elected for mandating hearings on steroid use among professional athletes or intefering in state matters like the right of a husband to let his wife die a natural death. Yes, I realize these are particular instances of American issues, but it is the same in all democracies. All the politicians have to make a large hue and cry over insubstantial or trivial issues in order to remove attention from the fact that they're basically doing nothing or are powerless to do anything about real issues that they were elected/appointed to do.
I'm with one of the earlier posters. Tell 'em all to fuck off. They can create their own root servers any time they want. For redundancy reasons, it is something they should do anyway.
What the Internet is... (Score:5, Insightful)
But hey, it'll be fun to watch....
Re:This again? Where's the problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
NEWSFLASH:
Growth rate of US economy: not much. A few percent possibly.
Growth rate of China's economy: huge. About 11% IIRC.
Which means China is on course to become the largest economy in the world in about 30 years' time. (Figures all OTOH, but there or thereabouts.)
The US and Europe may be far and away the biggest economic blocs in the world at the moment, but we're going to have to get used to sharing economic might sooner than some people realize. And I doubt China (and India) will have the same ideas about where the centres of world power should be that we do.
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:5, Insightful)
The clear statement was: "No, we will not". Some folks ask: "Well, why not?"
Now the EU and other countries will install their own root DNS servers and that's the end of the story.
No need to get emotional about it.
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:5, Insightful)
It's interesting. That's what many countries say about the US... That we sit on our high horse and tell them what to do.
Slashdotters should be ashamed of themselves (Score:1, Insightful)
What's your problem? Why are you reacting so defensively? What the ridicule of the EU?
Stand back, and look at the situation logically: the root DNS servers are all in the US. These underpin the internet as we know it. Now, at the best of times it's a bad idea to put all of your eggs into one basket. What happens if a terrorist attack takes out communications in the US? Or what happens if you suddenly adopt a China-like xenophobia (i.e. like what's happening in this thread already)? The internet for everyone else'd be pretty fooked, right?
Invention. No one man or organisation "invented" the internet. Yes, a lot of the underlying networking was developed by Americans. Parts of the topology were developed in Europe. The browser/WWW were was developed by Europeans. If you go further back, the microprocessor was "invented" by an Englishman. If you really want to stretch is, the language we're using now was a collarorative effort between half of Europe and Scandinavia (including those who's later settle US/Australia).
Likening to the meridian time: unlike the core DNS servers, each region runs their own accepted time. There are atomic clocks in UK, Japan, Paris and various other places. Yes, the zero-point is in Greenwich, but the world doesn't rely on the Greenwich clock working to tell their time. So the analogy is redundant.
Really, I'd expect more from my American friends here. This reaction is stereotypical of the mindset of current US administration, something that general
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:2, Insightful)
Reality check time. You can't run a military without a few things.. two of them are oil and money.
A majority of our oil comes from outside the country. Over half of our debt is held by foreign countries, with China buying up more and more each day.
While we have stocks on hand to conduct operations, if other countries wanted to get serious (and they obviously wouldn't over such a silly issue as this), the US would be in deep shit. We've situated ourselves in the world to rely on not only our allies, but also countries that some consider enemies, like China and the some of the nations in OPEC. The US cannot stand alone against the world.
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:5, Insightful)
If countries like China were to just stop buying your government debt (let alone trying to get rid of it) then you won't even be able to pay for your mighty military.
Actually we weren't using deficit spending to pay for our military (or anything else for that matter) until Dubya took office and gave a giant tax cut to the rich. Based on that fact I'd say that we really don't require you buying up all our debt to pay for our war machine.
And people with your attitude wonder why there is so much rampant anti-Americanism around the world today. You're too arrogant and conceited to see it.
And people with your attitude wonder why Americans distrust the UN and dislike Europe. I've heard Europeans pick apart every part of America from our welfare system, our politics, our religious beliefs, our support of Israel, our banking system, etc etc etc. You call us arrogant? You are too arrogant to think that just maybe we are right once in awhile.
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:5, Insightful)
Incorrect. My argument is:
1. That the private company is already an international entity that serves international interests.
2. That said company has done an excellent job to date, and has shown no need for a government run entity.
3. That it is not the US policy to force private companies to give up ownership.
4. That the UN has no compelling argument for wanting control other than the fact that it wants it.
5. That the UN has a far poorer track record on joint ventures than ICANN has.
That is the argument, and I daresay that it's pretty ironclad. The moment someone can poke a reasonable hole in that logic, I will change my position. So far, no one has done more than insult me for my "american elitist position". Boo hoo. Find an argument that works, then we'll talk.
Re:This again? Where's the problem? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:1, Insightful)
China is a pimple on the US' ass. Let them try whatever they want.
I don't need a new DVD player and I got a farm that can feed me when I get hungry.
Re:If the EU hasn't noticed (Score:5, Insightful)
More to the point, the US doesn't have any control over the Internet it could hand over to the UN even if it wanted to. The article talks about the DNS system - or so I presume anyway, since it mentions root servers; it doesn't actually state anything about DNS. The US currently hosts the root DNS servers. Those root servers are special only in that everyone keeps using them; they have any authority only because everyone agrees that they do. There is nothing whatsoever stopping the UN from making its own root servers and telling everyone to use them; they will be ignored, but that's not US's fault. Such things has been tried in the past ("use our special DNS servers, and you can type keywords into your browsers address bar", and they died off from simple lack of interest.
I don't see how US could hand over something, which, in the end, is authority by being voluntarily recognized as the authoritative data source by everyone. Even if the US would take the root servers offline, there is no reason why everyone would start using UN's brave new root servers. More likely we would get a period of total chaos as several conflicting DNS namespaces would be in competition against each other.
This entire proposition is nonsensical and should be silently ignored.
The US is Losing the World (Score:2, Insightful)
The US has alienated enemy and ally alike. In the past, even enemies of the US, or uneasy "partners" like Russia, have still trusted US governance of the Internet. But now the US government has declared its unilateral selfinterest at the expense of any other nation that stands in its way. The boss of the US delegation over at UN now, the John Bolton installed by Bush this year, is famous for gloating over how irrelevant the destruction of 10 storeys of UN building would be to his terrorist fantasy. And few in the UN will forget US Secretary of State Collin Powell lying in session about Iraqi WMD, waving a prop vial in front of fraud satellite intelligence captions.
If you want the US to back up our control of the cooperative Internet with force, you're backing the forces destroying not only the unified Internet, but also the international community itself. The Bush people running our country today are clearly willing to risk the Internet in their desire to destroy that community. Those people are exactly the kind of people who pray for American bombs to find their targets, then "amen" themselves, rolling in their alienated, disconnected virtual "faith based" reality. No surprise you put that icing on your divorce cake.
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:3, Insightful)
The US is constantly in arrieres with the UN and has the largest single debt in UN membership fees and has for years -- last I checked it was about 50% of the total membership debt of all countries. For an organization in which they have a permanent veto and which they demand support from, they don't Ted Turner felt so bad about the situation he tried to pay off a chunk of it himself some years back.
By the way, the next time someone mentions that the US should demand repayment of debt from countries it has issues with you might want to remind them that the US is the world's largest debtor. If you're going to be ashamed of something, be ashamed that your personal share in this debt is about $150 000 that you owe the rest of the world.
Re:Please god not the UN (Score:2, Insightful)
As for a geek body running the internet. That strikes me as the most likely scenario. I imagine a situation where an existing body or bodies are incorporated into the UN umbrella. This has happened before, the WTO is in fact a remnant of the Society of Nations which was "adopted" by the UN system.
I think it's in the US's interest to relinquish control over parts of the internet management. There are two reasons for this:
1. If they don't other parties will try to go it alone. This is not bad in itself, but one of the advantages of the internet is that it works seamlessly across borders. What if we suddenly missed out on japanese porn because japnet and usanet were incompatible, or you had to pay to access anothers content?
2. As the internet expands, not only in terms of geographic penetration but also in terms of accounting for an ever greater part of public life, conflicts will begin to arise, and I wouldn't want to be everyone's lightning rod, better they solve their own problems in an international forum where the US can influence outcomes as well as choose its fights.
In the end, the reflex of a lot of people of screaming "the UN is corrupt" or "damn the world, it's our internet" is rather childish and counterproductive. Many global phenomena like the internet are better managed when you have the goodwill of several players, even if you are by far the most powerful nation on earth, millitarily.
Just my USD 0.02.
Re:i suggested this in the previous discussion (Score:5, Insightful)
News to me. Where are those rights enumerated and by which body were they passed?
View in a larger context (Score:5, Insightful)
It's really not that hard to imagine, for instance, that our government might force the root name servers to stop handing out answers for the
That all probably seems like hyperbole. It does to me, too. But if you're the leader of a foreign country, it would seem a lot less so. And if you're responsible for your nation's economy and the internet plays a significant role in that, I'd say you've got a responsibility to mitigate such risks. While I think the root DNS is safe with us, it doesn't surprise or anger me that the rest of the world doesn't agree. If anything, it surprises me that it hasn't happened sooner.
Re:This again? Where's the problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:4, Insightful)
Your post implies that Saddam was armed, and armed with WMDs, as those were the primary target of UN resolutions.
That is false. Iraq had no WMDs, nor any plans to build them, nor any facilities capable of building them.
So it would appear that all those weakly worded resolutions might have had an affect after all, although in many respects the whole sanctions regime, oil-for-food, etc., was a disaster.
The telling views.. (Score:4, Insightful)
All modded up as insightful and informative.
Well.. That's the reason the UN really wants things to be run by an international board, not a US controlled one. The net, as the article states, is now vital to many countries.
Which means the rest of the world would also like to have it's fair share of the say, without having to listen to the US, which has recently showed it's absolute contempt for international view (and in the posts here, is showing it all over again).
The aim, from my interpretation of the article, is that an international body, that fills the shoes that ICANN now fills will be formed as a technical arena to ensure that the needs of the world are fulfilled.
The rest of the world is perfectly able to build it's own root servers, although this will then lead to the US being cut off if it refuses to use the new ones, and fragmentation of the whole will occur.
This is what the ongoing argument is about.
Not 'Give us the root servers. All of them. Give us what you paid for.'.
The infrastructure outside the US was paid for outside the US, by the companies that operate outside the US.
Without that foreign buy in to a Standard, there would be no worldwide internet. It would be the US military net it started off as, or perhaps their academic net, like UK had JANET, and Europe's other competing national networks.
What is being requested is that the ownership becomes joint. No one country can pull the plug and get overall control to suddenly yank a whole area out of the system at will.
The amount of inventions used in the US created outside of it (or before it existed) are many and multifarious.
Without those, it's entirely probably that the ideas that lead to the creation of the Internet would have not formed for a goodly long time.
But, the ideas did come around in the US, and honestly, all credit to the guys that did come up with it. And for the forsight to put it into the academic arena, which led to it's increase in scope worldwide (I still remember the net from it's almost entirely academic days).
Now the choice comes to either make it a truly worldwide and international entity and show real enlightenment, or to hoard it, use it as a lever to gain other concessions, or a stick to beat people with if needed.
This whole issue is a lot more complex than most here give it credit for.
Personally, I'm interested in seeing how it evolves.
I think a lot of the character of both the UN and the US will come out here, and I very much doubt that either one will end up smelling of roses.
I am paying for the internet! (Score:3, Insightful)
If you look at the total backbone infrastructure, I would be willing be bet that all the bit are moving over fibre paid for during the telecom bubble - none of it US government money.
Even if you look at the investment into the basic science and development, it would be difficult to argue that USA paid for it all. There has been lots of advances done by individuals (in universities and industry), by government organization (USA, Europe and elsewhere). The RFC's were all "free" work by everyone. Hack, the Web (which is what most people know) was invented in Europe.
It is fairly silly to claim the USA paid for the net (it is toally nuts to claim the USA is paying the it now).
Re:i suggested this in the previous discussion (Score:3, Insightful)
But more importantly to respond to
a) We actually should learn to live with fragmentation, because it will make the internet more robust, capable, and efficient.
b) I don't really think there is any RIGHT to control. Anyone who wants their own root server can have one, and that seems like much more of a RIGHT to me.
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:3, Insightful)
Now either make an argument, sir, or remove yourself from the discussion.
Take my criticism and learn, young grasshopper. Enroll in a logic class or something.
Considering that your own claim to fame is fictional "rag sheet" stories [blogspot.com], sir, I'm not certain you're in a position to be claiming expertise in logic battles. Rather I submit, that you are merely disagreeing with me for your own personal amusement. i.e. You are "trolling", as according to the popular term. Again, please find a logical, non-fictional argument, or remove yourself from the discussion.
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:4, Insightful)
The US always has paid for its own messes ... and eventually, for everyone else's.
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:2, Insightful)
Just because something is named International doesn't mean it is.
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:5, Insightful)
Some people don't like being assholes maybe?
2. Why take their word over your own trust in your own county?
I have a better suggestion for you..
Provided that there is anything in that thing you consider to be your head, try using it.
You should listen to both and decide for yourself. Listening to one side of a story is going to make you a fool by definition.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:non-governmental control? (Score:3, Insightful)
The Internet is the modern forum for the people, and I for one shudder at the thought of any government control over such a media.
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:3, Insightful)
I hope that was sarcasm? Because you may be surprised at what you find in the history of the internet's invention.
You'll find it was created by scientists of various nationalities working together to make something useful.
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:3, Insightful)
But if they want to force the issue, I'm thinking that we should "remind" our foreign allies that a country with our military might cannot and will not be forced.
So you're proposing because foreign countries set up their own root servers and a international body to govern those servers we should invade them? Umm, all of them? Yeah, that would work. The U.S. does not even have enough troops to maintain an effective defense of it's territory and occupy Afghanistan and Iraq effectively. Invading a few hundred more countries, especially ones with bigger, better armed armies is a great idea. The U.S. invading China would be like the U.S. invading a live volcano. You can pour in as many troops as you want, but it isn't even going to put a dent in them. It would probably help their economy, actually. China can send more troops at us every year than we killed in all of the time we were in Vietnam without decreasing their population, just curbing it's expansion. Lets invade there, brilliant!
If need be, I highly recommend that the US resign from the UN and see how long it holds together without our monetary support.
Umm, we're billions in debt to the U.N. right now. We tried this before and they told us to bugger ourselves and got on just fine until we realized what a stupid move it was.
The internet root servers are working fine. The UN has presented no compelling arguments as to why it should be turned over to an overly beaurocratic entity that has a poor track record for making joint ventures work.
They are working fine, as far as we know, but we have no idea what all is being done with them. And then their is the fact that they are being run by for-profit corporations that pull stunts like redirecting all 404 traffic to ads, instead of following the spec and in doing so broke proper internet connectivity worldwide without any notice, or did you miss that one? You fail to elucidate how a U.N. bureaucracy is any worse than the U.S. one.
While the servers themselves may reside in the US, the organization that controls them is a true international entity.
One not chosen by any democratic process.
No one trusts the U.S. or U.S. based corporations because both have proven themselves to be untrustworthy time and again. We break our treaties and contracts, lie, violate human rights, invade foreign countries without cause, ignore international agreements we have signed, etc. Why should the whole world trust a country that has proven itself so dishonorable and untrustworthy? Governments are supposed to act for the good of those who have elected them. The EU represents Europe and the U.N. represents the world. Now tell me how the U.S. controlling all the root servers and causing a single point of failure for the whole internet serves to benefit either the EU or the world. The U.N. and EU have declared their intentions and are largely in agreement. Now they are hashing out the details of the implementation. I assume this will include the creation of alternate root servers which will eventually be accepted as the primary root servers and a governing body that will regulate and issue TLDs according to the wishes of that body. There is no reason why people have to pay for domains at all, aside from covering infrastructure and administrative fees. Maybe you don't remember when they were free, but some of us do, and there is no reason to pay tithes to U.S. corporations to use the internet. It is a world-wide infrastructure right now and there is no reason to let one country control it. Sorry, this just makes sense.
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah - go figure - the military is off doing military stuff, but the first responders of local government of Lousiana and New Orleans can be incompetent all day long without remark from you.
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:what a crock of shit (Score:5, Insightful)
If there's not, then I propose one.
Melanie's law states:
That when ever Americans get in an argument with Europeans they will bring up WW2 and claim to have saved the Europeans arses.
Anyone who uses such an argument in a thread is invoking Melanie's law and like Gibson's law, loses the argument by defaulting.
P.S. The Brits prevented the invasion of the UK by themselves before the US was in the fight and the Russians saved our collective arses by bogging down the German army so much that it gave the Allies a chance to fight back.
Re:This again? Where's the problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
We invented the type of government where the people are represented by representatives in a legislative body, separate from an executive branch, commonly known as the Republic. Your use of the aforementioned type of government infringes on our Intellectual Property rights. Please cease to use the aforementioned type of government within 30 days.
Best regards,
The Old World The internet is, by definition, the sum of its constituing networks. The constituing networks are build and paid by their respective owners. Basic property rights. You don't own anything you can't show the receipt for.
In the case of the domain name system, that is payed for by the owners of domain names. Year after year they pay for it through their registrars. Other then whining on
You want more examples? Graham Bell invented the phone. Does that mean the US has the final say in deciding whether Moldavia gets country prefix 0418 or 0418? No, that is decided by the ITU, which is a special organization of the UN. (Which are known to be anti-American communists, having done such terrible things as providing North America with the obscenely long country code "1" just to make it harder for the rest of the world to call the US.)
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:5, Insightful)
Bull. This is in fact a very simple matter. The internet is now a key part of the infrastructure of many countries and no matter if you like it or not, nations don't like it when a critical part of their infrastructure is controlled by a foreign government. The US wouldn't like and accept such a situation and other nations won't either, so the interesting question is not if this situation will change, but how it will change.
If they're going to try to "force" the US, I can certainly see the US resigning. The UN has been nothing but a pain for the longest time, passing resolutions that no one but the US is supposed to carry out. Then when we do carry out UN resolutions, we're censured as being an "empire builders" or "warmongerers". Isn't it nice that so many countries can tell us what to do while they sit on their high horses? The next natural step after resigning would be to setup defensive positions in case someone wants to take it farther than that. I'm hoping that the member countries would be smart enough to leave things alone and recognize that a US resignation would be their own fault.
I know that people like you don't want to hear it, but being part of the UN is of great benefit to the US (do you really think the "war against terror" can be won by the US alone for example) so the US leaving the UN, thereby destroying the international system would be a very stupid move indeed, to put it mildly.
Btw., I'd really like to hear some examples of the US carrying out UN resolutions and then getting blamed for it. Thanks in advance.
I hope that was sarcasm? Because you may be surprised at what you find in the history of the internet's invention.
Hihi, watching people like you rave about how the US invented the internet is just to funny.
Why? First because it is pretty senseless. So what if they did? What follows from it? That only the US should be able to use the inernet? Well, have fun then, cause a global network is sure going to be useful when it's not global. And what about other inventions? How about the US not using any technology that wasn't invented in the US? Wouldn't that be fun?
Second, what about the www? It sure wasn't invented in the US, but in Europe? So what follows from this? You guys keep the internet while we take the www? How utterly silly, childish and senseless.
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:5, Insightful)
Of various nationalities? Yes, but these were employees of American universities that had vested interests by US tax payers.
If I were an American workign in Germany and was part of an engineering team that built some great technology I can not suddenly decide that it belongs to the American people simply because I, as an American, worked on it.
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:1, Insightful)
Regardless of your interpretation of resolution 1441, it is now clear that Iraq was not a threat. Terrorists were not active in Iraq in 2002 so it is not possible to create a justification on terrorist grounds. The blasé attitude of US forces towards Iraqi civilian casualties makes a justification on humanitarian grounds somewhat untenable.
To justify the Iraq war as the "coalition" carrying the will of the UN Security Council is somewhat disingenuous; the "coalition" could have tabled a resolution explicitly authorising the use of force: they did not because such a resolution would not have been passed.
Re:The UN, dictatorships and the Internet... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:3, Insightful)
Definitely. A nice few examples can be found with regards to Israel and occupied territories, and the even nicer thing here is that one can point at the USA as the party which blocked any action.
Pot, please meet kettle. May I point out that you look alike in color?
The UN *has* censured the United States for acting on those resolutions. The perfect example of this has been the Iraq war, which was a UN resolution that the UN got upset about when the US took action. Do you deny these things?
After the USA came with extremely doubtfull evidence, disproven claims and such, yes.
Tell me, where are those supposed WMDs?
Did not find them? then it is pretty clear that the primary reason for the UN resolution was missing, and the UN is right to disagree with the US/UK invasion of Iraq. There are lots of good and defendable reasons one can come up with for that invasion, but this is not one of them.
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:2, Insightful)
They want it, let them have it (Score:5, Insightful)
Now they want to force the issue, I think we should help them along. Tell the EU and the UN to pick a date on which the US root zone file will no longer be responsible for containing the look-up information for non US country domains such as
Now if they actually did this, the US part of the internet would not be order the control of an organization that is not beholden in the slightest way to the American people, while the rest of the world gets to deal with something administered by the UN or the EU. Really, what is so hard about this?
Oh, as for the internet being essential to the infrastructure of some countries, might it be said that the internet pretty much IS the infrastructure of the US economy, government and whotnot? Turn off the internet everywhere, and the transistion in the US would be substantially more severe than the transistion in Brazil (I am sure they would still get their taxes somehow).
Re:Funding (Score:5, Insightful)
And they aren't being sarcastic.
The current brouhaha is merely the first public example of the US coming into conflict with the rest of the world as a result of recent changes in its image.
You (the USA) are currently the only global superpower.
Nobody minded this too much[1] while you were seen as trustworthy, democratic, meritocratic, the least corrupt and the most "free" (libre) society on earth.
In the last two presidential terms, your reputation has become more and more tarnished (sorry, but it's true), to the point that the benefit of the doubt has simply been withdrawn. Please note that I'm not saying whether this is right, wrong, fair or unfair... merely that it is the case.
No, I don't expect you to agree, or even to realise. You're part of the US, famously one of the most insular cultures on earth, and people are always the last to hear gossip about themselves anyway.
Since you are no longer trusted to be trustworthy, democratic, meritocratic, uncorrupt or free, you are no longer adoringly looked up to by other nations. They no longer feel safe banking on your currency, they no longer trust you as an honest broker in international politics, and they sure as hell don't want you in any kind of position of power over them.
For the entire lifetime of the net nobody's cared who ran the root servers. Now, the explosive rise of the internet's importance has met the free-falling reputation of the US, and it's hardly surprising that other countries are getting antsy about your position of "authority" over them in this area.
Short version: You were the Google of international politics, now you're more the Microsoft. Expect a lot more international anti-trust arguments in the future.
Footnotes:
[1] Well, most of the relatively powerless middle east didn't like it much, but the West, the far East and their allies didn't mind, and China (as always) just studiously ignored everyone else.
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:5, Insightful)
What's with all this "we" business? Unless the poster actually had a founding hand in setting up what became the Internet, then how do they have any more right to it than anyone else? Because they happen to have been born in the same country as people who did? Accident of birth is no ethical basis for distributing non-local resources.
Do the US posters here really feel they have more in common with all other americans than they do with counterpart techies in Europe or Asia or Africa? Which community are you going to give precedence to? The US government that is comprised of tech-ignorant people with vested corporate interests (RIAA / MPAA, Pentagon, et al) and little adventurous spirit, or the IT literate and neophile tech community?
There is no reason why DNS could not be a distributed community effort. We've reached the level where such a thing could be implemented reliably. Hand it over to the techies. No-one will be happy with the means of modern information exchange under the control of one governmental organization no matter how much they tell us that "it's okay - we're the good guys."
People here spouting Fuck Em comments about the UN should ask themselves why they identify so much with their government. Why this sudden rush of Us and Them? Allowing a government to assign your loyalties to you by accident of birth seems a little old fashioned. Most posters at
Re:If the EU hasn't noticed (Score:3, Insightful)
The EU does not want a single country to control the root servers anymore. The EU (with the support of most developing nations) is now moving to get the root servers under control of an independent organisation which will be under the UN umbrella. The EU of course wants the change to happen with agreement with all parties, but the EU will not accept the current situation anymore and will go ahead even if the US does not join. And if you follow the debates, most of the world will use the new root servers that will be offered by the UN. Maybe finally the EU will be able to get the .eu domain that ICANN so foolishly have not granted them.
Re:This again? Where's the problem? (Score:2, Insightful)
Sure, it entititles us to all the wire and boxes we bought, except, of course, that most of that is actually in private hands. You'll find that much of the wire and many of the boxes do not reside in and were not paid for by America.
Should CERN (the "E" in CERN does not refer to the US) "own" the web (we're talking about control of the DNS namespace here, not the internet, which is largely uncontrolable, although China's giving a good try. Bloody shame that Slashdot continues the internet/web confusion, innit?). Europe invented, built and made the initial investment. You could say that America stole it in the first place.
Or is the web, perhaps, just an idea, a set of published, open communications standards, free for anyone to impliment and use?
Or do you think that Italy has some sort of propriatary rights to radio, Scotland to steam engines and Germany to the Theory of Relativity?
KFG
Re:Screw the crybaby Bush Admin. (Score:3, Insightful)
But that's what the EU/UN is trying to do. Why do you think it's justified?
Re:what a crock of shit (Score:2, Insightful)
As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.
if you deny that the US had nothing to do with liberating Europe and saving your "arses", you're delusional. no one has lost this argument - the point still stands that control of the internet (if you can even call it that, considering there are root DNS servers all over the world) belongs in the US, where it originated.
pot to kettle: sloppy argument! (Score:5, Insightful)
You miss the principle of Charity. Rather than call his logic invalid because he started with "EU/UN" and then dropped it in favor of just "UN", you should charitably add the "EU/" yourself and see if his argument holds up. Otherwise, you're just nitpicking at spelling errors at best or launching a veiled ad hominem "UN-hating gingoistic bigot!" attack at worst. As always win you ignore Charity, you may win points with the audience, but logic isn't a popularity contest.
That said, you completely failed to address his major arguments, which were:
There are obvious counterpoints to all of these, and I only consider #3 to be worthwhile. But you didn't make those counterpoints at all.
What is about to happen is that the Silver Age of the Internet is about to end. The Golden Age was before the web; the Silver age has lasted since '91 or so. Now we'll see fragmentation and provincialism. Whether that is good or bad is an open question, but it will surely be different.
What's really at stake in this struggle is who will have the power to block network access to and from a given country. Some countries are afraid of the US having that power, which they would "never" use, while the US is afraid of the UN having that power, which they also would "never" use.
It's neither more, nor less, than that.
Re:This again? Where's the problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
What, like Cuba? They may be suffering, but last I check there were still there, doing business, living their lives free of US control. Sometimes freedom is more important than money..
I have a whole lot of problems with them and since it was my tax dollars and not the EU's that paid for the Internet in the first place (from the R&D to the initial deployments) I'll be damned if my Government turns it over to the World.
Then be damned, because you will lose control one way or another. You did NOT pay for the cables in countries outside the US. You did not pay for the routers, the power usage, the servers that are outside the US. You payed for a small part of the internet that connects your military servers and some academic institutions. Last I checked, no one was demanding that you give the World control over these segments.
Give us the Internet. No, we INSIST. (Score:3, Insightful)
It will be officially raised at a UN summit of world leaders next month and, faced with international consensus, there is little the US government can do but acquiesce.
The UN can build consensus all they want to, but we don't _have_ to give up control. Are they going to invade the US over the issue of the Internet? Highly unlikely. I think the EU is was off base in thinking that they have the right to do this. ICANN owns the Internet. DoC gave it to them. What else can the UN decide should be donated to the international community. Our American tax dollars and private investments paid for it. I'm sorry, but requiring that ICANN give up control of the Internet is akin to requiring Lilly to give up its patent on its latest cancer drug, because it is not in the best interest of the EU to have a drug controlled by the US.
Stop trying to flex your muscles for the sake of flexing them. My favorite part of the article is:
Brazil relies on it for 90% of its tax collection - the question of who has control has become critical.
How would having control of the Internet in international hands help Brazil at all? Presumably there are high level DNS servers that would get every Brazillian to the Brazillian govt without ever hitting the Root DNS. If something happened to the Root DNS there would be 0 impact on the Brazillian Infrastructure to a well known host.
Can we please get back to fighting terrorism or something more important than this.
To paraphrase Andrew Jackson: (Score:4, Insightful)
The EU and UN have no say so in it. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Slashdotters should be ashamed of themselves (Score:5, Insightful)
Um. No. Not even close. Not even all of the root DNS servers managed by US companies and organisations are located in the US due to the fairly recent attempts to DDoS the root servers. There might only be one IP listed for [A-M].ROOT-SERVERS.NET, but each of those IPs has multiple physical hosts behind it that are distributed across the globe. At the present time, less than half of the actual boxes performing the root DNS service are located within the USA, so I think we can realistically expect one hell of a lot of political posturing over the next several months. Given the importance of the Internet to governments and Big Business, this could well turn out to be a bigger political issue than Kyoto.
I have a revolutionary new theory (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe, just maybe...
the US is a bunch of hos.
the EU is a bunch of hos.
people in general, are a bunch of hos.
I assume your world has been rocked.
(people aren't really that different. stop pretending your nationstate is unique! it's not!)
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:2, Insightful)
And now, it never will be.
As a side benefit, the people of Iraq have a chance at self-rule, with many inevitable hurdles to clear - but don't let bringing democracy to 25 million people, removing a murderous tyrant from power, or establishing a beachhead of democracy in the center of the Arab world affect your belief that continued power by the gentle, peace-loving Saddamites would have been the better answer for both the (fractured) Iraqi people and the rest of the world.
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd be real interested to hear how the UN has helped with the "war on terror"? It seems to me that the "war on terror" has continued despite the UN's attempted interference at every turn.
How about UN Resolution 1441? To refresh your memory, that's the one that contains the admission by Iraq that they had Weapons of Mass Destruction, and that they would dispose of those weapons, and that they would prove that disposal to the UN.
Iraq failed to do so. Maybe they did get rid of their WMDs, but part of their responsibility was to prove to the UN that those were destroyed, and not just hidden for later use.
So it was up to the UN to enforce it. The UN went against its own resolution and refused to enforce it. So the US was the one who got to do the actual "enforcing"... And once it was complete and Saddam was out of power, the world turned on us for going AGAINST the UN (despite the fact that it was simply enforcing the UNs own resolution).
Re:This again? Where's the problem? (Score:4, Insightful)
Growth rate of China's economy: huge. About 11% IIRC.
Which means China is on course to become the largest economy in the world in about 30 years' time. (Figures all OTOH, but there or thereabouts.)
Err. No. If you see a linear trend line, it is generally foolish to extrapolate out that trend line 30 years. China has and will continue to see a lot of growth. Thinking that they are going to maintain 11% growth for the next 30 years on the other hand is close to insane.
People don't realize this, but business in China has a LOT of problems. The most obvious problems are the extremely high level of corruption and constant government meddling. China has a lot of people just starting to get out of third world style poverty and very cheap labor, but it isn't the business utopia people seem to think it is.
One of the other little talked about problems with China is their gross inefficiency. When the oil crunch comes, China and the developing world are going to be the ones to be hit the hardest. Granted, the first world will feel the burn too, especially in the indirect cost of having the developing world's economies getting a good shaking, but the pain in places like China will be much greater. The amount of oil it takes to grow the GDP in china 1% is significantly higher then that of US, and higher still then places like Europe and Japan.
I am not saying China can't become a super power, but it has some very serious hurdles to overcome first. China is still a mess politically, they are extremely bureaucratic and corrupt, their market is riding essentially only on the fact that they have cheap labor and a billion potential consumers, and their levels of oil consumption per percent of growth of the GDP makes the US look down right green. China has its share of problems. Boiling down China's rise as a super power to seeing a 11% growth rate is a naïvely simplistic way of examining the issue.
Re:This again? Where's the problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
Your comment, "how technically it is very difficult for one country to "control the internet."" You think that's hard, wait until you see a committee of twenty countries trying to do it.
And I just can't wait until the UN/EU tries to impose a "Root Fee" to pay for managing it, that every man, woman, and child with an Internet conneection will have to pay. If you don't think the UN is thinking about this, then you don't understand the most fundamental rule of politics -- "It's all about the money."
The US should stop acting like a spoiled brat (Score:1, Insightful)
The Bush Administration should stop acting like spoiled brats and facilitate the transition from ICANN to an international governing body modelled on the Universal Postal Union and the International Telecommunications Union. Sure, the ARPAnet was developed by the United States, as was a lot of the other technology that underlies the net. So what? The web as we know it was created by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, whose members are: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, the Slovak Republic, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. CERN is located in Switzerland. Does that mean that CERN or the EU should control everything to do with WWW and HTML? Of course not. Radio was invented by Gugliemo Marconi, an Italian with an Irish mother. Does that mean that Italy or Ireland should control radio communications? Of course not.
The regulation and standardization of an international communications medium is obviously something that should be done by an international body. Who invented it is irrelevant. I am amazed not only at the Bush administration's position but by the numerous /.ers who advance the position that whoever invented it should control it without any justification for this bizarre assumption, not to mention the lack of attention to the major non-American contributions. American jingoism never ceases to amaze me. (And before someone whines about me being an anti-American foreigner, I am a US citizen. I am also a Canadian citizen.)
My main concern about shifting control of the net is censorship. On several occasions third world countries have made noises about wanting to control communications so that they could control information. They use various euphemisms, but what they want is the ability to censor. I am therefore very pleased that the current effort to internationalize control is being led by the EU. If the US wants to foster freedom and democracy throughout the world, the best thing it can do is to cooperate and make sure that control passes to a technically competant non-political organization like the UPU and ITU rather than to a politicized disaster like the Commission on Human Rights.
Re:This again? Where's the problem? (Score:4, Insightful)
Team America? (Score:3, Insightful)
Turning anything over to the UN seems like a bad idea to me, but saying "we invented it; fuck off" or "we have the strongest military so you can't take it away" are hardly eloquent or compelling arguments.
Better to trot out the track record of the UN and then ask, "Is this who should run the show?".
I don't think ICANN is perfect, but I'm positive I don't want it handed to the UN.
Re:The UN, dictatorships and the Internet... (Score:3, Insightful)
"If it aint broken, dont fix it" is all well and good, but what happens when it does break? When the United States decides it doesnt like a new EU trade law, so is going to block their zones until they give in? We would have no warning and would need to put in the same changes we want to do now anyway. At least if we do it now we can have a transition period.
I also want to make sure that China and other such governments have no say over my Internet connection.
Funny, what if China had invented the internet and declared it would retain control of the root servers? Would you be happy to drop your battle for equal control just because the chinese dont want you to have a say with their connections?
And the EU sure seems to be taking the hardball approach to this!
Wouldnt the US take a hardball approach if it was the other way around? Iraq? It was ok for you to feel insecure about WMDs and invade to fix the problem, but we cant?
Its unlikely they would split the internet, more likely would move the ccTLDs to separate root servers maybe? But even if they did simply shift control of the non-us root servers to an international body, effectivly splitting the internet, this would cause the US problems too. (What will you do when all those Hong Kong sellers vanish off ebay?)
I do agree that this isnt a nice solution to the problem, but the US should stop thinking its the solution to everything and realise it would be doing exactly the same as we are if this were reversed. Maybe instead of saying "We wont give up control of the internet" say "We wont give up control of the US portions, but will help create a UN body for all international parts.
Re:Lets remove DNS (Score:3, Insightful)
I think a lot of people have thought that DNS needs replacing, but I think it's just not going to happen. The fact is DNS works and replacing it would be a massive undertaking -- people just aren't willing to expend that much energy fixing something that works perfectly fine for the most part.
Re:Vint Cerf invented the Internet , _NOT_ the U.S (Score:5, Insightful)
When was the last time you worked on a project for some Corporate entity where YOU ended up owning the work? I'll help you out with that one, never. The company owns it.
Don't put your eggs into a basket you don't own (Score:2, Insightful)
Basically, american tax dollars funded and built this network, other countries were invited into it voluntarily, and are not being forced to stay into this network. It is of course in the interests of the people to stay on the network for educational and humanitarian reasons. I don't think that the US has shown any cause or reason (shutting people out) that the UN or EU has any standing to present this to anyone.
As an American, I would honestly like to know, "what has the UN done for the USA?" Then I would, in the same vain ask, "What has the USA done for teh UN?"
insightful? (Score:3, Insightful)
I have to say I laughed at the idea of the UN wresting control of the internet from the US in the first place. The UN doesn't have much power, and most that it does have comes from the point of US guns and G7 financial levers. I just don't see the UN succeeding here. Now, the EU has more capability to at least attempt something like this.
If you want to worry about international "government" taking money from you personally, worry more about international treaty organizations, like trade organizations and such. Those organizations have some power, they are written in to the Constutition.
Re:The US is Losing the World (Score:3, Insightful)
Why the UN shouldn't control the DNS servers... (Score:3, Insightful)
Here in America, I was able to write an article [theinquirer.net] criticizing Microsoft for their stance on Office, with regards to OpenDocument support. Would I be able to criticize the largest software company in China, for example? I doubt I would have the right (or the expectation to not suffer the repurcussions of angering one of the largest companies) merely for speaking out.
I can stand up and voice an opinion that goes against "the party line." (valid in more than just Communist China) If I were to do this in China, or any of the other listed countries, I would face prison, at the least, if not death.
I'm sorry, I'll stick with the US being in control. What's broke about it? What has the US done wrong with regards to controlling the internet? Up until now we've let ICANN run things how they want...the "hands-off" approach has worked well. We would be among the first to complain should the US administration start exerting control, as that would be censorship, and against our Constitution. The UN does not recogonize the right of free speech as a right member countries citizens have.
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:3, Insightful)
The world already has a say in the running of the internet, although I wonder how many people (probably a good many Slashdotters, but very close to zero UN delegates) really understand what they mean by "running" the internet.
Do they mean ICANN? Guess what - ICANN loses its power as soon as enough people switch to IPV6 (or some alternative layer 2 that provides an effectively limitless supply of addresses).
Do they mean DNS (the article mentions root servers, so one might presume they consider "the internet" as equivalent to DNS)? Well, they can go right ahead and set up their own root servers today. You or I, personally, could set up our own root servers today. That doesn't mean anyone would use them, but we can physically do so.
Do they mean the WWW, by which they could really only mean they want the authority to censor content? Go right ahead, and something similar but totally separate (and likely encrypted) will pop up tomorrow (shocking though it may seem, I used "the internet" for almost decade before I visited my first web page... And still do use it, on a daily basis, in ways unrelated to The Web).
So... The "world" already has a say in the running of the internet, by which I mean every single person that can sit at a PC and participate. Not the governments, not the corporations (though both of those can certainly make connecting quite a lot more of a hassle), but the PEOPLE of the world.
The problem with this whole topic, and the reason we can all argue about this (in the physical-possibility sense) despite the respective views of our governments, involves just what we all mean by "internet". NO ONE controls the internet. Not ICANN, not Verisign, not even the recently-mentioned tier-1 providers that control the physical medium. The governments of the world just don't seem to get that idea.
If ICANN declared open season on class-As, if every root server went down, all the tier-1s ended their peerage agreements, and you cut every fiber in the world longer than a kilometer, the internet would STILL exist. Getting between two points might start looking like the "Path" field in a usenet message, and latencies would make any online games other than Chess not very much fun at all, but you just can't put this particular genie back in the bottle.
As long as I have two NICs, a router, and a neighbor with the same, we can agree to share traffic to our mutual benefit.
When Bell invented the telephone, he wasn't thinking: "ah hah, now Britain will be able to communicate effectively but no one else will!", he was thinking "God damn i've just done the world a big favour!
Aside from the fact that, though born Scottish he spent his entire adult life in the US - By all accounts, Bell's thoughts ran more like "God Damn will I make a lot of money on this!".
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:2, Insightful)
Currently, the US is not a threat to the internet.. And when we are through, it never will be.
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:5, Insightful)
The Internet is best described with organic terms, it grew out of the interconection of networks, colonising new nodes and spreading as more wanted it. The US is where it all started, not who created it. To say so surmounts to claiming that they built it as well, which is blatantly rediculous given it was and has always been since its cessation as a darpa and academic project, a commercial undertaking by telecomunications and networking companies.
The internet owes it existance to a number of things outside the US, Vint Cerf and the CERN folks as well for instance, in the very least that proves something, since "the net" by and large when disscussed is reffering to the interconected layer of html and hypertext linked pages of html that are the result of their work, without these the internet would likely have remaind a technical place, as it was before the AOL explosion and the september that never ended.
I personaly only care about this as it is jabing me in the side nagging partialy if theres a way to profit from this somehow... I know that the US isnt stupid enough to declare war over the internet, and the US isnt strong enough in any way other than militarily (they got them nukes and thats why i said that, no ones got as many as em) that they can attempt to force control over the rest of the world, this isnt some kind of US/UN cold war... this is a rediculous schism between those with the power and those who want them to relinquish it for a lower amount of control.
Actually, he's right, in a way... (Score:5, Insightful)
The US funded the research which created the protocols upon which the Internet is based. The Internet first existed in the US, but it wasn't invented, it evolved.
The Internet itself is simply a bunch of individual networks which have agreed to connect together using those protocols. For that reason, any attempt to "control" it is fatally flawed. There's nothing to control. One can presume to "take control" of the DNS "root servers," but there's nothing preventing someone else from creating their own set. Who wins depends strictly upon which set the individual networks point to, and no one has control over that decision except the individual network admins.
Let the Euros piss and moan, after which if they don't like the US influence over the Internet, they can instead join Fidonet http://www.fidonet.us/joinfido.htm [fidonet.us] :)
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:3, Insightful)
Indeed. However, in recent times your government has been play-acting the worst of the American stereotype (arrogant, inward-looking, aggressively expansionist), which has accordingly strengthened that stereotype worldwide.
Most american's aren't arrogant or expansionist (they've got you bang to rights on the inward-looking, though), but the ones you nominate to power are, so you all cop the world-opinion fall-out.
"Yes, there are legitimate grievances against the US. But much or what is perceived as US arrogance is merely the US attempting to retain it's own constitutional structure. A large portion of the world wants the US to tear up our constitution and remake ourselves in the image of the EU."
Again, this is a very common US perception. In fact, all the rest of the world wants is for the US to stop telling them what to do.
You can easily give this a reality-check: How many EU countries have tried to use trade embargoes, tariffs or full-scale military invasion to change the US's position on economic or political issues? And how many times has the US done the same?
Obviously terrorists would love it if you turned the Us into a middle-eastern-style fundamentalist theocracy, but we're talking national governments here, and politics/economics, not private individuals and religion.
"Most of the what the world knows about the US is garbage, heavily influenced by Hollywood. Just as most of what most Americans know about the Middle East is from Hollywood bull and news reports showing scenes of war and terror."
That's a very interesting assertion. So basically you're saying that:
What the rest of the world knows about America comes from what America tells them about itself, and
What America knows about the middle east is what America tells itself.
Hmmm.
Add to that the fact that what other countries know about the US is what America tells them and how the US actually acts towards their country, and you're getting close to why there's such a lot of anti-american feeling in the world, especially in the poorest countries, where the disparity between that the US says and does is greatest.
You might want to look up... (Score:2, Insightful)
hint: http://www.darpa.mil/ [darpa.mil]
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:3, Insightful)
> rest of the world.
Just a point; if anyone tried to destroy the US monetarily, the effect on the rest of the workl would be easily as bad. The dependency works both ways. Yes, the US is dependent of foreign trade, but most of the nations we trade with are dependent on it as well. Some few nations would just suffer loss of income and products, but many would suffer pains equal to some of the worst natural disasters.
I don't think the original poster was talking about a trade embargo - he was talking about debt... US treasury bonds to be precise.
When Bush spent $200B to invage Iraq, where do you think the money came from? Sadly the answer "US tax payers" is wrong (at least in the short term). The answer is that this was decicit spending - the US didn't have that money available, so they borrowed from other countries by way of issuing US debt instruments (30 yr bonds) which other countries bought (or in simple english - they lent the US the money, at the interest rate payable on the bonds). Of course the US taxpayers will eventually foot the bill as those 30 yr IOUs become payable.
So, other countries don't need to start a trade war to cause the US economy to crash - they just need to stop lending the US the money (i.e. buying US debt) that keep the US economy afloat (at least while it's being run by a profligate spender like Bush Jr or Sr.. Clinton was actually running a budget surplus).
The Oil producing countries could also cause the US economy to tank by the simple measure of choosing to price/sell oil in Euros rather than dollars. The demand for dollars would then plummet and the value of the dollar would than tank, and the US economy along with it.
Re:i suggested this in the previous discussion (Score:4, Insightful)
And the specs for those protocols are all written in American English.
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:2, Insightful)
The US always has paid for its own messes ... and eventually, for everyone else's.
You mean, like you have paid Vietnam for your screwup there? Oops, my bad - you haven't done that yet, despite being ordered to. Any plans to do that?
The UN is a cesspool, and should go (Score:2, Insightful)
One attribute I notice of people that come from the US or the EU, is that they think the UN is a noble institution. It's easy to think the UN is noble if you aren't paying attention, or just listen to the media, or if you don't do business with them.
The reality is that the UN is the largest, most corrupt institution in the world. It is run by the scions of dictators and fascists, who get their positions because of the power and the money they can steal. The UN is implicated in multiple genocides, and in embezzlement of at least 10s and maybe 100s of billions of US dollars in the last decade alone.
There are one or two parts of the UN that may be worth saving, like the World Health Organisation. UNICEF too, maybe, if we can shut down the UN child prositution rings running in Africa.
Think Enron, with the combined corruption of every third world country you know, and vested interests that have everything to do with prolonging war, dictatorship, and famine. Add hundreds of billions of dollars of money that isn't audited, and a media that gives you a free pass. That is the UN.
If the UN disappeared tomorrow, the world would be a better place.
The worlds DNS servers are WAY better off being controlled by the USA. Americans who think otherwise should travel a little more widely.
-- Nurf, who is not a US citizen.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The US is Losing the World (Score:3, Insightful)
If that's the question, then the US keeps it, having a long track record for both.
The US has alienated enemy and ally alike
That's a two-way street. The US has made many mistakes, but the rest of the world has this way of forgetting that the US is basically the financier and implementor of tons of issues that the UN etc. get to basically execute with the stroke of a pen. Given that, we're sick of doing all the dirty work and getting only an equal say over how things are run. The way I see it, if we're doing the lion's share of the work, we get to set some terms.
The Bush people running our country today are clearly willing to risk the Internet in their desire to destroy that community.
Wait, who started this again? We're backing status quo. Seems the UN and Europe are the ones willing to play a game of chicken to feed their sense of self-importance. The internet works fine now. The UN has no experience running it. There's no compelling reason to switch other than politics. So who's playing games?
Re:i suggested this in the previous discussion (Score:3, Insightful)
As designed the UN is next to useless. The only good thing is that it provides a way for all the world's goverments to send each other messages directly.
If the UN had real power it wouldn't have a security council that any member can veto anything because just because.
Re:WWW != The Internet (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No one will notice (Score:5, Insightful)
This doesn't spell the end to ICANN at all. All it does is reinforce the idea that the EU thinks they control the economic members and doesn't really respect member countries, and that the UN is powerless. People bitch and moan that the US tries to take things from other countries, well here is the exact same thing.
Re:bad analogy, coming through (Score:3, Insightful)
Firstly, under current jurisdiction concepts can be owned and controlled - that's the whole idea behind intellectual property. That wasn't my point though - I wasn't thinking about IP, I was just making a purely hypothetical, not based on reality, argument - my point was that saying 'we made it, and this means we should forever control it' is dumb.
I can think of several reasons why the servers should be kept in the US such as stability and lack of censorship (currently; things might change). We were the first to create it, though, is nothing but pure nationalistic dumbness.
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Why do you care?
Because when people don't care, Bad Things happen. It is vital that individuals are involved.
2. Why take their word over your own trust in your own county?
Why would anyone trust their own country? How many times do you need to be duped before you learn one of the foundations of American citizenship, which is "a healthy distrust of government"?
I personally trust the UN more than I trust the US. Why? Because the individuals of US government have shown me again and again that they do not fight for OUR interests, but rather THEIR OWN interests -- although they claim the opposite. At least the UN is more honest.
It's all about DNS (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:3, Insightful)
The UN went against its own resolution and refused to enforce it. So the US was the one who got to do the actual "enforcing"
So the UN voted and decided to not do something, The U.S. ignored the UN vote and did it anyway, and you're claiming the U.S. does not deserve to be blamed for the results of their actions? Did you ever think maybe the UN voted not to do anything because most of them did not believe there was a problem (which turned out to be true). Did you ever think maybe our president declaring that he will go to war unless someone else does something that is by definition impossible is not cause for reprimand?
One day the whole club decided as a group Herb probably did not have the stolen candy and it was not right to search him. Then George declares, "unless you show me you don't have the candy I'm going to beat the shit out of you and take it." Herb empties his pockets and says, "see, nothing, is there anywhere else you want to look?" George says, "that's not proof, it could be hidden somewhere else" and beats the snot out of Herb. After ripping up all his clothes, handing out all of herb's money to his friends, ripping off a few body parts, raping him in the ass, and chaining his head to the floor, George says, "well he probably swallowed the candy, and he is an asshole anyway."
Everyone in the room picks up a stick, doesn't turn their back on George from then on. Now the club has decided maybe George is not the most stable or trustworthy person to hold on to host the club's website and you think that is an overreaction? Well, you're entitled to your opinion.
Re:The US should stop acting like a spoiled brat (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry, but my radio argument is exactly on the mark. The EU and UN are not as far as anything I have seen demanding that the US hand over any equipment, nor are they demanding that the US hand over complete control of net within the US. Obviously the US would retain control of .gov and .us just as other countries do. What they are proposing is very much along the lines of the current international systems for control of other forms of communication including radio. Those systems have worked quite well for decades.
My point about my US citizenship (which by the way is the one I was born with) was that I am not an inveterate US-hater. The fact that I am also a Canadian citizen doesn't change that. That Canadians are foreigners (from the point of view of an American) is obvious and of no discernible relevance. That Canadians are (in general) socialists, as you assert, merely shows your ignorance. Canada has a few characteristics that Americans, and almost noone but Americans, regard as socialist, notably the health care system. That is one of the nice things about Canada. That a country with the resources of the US would leave a large part of its population without regular decent medical care is just plain indecent. In general, Canadians are not socialists. The party in power at the national level is the Liberal party. The New Democratic Party, which is the democratic socialist party in Canada, has only 19 out of 308 seats and has such little power as it has because the Liberals do not have a majority and need the NDP's support. Until recently the Liberals had formed the government by themselves. Before the Liberals, the Conservatives were in power. The NDP has never formed a national government. At the provincial level, again, NDP governments have been rare.
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:3, Insightful)
For example, it is illegal to drive 100mph.
Driving 100mph on a public road is not illegal. It is an adminstrative infraction. If it were illegal, it'd be a misdemeanor, and you'd be entitled to a lawyer.
Re:The US is Losing the World (Score:4, Insightful)
If you don't like it, then set up your own DNS. If you think DNS needs to be more decentrilized (which is kind of stupid to do), then write a set of protocols to do so. If people like it, they will use it. Just like how DNS started to be used.
Why in the hell do we need the UN trying to forcibly take control of anything? We have independant countries for very good reasons. The UN is not a lawmaking body, and the EU isn't supposed to be either. How does this have any basis in the foundings of these organizations?
No, this whole set of shenanigans perpetrated by the UN and the several countries is ridiculous, and just about the worst possible way of doing it.
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:5, Insightful)
those with the power and those who want them to relinquish it for a lower amount of control.
What control, what power? The US government stopped "operating" the internet a while ago. The government doesn't own any of the public backbones. The government doesn't own any of the public DNS root servers. The millions of miles of fibre that blanket the US aren't owned by the government.
The maybe was some point in the past when one entity could have "owned" the internet. The internet isn't some flat homogenious collection of nodes. It's a whole bunch of castles with draw bridges between them.
Re:This again? Where's the problem? (Score:3, Insightful)
Then research early 90's to today. Take a look at why Japan did not grow past a certain point. Why the marriage between business and government allowed the country to expand rapidly originally, but ended up choking. Then research how restrictive and centrally planned the Chinese markets really are.
Folks forget history so quickly it is pathetic.
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Why do you care?
Why do I care? Simply put, we live in a global economy and as such we are heavily dependent upon our neighbors to buy and sell goods. That means we need somewhat good relations with them.
If we create purposefully hostile relations, you know what happens? They suddenly realize "hey, you know, we don't really need the US", and they go off and form their own trading partners, etc. And Frankly, we are at a time in history now that the US is more dependent upon the world than the world is upon the US. Look at our trade imbalance, and then look at what nations like China, Russia and all of Europe have been doing. They're negotiating their own deals, outside of our arena.
2. Why take their word over your own trust in your own county?
Well that's a difficult question. My country, I trust. I think our business leaders understand in the broader scheme why what I said in #1 is important, and they are putting a great effort into making this work.
Our Government? Them I don't trust. Why should I/ The President doesn't represent America, he only represents his one political party. His policy goals and actions are not determined by what is in the best interest for the nation to help it grow, but rather what is in the best interests of maintaining their political power.
Never before have I seen this in my lifetime. And you can bet, that those living outside our country see it even more vividly as has been evidenced by the US's declining popularity.
You cannot force someone to like you. You cannot force someone to love you.
Well... no. (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately when the ones that are arrogant and conceited are so good at pulling off grabbing the FP post on slashdot, it can perhaps become understandable if others are to make mistakes.
Yes, there are legitimate grievances against the US. But much or what is perceived as US arrogance is merely the US attempting to retain it's own constitutional structure.
As an American, I would gently suggest that the majority of what is perceived as US arrogance would be comprised by decades of frequently illegal covert interference by the U.S. intelligence agencies and military in the internal functions of other countries; unjustified invasions of other countries with the opposition of the entire world and many of America's own citizens; economic tendencies wherein Americans are perceived to be gradually beginning to own practically everything in certain foreign countries; frequent international trade dealings wherein America demands other countries stick to the trade treaties they have signed, yet America ignores those same treaties as it see fit on whims as small as the sale of lumber; seeming insistence that when American forces are abroad, international rules, such as the Geneva Convention or the U.N. convention against torture, apply to everyone but America; and actions like the decision by the Bush Administration, the one the events in this article are occuring in response to, to keep the DNS root servers used by the entire world under U.S. Department of Commerce control rather than handing them over to an international body (ICANN) as was originally promised under the previous president.
None of these things have to do with the U.S. "retaining it's [sic] constitutional structure".
A large portion of the world wants the US to tear up our constitution and remake ourselves in the image of the EU.
I would also gently suggest no one, anywhere, is seriously suggesting the U.S. do this.
You could, I'm sure, locate some small number of specific criticisms where expressed displeasure with U.S. actions that essentially are a matter of the U.S. protecting its own sovereignity. These are not the criticisms that are important. The actions that have earned America its reputation of international arrogance have nothing, nothing whatsoever, to do with the U.S. protecting its sovereignity and "constitutional structure". In fact I would posit practically all sentiment of U.S. arrogance in civilized foreign countries could be eliminated if America would just respect the sovereignity of others.
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:5, Insightful)
This came about because of the UN sanctions upon Iraq following the Kuwait invasion. The sanctions were intended primarily to keep Hussein from redeveloping a military force. A secondary agenda was to plummet the economy of the country such that the people rose up against Hussein.
The secondary agenda did not work. Hussein maintained an iron grip, as all despots do. He kept what he needed for himself and gave little to the people who had no say by force of a gun to their head.
The Oil for Food program was setup as a way to alleviate the suffering of the people, as well as get Iraqi oil back into the system to help lower global prices.
Now there were two failures:
#1. A handful of people at the UN got involved in a kickback scheme in awarding the contracts.
#2. Hussein smuggled Oil, outside of the Oil for Food program.
The first failure is that of the UN, and it's being dealt with.
The second failure is the fault of the United States and the other nations who knew all along this was going on but turned a blind eye because we were hungry for that oil. Plus, the oil was smuggled through Turkey and Jordan and we didn't want to hurt their profits either.
But now we get back to the primary purpose of the UN sanctions. To keep Hussein from redeveloping a military power.
So what's more important to you? Obviously not the oil, and not the kickbacks, because we turned a blind eye. What was important was the sanctions keeping weapons out of Husseins army.
As it turns out, The UN sanctions were a success, as proven by the invasion of Iraq finding no WMDs and nothing even anything remotely resembling a defensive military force
The complaints regarding Oil for Food are politically motivated John Birch society bullshit.
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:5, Insightful)
I can see some sort of international consortium running the root server system if you could trust that the censor queens would not have a voice in it. The UN is not that body. The UN will never be that body.
Re:Actually, he's right, in a way... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This again? Where's the problem? (Score:3, Insightful)
I believe this is what is being proposed. Different countries set up their own root servers. ISPs receive government recommendations that they use ones other than the US ones (probably in addition to, rather than instead of). Then, if the US or any other country decides to play silly buggers with the DNS infrastructure then ISPs simply removes that root server from the list, and there is no interruption.
I would probably recommend that any response other than NXDOMAIN be validated by other root servers controlled by a different country before being entered into a DNS cache. 90%+ of DNS queries that hit the root servers are miss-typed top level domains which return NXDOMAIN, so this wouldn't add much load to the system, and would provide extra protection from unilateral action by anyone.
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:5, Insightful)
Yea but unfortunatly they must have missed the fact that "George" knew that "Herb" was a a viscious killer that had killed many people.
So are half of the club members, including George. In fact George used to pay Herb to beat people up, but now he is upset because Herb does not want to be a pawn anymore.
BECAUSE GEORGE IS NOT A PUSSY LIKE MOST OF THE MEMBERS OF THIS STUPID CLUB...
George is a coward and a bully and a liar and everyone knows it.
Heh, not likely. He stays in the club because he does not want the others to gang up on him, because he needs them as much as they need him financially, because he owes half of them a lot of money and does not want his car repossessed, because he and some other club members used to get in fights and this was the only place they could talk without much risk of a real fight breaking out, and because he is smart enough to know isolation makes you weak. He also know if he picks a fight with the biggest clique in the club they will probably kick his ass and take his stuff and because he knows Lee could go kung-fu on his ass and probably turn him into dog meat.
The smart ones know that it's not him that needs us, it's us that needs him.
Need him for what? To borrow money from them? To try to pick fights? To extort money from the littlest guys? Any one who is fool enough to think the world needs the U.S. more than the U.S. needs the world is an idiot of unbelievable proportions, and any American who believes it is just promoting the stupid, arrogant American stereotype. The U.S. has lower standards of living, worse education, and more civil rights problems than about half of the U.N. members. They bring nothing special to the table.
Re:i suggested this in the previous discussion (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Funding (Score:5, Insightful)
We've had our fingers in everyone's pies since WWII. We've gone around telling other countries what government they can and can't have. Our little tiff with the Soviet Union caused trouble for all kinds of places that weren't otherwise involved at all.
We've ignored our own constitution and persecuted people's freedom of speech (see the McCarthy trials). We've broken treaty after treaty with the American Indians. We've fueled wars and sold weapons to both sides.
We've funded revolutions, we've changed loyalties (see Vietnam and Cuba), and we've pulled every stop to build U. S. market dominance in the world. We've got a military that we can drop damn near anywhere and if not take over, at least cause a lot of strife.
I wouldn't trust us. Hell, I don't, and I used to be in the U. S. military.
Granted though, in my opinion, you asked for it. We had a policy of letting Europeans kill each other all they wanted without our involvement until Germany dragged us into WWI by trying to get Mexico to attack us. Then, when we decided to go back to our policy of leaving everyone else alone, Germany and Japan dragged us back into it with WWII. It's always one asshole that ruins it for everyone. Saddam dragged us into the gulf war by attacking one of our allies, and good ol' bin Laden, in an attempt to get us out of the middle east, started the current chain of events that led to our invading Afghanistan (personally, I think Iraq was just finishing daddy's work for ol' dubya, but that's just me).
We're the big kid on the block, and if you're tired of our bullying, you're going to have to fight back. And I'm not talking with words, mind you. The American people don't care, by and large, and our politicians have no reason to put an end to it. Until then, you're just going to have to wait until either an economic crisis cripples us, or civil war breaks out. I don't see either happening any time soon.
Re:Actually, he's right, in a way... (Score:3, Insightful)
So what if the US maintains control of the Root DNS servers? Other countries can simply put their own in place and point all their national sub-DNS servers to their own roots instead of the ones in the US... Granted, this will end up fracturing the Internet to some degree, but that's going to happen at some point anyway.
The real issue here, it seems to me, is that everybody wants a piece of the control, but they want to do it without causing a rift in the Internet. If someone were to have the huevos to stand up and say "we're going to do it on our own, you can interoperate with us or not", the US will suddenly find themselves in a very lonely position without much bargaining power. And with the current political strength of US-based multinational corporations, they will soon convince the US Government to stop this foolishness and accept the fact that they aren't the only game in town anymore and they need to play nicely with everyone else.
The US has entered its teenage years. It's rebellious, strong, and anti-authority, and hasn't learned not to be so self-centered. It will grow out of it, eventually, if enough good people guide it the right way. This might be a good learning experience for it.
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:4, Insightful)
"Wow. So if a foreign spy asked you to sell secrets for some cash you would be a taker? No allegiance to country, that being a silly 'old fashioned value.'"
Well it's a hypothetical, because I value my integrity very highly. But if I lived in Nazi Germany I would have few qualms aiding the allies. If I lived in Massacheusetts in 1775, then I would have no problems betraying my British government. The nation does not have the power to tell me where my loyalties lie and is not entitled to them regardless of their actions. It can earn them the same way anyone else does.
What is wrong with that?
Re:WWW != The Internet (Score:2, Insightful)
No I wouldn't, but by invoking that comparison, it seems like you have been duped by the rhetoric. The US does not have any claim to the DNS protocol itself, just the root physical servers paid for by US taxpayer dollars. Depsite all the disingenous rhetoric, it is clear that is isn't about control of the internet within their borders.
If control really was the issue, then all the EU would have to do is follow China's lead and go and create their own stuff behind their own gateway and with their own root servers. Whether or not you like "The Great Firewall Of China", China has demonstrated that it is technically feasible to have full control of their own infrastructure without needing to craft some UN resolution demanding that a country fork over their servers and disseminate disingenous rhetoric about "The U$A is controlling the internet"
Re:Funding (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Actually, he's right, in a way... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:2, Insightful)
The US and the rest of the world was shocked at the end of Gulf War I at how much closer Iraq was to the bomb than they had estimated. Iraq's history of successfully hiding a nuclear weapons program meant they needed to be on best behavior. They weren't and they paid the price. The alternative is unthinkable.
huzzah another person that gets it (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:3, Insightful)
Kind of like the US government then.
People already VOTE with /etc/resolv.conf (Score:3, Insightful)
People vote on the DNS root, when they decide whose servers to have their machine point to. People vote on the numbering scheme, whenever they connect to someone else's network and decide to use the addresses the other network's dudes told them to use.
It's already perfectly democratic. I guess UN and EU can try to overthrow this democracy, but they will fail miserably and they'll be lucky to get 1% of the users. If EU doesn't like how their own people are voting, then they should educate people, instead of pretending that they or any other government (e.g. US) has some kind of authority over the matter. I know people are in love with communism these days, but there are some things that governments just can't plan for its little people.
I'm from the EU and I'm here to help you. (Score:2, Insightful)
Hendon is also adamant: "The really important point is that the EU doesn't want to see this change as bringing new government control over the internet. Governments will only be involved where they need to be and only on issues setting the top-level framework."
Since when do governments "only [get] involved where they need to be"??? Is that the lesson that history teaches? Can we point to other examples of grass-roots resources like this where they were working fine, but some top-level coalition of governmental entities took control and things got even better? Or even just didn't get worse?? I think not! What is the problem they are wanting to solve? What have these other countries not been able to do because of ICANN? It's just a power grab of the most egregious kind. Should UPS or FedEx be taken over by the UN or the EU? They are also critical services to business. Think about this, people!!
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The US is the largest financial contributor. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sure the rest of the world would happily lose that financial contribution if they could also have fewer of those pesky vetoes..
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:3, Insightful)
Look, the UN is the closest thing we have to international democracy. The US is *supposed* to value such ideas.
Re:Let them make their own internet... (Score:3, Insightful)
They did. Then "they" connected it to "yours" and we have the current system, a system of interconnected networks. Thats why they call it the internet.
This whole issue is bullshit and should be silently ignored. Don't make it worse.
Re:The UN has finally lost it (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately, there are a lot of NOn-democracies in the UN with a voting power...that could make non-democratic friendly policy decisions....
That's a good reason not to turn it over to them...
The UN is not a Democracy (Score:2, Insightful)
Next, Democracy does not equal freedom. Many posters on here seem to think that the result of a democratic vote is 'people choosing for themselves'. This is rediculous. When people are free to choose for themselves, no one is free to vote on something. The result of a democratic vote is one group of people choosing for everyone else, thus violating the minorities right to decide for themselves. If everyone is free to choose for themselves, then no one has the right to vote on it.
Next, one HUGE difference between the US and many other countries that just makes all of this worse is the fundamental difference between the US legal system and many others: in the US, you are free to do anything unless there is a law prohibiting it, whereas for example in Britain from what I understand you are not free to do something unless there is a law allowing it. To americans it makes absolutely no sense to talk of democracy in the context of 'increasing' rights; when you vote in the US, unless youre voting to do away with or modify an exising law, by default you are ~decreasing~ the amount of rights people had before the vote. Sometimes its a necessary trade off, such as welfare; but make no mistake that the enactment of welfare was a ~decrease~ in americans rights to keep the fruits of their labor (and no, Im not anti-welfare per se, its just an example). Minimum wage laws remove the right to work from people who's labor is worth less than the minimum wage, etc.
Next, the majority does ~not~ rule, no. If no single individual has the right to dictate to you the choices you have to make in life, then niether does a group of individuals. If a person alone tells you you have to do something, you laugh and say whatever, then that individual goes and stands in a group with others and they all vote to have you do that thing, there is ~no~ difference. Merely because one is among a group, ones rights do not increase. New rights dont magically appear. No group has any more or less rights than an individual. There is ~No Such Thing~ as a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Euros rightfully complain about the influence of religon in the current US admin all the while most european countries poltical systems are based on the secular religous belief of a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Well, fuck that religon just as strongly as organized religon.
Next, democracy is a means to an end, not an end in itself. That end is individual freedom. It does no good to do away with a monarch without doing away with the authority the monarch had. If you remove a monarch and just transfer his authority to 'the people', youre just creating multiple monarchs. Its not how one weilds control over others that is right or wrong, its the fact that one ~has~ control over others that is just plain wrong.
Next, a free country is not a country that is just not 'beholden' to another. A free country is a country where individuals are free to live their lives as they wish, without a govt or their neighbors deciding for them. Some shleprock called Cuba a free country; thats fucking rediculous, and yes Ive been there. If you arent free to keep the fruits of your labor, youre not free. Americans are very sensative to that, perhaps having to do with a little civil war we had a while back you may have heard of.
Lastly, govt legislation is not some 'will of the people/society'. First, that limits society to only those eligible to vote. Second, unless your country has laws that require representatives to vote the way a majority of their constituents tell them to vote, you have no guarantee that the constituents agree. It would be absolutely rediculous for example to claim that american
political chest-beating, nothing more. (Score:3, Insightful)
Utter Hogwash
You have summed it up right there. Anyone bright enough to look at the underlying issues here will see that for the last few years, (while the EU has been organizing), countries have been trying to 'take on the super-power' to establish their political clout with the international community. France and Germany have been the biggest 'Veto-holders,' in both the UN and EU - where they hope to (as every country would like to be) take a major, if not top, seat in the 'union' that could potentially challenge the US as the world super-power. Don't forget that the leaders of these countries have been elected or stay elected and popular on little merit besides their 'ability' to stand up to the US in the UN.
The truth is that there is nothing wrong with how the internet is currently administered; the UN has lost all credibility to the US populace (who wonders why boatloads of our tax money is sent to them while they don't thank us for our contribution, but expect it and ask for more. i.e. 'Let's eradicate world hunger and poverty with your money, your citizens love taxes, we know this').
The UN is a wonderful idea and its aims are usually morally sound and just; but too many times they have been inept in practice and completely butcher justice and 'peace-keeping' efforts.
While I can't see it happening, I have long awaited the day when the US ditches the UN in an empty parking lot like the whiny and expensive tag-along poser it is. What would happen? I dare the WTO to place embargo's and trade bans on the US. It would hurt our economy, yes, but the rest of the world would scream and crumble without sucking on the tit of the American consumer. The US is still the major trade hub of the world. Need proof? Look to 9/11, look to history. Every American economic recession since WW1 has been magnified in other countries.
All of this political noise is saber-shaking, and nothing more. We don't need, nor do I support military action to get our way. We vote in this country, and under the system of capitalism, the world still bows to the all-mighty dollar. Not because it is so strong, but because so many consumers are holding it.