Internet Power Struggle Reaching Climax 791
Fredden wrote to mention a BBC piece discussing the U.S.'s poor image when it comes to Internet management. From the article: "It has even lost the support of the European Union. It stands alone as the divisive battle over who runs the internet heads for a showdown at a key UN summit in Tunisia next month. The stakes are high, with the European Commissioner responsible for the net, Viviane Reding, warning of a potential web meltdown. " We've previously covered this story.
Re:So what? (Score:0, Informative)
you imagined. A bunch of insiders have been able to siphon off
a lot of money from the internet community as the cost for domain
names has been held artificially high.
The UDRP rules were also set up to favor trademark holders more
than they should have been.
ICANN has also dragged their feet on approving updates for CCTLDs
in order to coerce the CCTLD managers into signing contracts with
them.
They have let Verisign/Network Solutions get away with terrible
service and they were not properly slapped down for wild carding
URLs while causing problems for other services.
Re:So what? (Score:2, Informative)
That wasn't ICANN, that was VeriSign. Two completely separate organizations.
Re:So what? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:No new solutions, no new news (Score:5, Informative)
de.http://www.ibm.com/ [ibm.com] not being the same as us.http://www.ibm.com/ [ibm.com]
That would be a giant PITA and would be like having the entire World use the NANP system of phone numbers yet each nation assigns them locally -- so 212 in the US would be NYC but not in the UK. It would probably also violate a ton of treaties related to trademarks and copyrights if anybody but IBM controlled that domain in Germany (per your example).
My suggestion (it will never happen) to solve this "problem" (I don't think there is one but the rest of the World seems to...) would be to get rid of the TLDs like .com, .net, .org, etc. and go back to the country code TLDs. Let every nation set their own policy for how they work. Then you could have .com.us, .com.uk, etc.
I've advocated this for years but there is no way in hell it would happen because of the saturation of .com.
Re:Who Cares?!! Slashdot need a flamewar! (Score:1, Informative)
Re:So what? (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/10/04/icann_dem
Re:Bad journalism (Score:5, Informative)
If the DoC were to become heavy-handed with ICANN, the root server operators would probably not go along. The same would be true if the EU pretends they are in charge. Anybody can ride around saying "I am your King!", but the Internet is still an autonomous collective.
Re:bassackwards. (Score:3, Informative)
Isn't that already the case ? If the domain isn't specified, the DNS server will check if there's a machine of that name in the current domain.
Re:bassackwards. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:So what? (Score:1, Informative)
And the US is a representative republic, not a democracy. Always has been.
Re:So what? (Score:3, Informative)
Might want to check to verify that the US is, indeed, the world's biggest democracy before, you know, shoving that foot way up in your mouth.
Re:So what? (Score:3, Informative)
India:
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos
total: 3,287,590 sq km
land: 2,973,190 sq km
water: 314,400 sq km
United States
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos
total: 9,631,418 sq km
land: 9,161,923 sq km
water: 469,495 sq km
note: includes only the 50 states and District of Columbia
Though technically, neither is a democracy. Both are republics.
Is a phone booth with 14 people in it larger than a phonebooth with 1?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/316
Re:No new solutions, no new news (Score:1, Informative)
uk.co.ackwards.bass (Score:4, Informative)
The DNS mess isn't as bad as it could be though:
Re:What's next, a takeover of the GPS satellites? (Score:3, Informative)
GPS is another military technology that the US military was nice enough to share with civilians. Should they vote themselves the power to take that over too?
We don't need to -- we're well aware of the risks of depending on the US continuing to make the servive available, which is why we're building our own GPS network [eu.int]
Re:Where do YOU point your DNS? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:US foreign policy made this inevitable (Score:2, Informative)
And yet, any time that the US does not contribute to someone else's woe in an amount commensurate with the sum total of all others it is then denounced as some kind of piker.
Every time this thread comes up, half a million zealots start claiming the US created the Internet,
Arpanet, Ethernet, TCP/IP came from where?
War for oil
Gee, we're getting oil from Iraq? When did that start? If you want to talk about profiting from Iraq's oil, perhaps you should speak to Mr Annan.
refusing to submit political and military leaders for internationally-recognised war trials
Say, what?
supporting dubious regimes in other nations...
Like Britain, France, Germany, Canada, Russia and Japan?
the list goes on, and none of it's pretty.
Amen Brother Pot. Amen.
Re:Get you own (Score:2, Informative)
HTTP came out of CERN [www.cern.ch] which is an acronym for "Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire"; Horror! European and it has a French name.
It started in 1954, in large part as a means of healing the wounds of the war. Since then much fine research has been done there, not least because of the free and open collaboration between the physicists of Europe and the rest of the world - including the US. That group of people will show huge competitiveness - my experiment is ALWAYS the most important - but none of this mean-minded "I did it, it's my ball" BS.
The US physicists I have worked with - from SLAC, Fermi, Brookhaven - have never shown parochial jealousies. Perhaps because they get out and see what the rest of the world is like. Mostly because that's what they do - try to find out what the world is like.
Re:Kids will be kids-but we still made the first 1 (Score:2, Informative)
How wrong is that... We, ie: the US, started the internet with ARPANET which the first backbones it started on. This is why it is said that the US built the internet. Since the US taxpayers funded the initial start of this great network i don't see any reason why we should hand over the root servers, we run it just fine as it is now. What the UN really needs to do is tear down the great firewall of china. If the UN accomplished that along with few other feats then MAYBE they would deserve some amount of control. But hey, we made the first "ball", and this is only just a powerplay.
Re:Because people don't like the real solution (Score:3, Informative)
Set their nameserver in you resolv.conf or your DHCP-server: http://european.nl.orsn.net/tech-switch-linux.php [orsn.net]
It takes less than one minute and now you are ICANN-free. The internet still works, I can still post to
Just shows that this is much ado about nothing. There is no big threat and no taking control of DNS.
Re:No new solutions, no problem anyway (Score:3, Informative)
Global Commission to Fund the United Nations, published The UN: Policy and Financing Alternatives, 1996, which includes articles promoting the Tobin Tax [ceedweb.org]. Tobin Taxes are excise taxes on cross-border currency transactions. They can be enacted by national legislatures, followed by multilateral cooperation for effective enforcement. The revenue should go to global priorities: basic environmental and human needs. Such taxes will help tame currency market volatility and restore national economic sovereignty. (The name Tobin Tax and the original concept derives from James Tobin, a Ph.D. Nobel-laureate economist at Yale University.)
At the spring meeting of the IMF/World Bank in Washington, D.C., it was announced that a number of countries will be used to test a $1 tax on airline tickets [taipeitimes.com]. This global tax idea has been around for the last twenty years, and is now back, as a tax that would be relatively easy to put in place. Furthermore, an "International Financing Facility" for immunization will also be set up, on a test basis.
In 1994, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) called for a "New World Social Charter where the world will redistribute wealth, as it cannot survive, one-quarter rich and three-quarters poor, and where the U.N. must become the principal custodian of global human security, and help with basic education, healthcare, immunization, and family planning."
To meet these goals, they put forth the concept of global taxation. Their suggestions included: a tax on the sale of arms weapons, creating a Global Demilitarization Fund, with the savings countries would experience, if they reduced military spending by 3 percent, over a ten year period; a global tax of $1 per barrel on oil consumption; a tax on speculative international currency transactions, that has been dubbed the "Tobin tax;" and a world income tax of 0.1 percent on the richest nations' with per capita GNP of $10,000. To help reduce the debt of the poorest countries of the world, a number of debt-restructuring recommendations were made, including debt cancellation.
Moreover, the document I linked clearly advocates the creation of an International Tax Organization (ITO) to create global taxes and enforce taxation across national boundaries. For example:
p. 9: The Panel proposes that the international community should consider the potential benefits of an International Tax Organization. This could address many needs that have arisen as globalization has progressively undermined the territoriality principle on which traditional tax codes are based. Developing countries would stand to benefit especially from technical assistance in tax administration, tax information sharing that permits the taxation of flight capital, unitary taxation to thwart the misuse of transfer pricing, and taxation of emigrant income.
p. 66: Another task that might fall to an ITO would be the development, negotiation and operation of international arrangements for the taxation of emigrants. At present most emigrants pay taxes only to their host country, an arrangement that exposes source countries to the risk of economic loss when many of their most able citizens emigrate. The general introduction of arrangements analogous to those in the United States, which requires its nationals to pay United States taxes on their worldwide
Re:US foreign policy made this inevitable (Score:3, Informative)
I would expect that this story about control of the internet will continue to appear on a regular basis as it continues to develop. I am sure that it will be fun and interesting, especially as corporations outside of the US who have well established control over their own national governments manouvre for greater control of the global nature of the internet to favour their own corporate interests. I am only suprised it took so long to start happening.
Address space as well as DNS (Score:1, Informative)
That's only *part* of the problem.
If someone decided to RTFA you'll see that what other countries are worried about is the USA's control over address space. With
You don't _need_ a hostname to be "present" on the Internet but you do NEED a valid IP address to connect your computers to it with.
Presently IP address allocation (v4 as well as v6) is all controlled by ICANN as well. What these other countries would like to see is the control over address assignment placed into an organisation that is backed by the UN rather and is responsible to the UN rather than to share holders or any particular government(s).
Re:US foreign policy made this inevitable (Score:4, Informative)
No, they provided the information, it just wasn't believed. They didnt have extensive documentation on this, after all they were destroying weapons they weren't supposed to have.
The whole article contains a mixture of misinterpretation mixed with outright lies. Before the war one could read what Scott Ritter or Joseph Wilson was saying and it turned out they were entirely correct. You can and will believe what you like, but as far as the rest of the world is concerned the evidence is conclusive. As for why oil prices going up proving it wasnt for oil, are you being deliberately stupid or what ? Nobody in their right mind claimed the point of the war was to provide American proles with cheap oil, the point was to provide American corporations with the control of vast oil reserves.