A Monroe Doctrine for the Internet 708
InklingBooks writes "An article in Foreign Affairs suggests that in a tersely worded statement the United States has issued a 'Monroe Doctrine' for the Internet. The Monroe Doctrine was a unilateral declaration by the U.S. that it would not permit European powers to establish new colonies in the Western Hemisphere." From the article: "Everyone understands that the Internet is crucial for the functioning of modern economies, societies, and even governments, and everyone has an interest in seeing that it is secure and reliable. But at the same time, many governments are bothered that such a vital resource exists outside their control and, even worse, that it is under the thumb of an already dominant United States. Washington's answer to these concerns -- the Commerce Department's four terse paragraphs, released at the end of June, announcing that the United States plans to retain control of the Internet indefinitely -- was intended as a sort of Monroe Doctrine for our times. It was received abroad with just the anger one would expect, setting the stage for further controversy."
a new internet (Score:5, Insightful)
Damn it (Score:4, Insightful)
The US has no control over the internet, they can mess with it and poke it a little but nothing more. The internet is an extreme communist network. You need to work together so everything works. If someone stops doing their share they get cut off and end up having to rejoin and work twice as hard or they die. It's that simple.
No one controls the Internet, no one ever will. Anyone who tries to will lose far more than I wish to even guess at.
Re:how very vague (Score:4, Insightful)
Even things like Microsoft's Active Directory require a DNS infrastructure to work, though it doesn't need the global DNS that we're talking about.
In this case, you can pretty much consider it to be "the internet", since, while IP and associated routing will still work fine, most services will not.
Re:Damn it (Score:3, Insightful)
That being said, I haven't seen any alternatives floated that seem especially preferable to the current system, although something on the ITU/UPU model seems like the most likely long-term outcome.
I have to agree with the author (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:even as a european... (Score:4, Insightful)
Where'd you get that notion from?
Yeah, America would never try to pass legislation regulating good taste on the Internet - nothing like the Communications Decency Act or the Child Online Protection Act
Again, where'd you get that notion from?
Yes, we're a heck of a lot better than, say, China. However, we're not talking about giving China the freedom to censor the internet. We're not talking about giving anyone the freedom to censor the internet; this has nothing to do with new protocols or a global firewall. It's about who controls ICANN. Since ICANN doesn't take part in those things, such topics are irrelevant to the debate over who controls it. This conversation is about DNS and registrar accreditation.
Re:Not a very good analogy (Score:3, Insightful)
Not really. The root servers, bind itself, in fact, were developed in the United States and were under the control of US organizations from their inception. It's not the US meddling in the affairs of others here. It's others wanting to meddle in the affairs of the internet as a whole and the US telling them "No."
As others have pointed out before in this argument, there is nothing whatsoever stopping other countries from setting up their own root servers and forcing their population to use them. It will proabably break things, and no one else will use them, but there's no real reason they can't.
The trouble is that Governments, all governments (US included) feel the need to have some kind of control. Getting everyone to agree on just how to use that control is an exercise in futility. Would China do a better job with the root servers? France? The UK? Zimbabwe?
Probably not.
Re:Didn't we invent it? (Score:3, Insightful)
And as another poster pointed out, large portions of what we think of now as "the 'net" are not of US origin. Here's an idea: lay aside the jingoism for a moment and realize that the internet, in all its messy totality, is now something that belongs to the world, and sooner or later we're going to have to deal with that fact.
Re:a new internet (Score:5, Insightful)
The situation is more complicated than that. You can't have conflicting IP addresses without having completely separate networks, which is impractical (everyone will want to be able to connect to sites under the American Hegemony), and you don't want to have conflicting DNS records either. Indeed the rest of the world can set up their own DNS servers for a new TLD (say '.earth'), but they can't force anyone to contact the root server for that domain. The result will be chaos.
Now, the US stands to benefit from controlling a global resource (just like oil-producing countries benefit from controlling the oil supply). The article seems to hint that it's wrong. You can hardly fault a government from wielding its power to make the world better for its citizens (isn't that's their function, after all?). Of course the US government doens't always seem to have the benefit of all its citizens in mind most of the time, but that's a separate issue. If we don't like what the US government does, we can ask our governments to negotiate with them to change their behaviour. And naturally we will have to offer them something in return -- TANSTAAFL.
Re:Grow up (Score:3, Insightful)
That might have been a good post. If you actually gave a reason for any of it.
Examples of problems (Score:5, Insightful)
Regardless, I'm trying to see it from their point of view. Can someone provide specific previous actions which could be used in the argument against continued US 'control' of the registry?
Re:Damn it (Score:3, Insightful)
Your last statement about no one controlling the internet is actually anarchy... which also is not what the internet is.
It's amazing that you could try to apply two diametrically opposed labels to the same thing... and then get modded up for it.
Re:a new internet (Score:2, Insightful)
True. Chaos, indeed.
Now, the US stands to benefit from controlling a global resource (just like oil-producing countries benefit from controlling the oil supply). The article seems to hint that it's wrong. You can hardly fault a government from wielding its power to make the world better for its citizens (isn't that's their function, after all?).
Sure. Unfortunately what you don't understand is that, prepare for it... We will do whatever we like and as you said you can't stop us. In a way, it's a war you can't win and you have the options to 1. fight and lose, 2. give up and lose and spare yourselves (and us, ok) years of unbelievable mess. Up to you.
Re:even as a european... (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem you get with the way that the UN or the EU is talking about doing it, is that you would have an even *bigger* beauracracy in charge of it. You *would* have countries like China or Iran or Cuba that took up as chair of the DNS committee. You'd have a technical resource directly controlled by a "government" with no actual authority. It's one thing to set standards on an international level, but quite another to have things like this controlled by something like the UN.
The US shouldn't be running DNS, nor should the EU or the UN. Right now, the US doesn't really run it, but they have influence. If it was in the UN, then lots of people accountable to none of us would have influence, and quite a few of them are nearly diametrically opposed to free speech, or even freedom in general.
Re:I have to agree with the author (Score:2, Insightful)
1. The US really can't prevent the rest of the world from developing their own root server system. If (or more likely 'when') that happens the US is going to have to cooperate to develop bridges between the two addressing systems, looking like fools all the while.
2. How does taking a more cooperative stance on this issue really compromise the US anyway? What is the freakin big deal that is so important that the US risks making the entire world angry with heavy-handed tactics? I've even read over the so called explanation, and I still don't get it.
(As a disclaimer, I am a US citizen).
Re:Damn it (Score:2, Insightful)
You're kidding, right?
If the US government really wants to, they could shut down the root DNS servers, or even worse, set them to produce bogus data. That will cause, very quickly, worldwide chaos as the 'net becomes unusable. People will work around it very quickly --- I'm sure most clued-up governments have backup servers and all the major ISPs are set up to fail-over to them at the first sign of trouble --- but in the mean time, a hell of a lot of mission critical infrastructure will have gone belly up, all around the world. And then people really will die.
The US government would have to be idiots to do this because the US has as much mission-critical applications based on the 'net as everyone else (banks and such; forget the military, they've got their own networks). But... well... these days, the US government is not doing that great a job at persuading the world that they're not idiots, and that's what's making people nervous.
But then how will they get any support? (Score:3, Insightful)
I expect the rehetoric to continue full force from the EU. I also expect nothing to come of it unless there are some draconian laws passed over there. Seems most DNS server operators are happy using the root-servers.net roots, and those roots are happy listening to ICANN. Since the government won't force ICANN to give control to the UN, and ICANN has no reason to, nothing will happen.
Re:Not a very good analogy (Score:2, Insightful)
The United States never forced any other nation to use our name servers, nor did the United States ever force those nations to connect themselves to our WAN. When other nations connected to the internet they did so voluntarily, and if they don't like the way our government chooses to manage our WAN, those nations are just as free to stop using ours - for that matter, they're free to just set up their own name servers connected to our WAN.
What it really comes down to is that decades after the US had the internet working, the rest of the world still couldn't pull off something similar. UN can't even agree that it should make some sort of serious effort to stop genocide in Africa, the damage all those corrupt diplomats would do to the internet if put in charge is unthinkable. Perhaps if those whiners in the EU could get their own constitution ratified by the member states the US would have a good reason to care about Europe's desire to have more control over the internet, but right now there's no evidence that letting other nations have more control over the internet would do anything but ruin it.
"Control" the internet? (Score:5, Insightful)
I am not sure whether to laugh or cry at the "we invented it, therefore it's ours" posts here.
The Internet is nothing more than an agreement to interoperate between networks. The only centrally controllable resource, the DNS system, is only de facto controlled by the US government. The current DNS root servers could be abandoned by the rest of the world easily, if the US pisses them off enough.
The US can't control the Internet any more than it can control what "good music" is. It's not something that can be controlled. Any attempt to influence it simply reflects badly on the US as a country, and works against our global interests in the long term.
This doctrine being spoken of makes obvious the fact that most of the current US administration and lawmakers are still living in the (mid) 20th century.
Unfortunately, they've been holding back development of our country for years (since post world war 2, when a global war made them believe in their own moral superiority) in the name of what they believe is right. Fortunately, they'll start dying of old age in droves soon.
I just hope they don't irreconciliably damage international relations before then.
Erik
PS: Taco, for the love of all that's holy start using Kupu or FCKeditor, or something besides these damned textareas.
Don't Be Hat'n Foo! (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't doubt that the US is viewed by many as a bully who should just step back and let others control their own destiny. Okay, so then what? Are you going to tell me that the everyone around the world will just arbitrarily keep the global map static? You must be smoking something.
In every power vacuum throughout human history there has been a rush by next-tier players for the top spot. If the US declines to exert its power and influence, you can bet that China will. Russia will also step up and exert its power and authority over its smaller neighbors. Don't believe me? You don't read even recent history very well.
For over a century the US has represented the dreams and fears of every country in the world. Our impulse to export freedom and democracy may be misplaced and unwelcome, but consider the alternatives that history has served up. How many powerful nations have simply taken a pass when it comes to taking over a vanquished enemy? Are Germany and Japan the sole territory of the US? What about France?
I'm not saying that every policy that the US has exported overseas is great for the people we screw with. Our policies haven't always been real helpful to the US. But considering the alternatives, who would you rather were in our shoes?
And don't forget who catches the shit for the policies of our partners. France, Russia, and Germany were selling shit to Saddam as fast as they could, but which one of these countries is the primary target of Al Quaeda in Iraq? Do you think that the absence of the US would make these fuckers disappear? Do you think any piss-ant global jihadist movement that wants attention will blow up the government buildings in Sierra Leone? Local rebels might, but global terrorists don't gain their street cred by blowing up one of the smallest and poorest nations on the face of the planet.
The fact is that if a country like the US didn't exist the rest of the world would have to invent one. Criticize the US all you like. Just be glad you aren't the ones "on point".
Compromise (Score:5, Insightful)
As a lifelong American citizen, can I please ask my fellow compatriots: What the hell happened to compromising?
Why are we no longer the "Benevolent Superpower?" So the world wants to share in our responsiblities with the DNS system and naming conventions. Is it really so different to accomplish this with an international panel as opposed to our organizations (which even still contain many international members).
Don't tell them to build their own DNS servers and break the entire nature of freedom for the net, besides what good are they with IPv4 and the core DNS naming conventions. Adding DNS servers with gibberish for localized areas isn't going to do anything positive for the maturing of this medium.
If we divide the core DNS system using an international medium, can we not simply "cut out" any group that does not adhere to guidelines set forth by the panel? And if the "shit does hit the fan" and someone doesn't listen, we could build our own internet (we have it already) that's even better then the old one! Why not move into that realm in case of emergency?
I don't understand why we have to have total control. The US involvement in the creation of the internet led to this global phenomenon, now let's make it truly global. Besides, if it's part of the UN can you imagine the impact of an internet embargo against a nation (haven't quite worked out the details, but cool in theory)?
I'm not going to rant on GW, Iraq, Energy Conservation or anything like that, this isn't the place for it. But why is it we ask so much of the international community then crap over something like this when it comes to sharing?
The Internet will outlive the US (Score:4, Insightful)
Though it's also very possible we'll eventually see three internets: one controlled by multinationals and market forces, one controlled by a council of governments, and another controlled solely by individuals secretly piggybacking on the infrastructure of the other two internets.
Damn, I should write a sci-fi novel!
Re:a new internet (Score:5, Insightful)
The bottom-line issue is that the rest of the world wants the U.S. in their internet, a lot more than the U.S. -- generally speaking -- cares about being able to access the rest of the world. Think about the average user in the 'States (which is not the same as the average Slashdot user, so spare me your "but *I* access foreign content all the time" whining): if the rest of the world went black, there are quite a few people that wouldn't notice. They're using a U.S. ISP to access a U.S. backbone to get U.S.-created content off of a U.S.-based server. Although I've never seen a statistic, I'm willing to bet that a fairly high percentage of the packets transmitted over any part of the Internet in a day, both originate and end in the U.S.
The rest of the world and the U.N. can talk all they want about getting control of the internet and IP address allocation and everything else, but at the end of the day they are going to have to deal with the fact that if the United States Government and the people of the U.S. collectively say "from my cold, dead hands, Europe" they are clearly in the less advantageous negotiating position.
Re:Damn it (Score:1, Insightful)
Strangely enough I don't hear any answer.
In related news.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:even as a european... (Score:3, Insightful)
Just shoot Monroe (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Didn't we invent it? (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyway.
Your question, "how is it in our interests to act like we don't own it?", is more complex and more interesting, I think. My answer is this: first, that the US has an extraordinary amount of international ill-will right now (mostly for reasons that have nothing to do with the internet, of course) and that trying to reduce that is a good idea; second, that as international trade depends increasingly on internet communications, it's in everyone's interest to see that it runs smoothly, and the closed, autocratic way ICANN does business is not conducive to this goal; and third, that it's
As I said in another post, this doesn't mean that I think we should immediately give it away to the first alternative that comes along. I think a centralized UN office, for instance, would be unlikely to make things any better than they are now, and might make things considerably worse. However, an independent body established by treaty like the ITU or UPU would probably be the best long-term solution, and I have the feeling that's where we'll eventually end up.
Re:a new internet (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:a new internet (Score:3, Insightful)
The real problems come later, when half of the world begins using our so-called root servers, while half of the world uses yours... now there are no real "root" servers anymore, are there? This is what is going to happen unless you cooperate. And this is the content of the post you managed to misunderstand.
Us and Them (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm going to go out on a limb here, not knowing you personally, and suggest that you didn't invent shit. I know that I, personally, wasn't even old enough to pay taxes when ARPANet was brought online, so I can't really lay claim to the idea that "my tax dollars built the Internet." Have some of my tax dollars gone to it since? Sure. But so have those of lots of other countries.
Your attitude sounds like that of an armchair sports fan -- "We won!" When really it was the team who played the game and won and all you did is kick back and drink beer. It's not a helpful attitude when it comes to diplomacy. Geopolitics isn't a zero-sum game. Everybody else doesn't have to lose for America to win.
And after all, what if everybody else doesn't agree with the "we built it, we run it" rule. What do you propose we do? Take our ball and go home? "Thanks but no thanks, Europe, China, everybody ... you guys think you're smarter than everybody so we're not going to let you send us network traffic anymore." Obviously it wouldn't be a bad idea for the U.S. to be willing to capitulate a little bit.
ugh (Score:5, Insightful)
As another American (not to mention North American and citizen of the USA), let me thank you for perpetuating the stereotype of Americans as ignorant and mean-spirited. If other countries decide, for whatever reason, that they'd like to use different root servers, there's nothing we can do about it. What we should do about it is to listen to their concerns and try to accommodate them, rather than allowing the Internet to fracture.
Re:even as a european... (Score:1, Insightful)
If you have to resort to comparing the USA to Iran in order to get a favourable comparison, it should be quite obvious that the Internet isn't safe in USA hands.
Re:Damn it (Score:2, Insightful)
1. Capitalism should work like this and that...
Result: some monopolies, some corruption, some exploiting (well I don't agree with these but that's what most people would complain about)
2. Communism should work like this and that...
Result: millions of people killed in the name of the Greater Good, deported to Siberia, tortured, restricted in every single conceivable way, deprived of any and all freedom; mass murderings while invading Tibet, Great F/W of China; preventing people (and not by kindly asking them not to) from crossing their city and getting to the other side because everybody knows they wouldn't come back (do you get this or is it a bit too European for you?). I could go on but I don't see the need to kill so I'll stop here.
Yeah you're right, it's just a small discrepancy between theory and practice.
Re:I still don't get the controversy (Score:3, Insightful)
This statement is just plain wrong. P2P has shown that.
P2P has shown no such thing. P2P breaks spectacularly when you don't have centralized control over things like addressing and naming. About the best you could hope for is an abitration protocol that would attempt to resolve conflicts - which in essence will boil down to "trust one source more than any other". This ends up being centralized control:
Multiple DNS servers? That functionality is there in case your primary DNS doesn't answer. Wonderful if you've only ever got one entry for an entity. What happens when 2 high level (think: root) DNS servers have a conflict? DNS isn't designed to deal with this, because IT'LL NEVER ASK BOTH. You'll only ever get the first response. This is the problem.
maybe you just specify an extra level of TLD to determine which root servers you use
You mean, like "I'm in the US, so I'll use the US root server"? That's what TLDs do in the first place! Root servers exist solely to tell you which DNS servers to use below them. Another level above them would serve no purpose whatsoever.
No, Kofi, you cant now shut up! (Score:3, Insightful)
The kind of control the other nations wants is control of content. Already the Chinese put up firewalls
and the french ban things they dont like could you imagine if these countries got control of the internet?
You see the nations behind this China, France, Cuba, Syria, South Africa, Brazil. With the exception of Brazil all of these nations are the epitomy of either tyranny or Politically correct ideologies.
While I would prefer an affirmative statement in favor of freedom of speech, I will settle for benign neglect.
Re:a new internet (Score:5, Insightful)
I haven't heard anyone speaking of splitting the IP space, only DNS. Conflicting DNS records is not as bad as it sounds. You could easily resolve this by having a "metalevel" of google.com.foo and google.com.bar which would query two different root servers for the lookup. And the government can force ISPs to point to their root servers. Things would be rather hairy, but it'd work out. I imagine every company that is eligible for a DNS entry in both trees would get both to avoid domain squatters, just one more burden. The US is really making a mess by making it seem that important. If they had played it cool, showed some nice bills "Ok you want to join us in paying for the world's DNS structure? Nice, we were looking for someone to share the costs with. It's really nothing but a management hassle." and the rest of the world would have dropped the ball like a dead rat.
Re:I have to agree with the author (Score:2, Insightful)
Then what is your solution? The UN routinely appoints despot regimes to chair the human rights subcommittee. ITU is under the UN ... you don't
see the problems with that? Such as depot regimes making it
difficult to use cheap alternatives to the gov't telecom monopolies?
The article discusses the standards the Internet uses. Currently these standards are issued by IETF [ietf.org] under the auspices of the Internet Society [isoc.org]. IETF is an truly international organization where the people with ideas and time have the influence in terms of authoring or editing standards, chair working groups, and directing actitivies, all achieved by a credo of "rough consensus, running code". It is a system that prizes technical excellent above politics. The same system that told the USA to piss off [ietf.org] when the gov't attempted to cripple encryption over the the network in order to "protect us." Under your vision this would be replaced with each national government voting on standards; the same people who gave us OSI standards that were stillborn. The nerds would lose control to Castro, Mugabe, and the Ayatollah, not to mention the regulators of democratic regimes. Get ready for a new internet protocol with gov't backdoors in the standards.
Next week IETF meets in Vancouver. I expect it will be one of the last IETF meetings I'll attend, thanks to visionaries like you.
That's the problem; you want nations to control it. I want competent people from all places in the world to control it, i.e. the status quo. I'll take an Internet run by employees of Cisco and CERN over your Internet.Re:Damn it (Score:3, Insightful)
And for the last time ( I hope ), Stalin was not a communist. Neither was Mao. They were dictators who happened to use communism for rhetoric.
Re:Don't Be Hat'n Foo! (Score:3, Insightful)
Because those were brutal regimes that exploited the colonized people to the advantage of the empire's citizens. Often, the justification for exploitation was that they colonized people were objectively inferior according to the religious and cultural traditions and mythology and it was their place in the world to serve their empirical masters. We now recognize that those justifications are fig leafs for the morally corrupt to hide a more simple motivation: greed.
If the US declines to exert its power and influence, you can bet that China will.
You present us with a false dichotomy between imperialism and isolationism. In fact, most people agree that the US should exert its influence, in co-operation with other democratic nations. You bemoan the fact that other nations have conflicts of interest and can't be trusted, but for some reason you fail to pursue that to its logical conclusion: The US should hold itself to the highest standards of democracy and transparency and have an impeccable record of weeding out corruption in its own house. The hypocrisy of some people who denounce the UN and European nations for their corruption, but protect and defend the behavior of our own American scoundrels is, quite frankly, disgusting. They hold themselves up as the standard bearers of morality when pointing their fingers at other people, but refuse to apply the standard to themselves.
The subtext of your argument is that everyone is immoral, so let's just let it all go to shit. At least we come out on top and its not as bad as it could be.
Are you going to tell me that the everyone around the world will just arbitrarily keep the global map static? You must be smoking something.
Not arbitrarily. What kept the US map static for so many centuries? Not democracy, but respect and enforcement of the Constitution. The profound achievement of the founding of this country is that it brought together 13 colonies all with competing interests and created a single, co-operative entity. The Constitution and the make-up of the government was designed to prevent one powerful (or populous) state from dominating and enforcing its will on other states, and it was reasonably successful at that. But taking that analogy to the United Nations, the US consistently refuses to respect the "Constitution", undermines all attempts to make the UN cohesive and effective, and then turns around and argues that the UN that it has purposely sabatoged is an example of why coalitions of nations are doomed to fail. The UN will fail as long as the United States fails to set aside its narrow self-interests and stand firmly on the moral high ground that it should take. Right now, all we have is the US justifying itself by pointing to the same moral and humanitarian principles that it discards when pursuing its self-interest.
The meaning behind all of this obvious lying is fairly apparent. Its no longer possible to justify pursuing America's self-interests through empire in the previous manner. It's not "politically correct" to openly advocate getting rich off the toil and misery of other, lesser human beings, much to the chagrin of certain groups. This is the true nature of your argument, that the principles the US was founded on apply to Americans and not to lesser human beings.
Re:a new internet (Score:2, Insightful)
What's worse once America decides that it does not want to belong to the rest of the world the arab nations and china will insist on paymets in euros which will completely destroy the demand for the dollar and plunge america into deep depression that only a worldwide conflagration will cure. US will then engage in a massive and bloody war with the rest of the world in order to force them to use the dollar and to prop up it's own industry. Billions will die, it won't be pretty.
Re:a new internet (Score:5, Insightful)
You do know that China decoupled from the dollar because of U.S. pressure to do so, right?
China's yuan was tied to the dollar so that the U.S. couldn't do exactly what it did -- devalue their currency (the USD) to make U.S. exports cheaper, while making imports more expensive. For example, a "weak" dollar relative to the Euro makes it more expensive for US citizens to buy French wine and travel to Europe, but makes Florida orange juice less expensive to Europeans, and makes the US a more attractive tourist destination. This is elementary macroeconomics.
The Chinese central bank and government, realizing that their economy is intimately dependent on exports TO the U.S., had their currency pegged to the dollar, so that if the dollar fell the yuan would fall along with it, so that Chinese imports would not become more expensive. So when the dollar fell, imports to the US from countries other than China (which had unpegged currencies) got more expensive, but Chinese ones didn't. Thus total Chinese marketshare of imports actually grew -- not what a lot of US lawmakers wanted to see.
As a result there was a lot of anti-Chinese rhetoric for a few months, and a few people started publicly bringing up the topic of a special tariff against Chinese imports (or particular goods of which a majority come from China or are important to China) until the Chinese announced that they would decouple the yuan from the Dollar. This allows China's trade balance with the U.S. to be more easily affected by American policy, and IMO was something of a political loss for the Chinese -- although some would say it was a crutch they didn't need anyway at this point.
But I think that you, like a lot of people, misunderstand (or take too literally) what a "weak" currency means -- it isn't necessarily bad, and especially for a country with a large current account deficit some weakening is acceptable if it reduces imports and increases exports.
The rest of your B.S. I will ignore.
Re:a new internet (Score:2, Insightful)
Hell, about 30% of Americans still believe that there are WMDs in Iraq, so I don't think we should be lecturing the French until we admit we were wrong.
Re:a new internet (Score:2, Insightful)
It's a rough figure. The US doesn't have a truly free press and the military refuses to disclose how many people it killed and frequently lies about the figure when it does say anything. Just recently the fact the CIA had secret prisons all over the world came to light.
The US govt is extremely secretive about the number of people it kills and the number of people it tortures and/or send away to be tortured by other people.
Having said that it is possible to gather some figures from external sources such as hospitals, local observers, press from other countries which are more free to report what is happening, etc.
The 100,000 figure is a guess but it strikes me as being a bit low actually. In the first gulf war the US estimated that it killed 200,000 people. This war has been going on for a lot longer and is being wages in Afghanistan and Iraq (as well as the rest of the world covertly).
Take Afghanistan for example. The US had admitted to killing three thousand innocent people there (and has agreed to pay renumeration). If we presume that the US military is highly accurate and is trying to minimize civillian deaths as much as possible we can make a conjecture the it only makes a mistake and kills civillians 5% of the time (95% accuracy is pretty good). This means that 60,000 people were killed in Afghanistan alone. If the US military is more accurate (say 99% accurate) the figure goes up to 300,000.
"Contrast that with the multiples of that figure that the deposed dictator is confirmed killing."
It would be an interesting statistic to compile I think. I wonder who is responsible for the deaths of more human beings, the Bush familiy or Saddam? It might be hard to decide considering most of the people Saddam killed were Iranians and we were helping him. I think it's telling that Saddam was not charged with the massacre of the Kurds or other genocides he comitted during the reagan/bush years. That would have been a trial of the century. The US wisely decided not to charge him for those crimes or else all kinds of fun facts would have come into play.
"The entire planet ows a debt of gratitude to the US for a lot of the stuff it's done."
I don't think so. Saddam wasn't really bothering anybody except his neighbors.
"Since you clearly enjoy supporting oppressive regimes "
Typical american black and white thinking. Unfortunately our education system is so inept that most americans are unable to process any degree of complexity whatsoever. It's either America rules or you must love terrorists. It's also telling of of how crappy the american education system is when people like you have no idea that the US has and is supporting many many opressive regimes. Why just recently azarbaijan ruling govt rounded up the leaders of the opposition parties just before the coming elections. Alas they have oil and Bush is supporting their opressive regime (along with the opressive regimes of pakistan, china, turkmenistan, afghanistan etc).
"Not to mention the possibility of WMD that Saddam had - and whether he had them is irrelevant, looking at the hide-and-reveal game he was constantly playing with the US, or the sponsoring of terrorism (confirmed again, although not with Al Queda), or the brutality of his regime."
There was no possiblity that Saddam had WMDs, that's something the president made up to in order to go war. He wasn't trying to hide anything either, the UN weapons inspecters were there and they were allowed rapid movement and unfettered access to the entire country including Saddams palaces and govt buildings. As for supporting terrorism it was no worse then the terrorists the America was/is supporting.
Re:a new internet (Score:3, Insightful)
The Americans are our enemies. We should be attempting to crawl out from underneath them and establish our own power, not spreading our cheeks wider. Anti-American enough for you?
Re:a new internet (Score:2, Insightful)
First of all, if their was suddenly no way to communicate over the Internet to China, for example, their would almost immediatley appear a network (probably hosted by a major telecom) that would provide a portal through which you could connect to the chinese internet... or wherever...
The real issue here is that because of US foreign policy, you dislike us, and so you dislike nearly everything we do. OK.
The tragic mistake of the Bush administration was the use of WMD's as a justification for war in Iraq, not the war itself. Iraq needed to be invaded because the government in power their did nothing to interfere with the operation of a terror group that had declared open war on the US (Ansar Al Islam)... And yes, any country that refuses to arrest and prosecute terrorists within its borders deserves to be ended, for they are just as guilty as the terrorists themselves...
If a group of right wing gun nuts from Alabama blew up the eiffel tower and killed nearly 3000 people, AND the US refused to either find and hand over the gun nuts (or at least make an effort, or allow the french to make the effort) then they are effectively protecting terrorists and are just as guilty as those terrorists... This was precisely the situation in Iraq (with Ansar Al Islam)... And in Iran, and in Syria... We know this because we can watch ther terrorists train at their camps from our Sattelites... (I personally saw sattelite photos of Ansar Al Islam training camps in Iraq before the war, their presence is not contested by anyone)...
Please respond to this.
Re:a new internet (Score:5, Insightful)
Looking back just at some recent history, the U.S. has a tendency to come out pretty well out of these huge, global conflicts. Sure perhaps two isn't enough to make a pattern but it might be enough to cause people in the U.S. leadership, particularly neo-cons, to not back down if the rest of the world (or some other power) decided to play chicken.
You seem to assume that the U.S. would let the other guy win if push came to shove, and I'm not sure that's realistic. U.S. foreign policy -- and to be honest, American culture in general -- has never emphasized "live to fight another day." In fact one might argue that recently, it has been much the other way around. The United States is like a 900-pound gorilla, or a large bear: slow to respond, not particularly perceptive, but very destructive when it gets going.
Obvious example: The U.S. was attacked on 9/11 in a very public and spectacular -- but in the end numerically insignificant -- way, and responded by picking a couple countries that it wasn't particularly fond of and invading them, at enormous expense and very little gain. Why? Because a whole lot of Americans wanted to see somebody, somewhere, get the living shit bombed out of them on CNN, and there were marginal excuses for Afghanistan (supporting terrorism) and Iraq (WMDs). Really, they were just convenient: it is and was a Spanish-American War for the 21st Century.
By bringing up the war I am in no way implying that the U.S. would go so far as to bomb France (or anyplace else) over the Internet; just that there is very little evidence to suggest that America would fold in a contest of wills with some other nation, even if it appeared to everyone else that it would be the saner thing to do.
I'm not sure that if I were some other country, even one as big as China, and certainly not one as frankly insignificant as France, that I would go tweaking the U.S. Government and the American people by demanding that it turn over control of one of its crown jewels, the Internet.
Repost. Repeat after me. (Score:4, Insightful)
Repeat after me:
"Anyone can setup their own DNS server at _any_ time".
Say that 3 times.
Sure, if you setup your own DNS server at home, you probably won't have a lot of adoption. But the EU has a great deal more reach than you, and shouldn't have any problem convincing Europeans to use their DNS. Cuba, China, and Iran will have even less.
The answer is simple, and has little (read _nothing_) to do with ICANN, or IANA. Whenever it wants, the EU can setup its own naming authority. As long as they don't change the way IP addresses are assigned, it breaks _nothing_.
The U.S. blocks
Rather than having one, universal, flat global system, poorly managed by a central authority which will be unable to satisfy the contradictory demands of the various governments of the world, a fragmented _DNS_ system makes much more sense.
You, and most other people, are misunderstanding what is going on.
Imagine, once upon a time, when the USPTO was established, that other governments, instead of developing their own patent organizations, simply followed U.S. standards. We had a unified world wide patent system, based upon U.S. law. Then, other nations became pissed off about this, because they felt that the U.S. would use the unified patent system to the detriment of those nations.
As such, they demand that the U.S. relinquish control of the USPTO, and turn it into the UNPTO, which would be government through the U.N. China, Iran, and Cuba, in particular, would like to see some patents invalidated, so they push hard for this.
Does it make any sense? No.
What makes _much_ more sense is that each government established its own patent authority, and then various governments negotiated bi and multi-lateral agreements regarding the governance of patents.
The internet should work _exactly_ the same way. As long as the IP address space doesn't get fragmented (and with IPv6, theres NO reason for that to happen), "control" of the DNS system is a non-issue. In fact, I think the world would be a better place with a fragmented DNS system. Why? Because barring laws in unfree countries (which have their own firewalls anyway (read China)), if you don't like your DNS, you can simply point your system at another one.
look who is complaining about ICANN (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:a new internet (Score:4, Insightful)
Not when it turns the rest of the world against its citizens.
US Controls GPS and no one complains (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:a new internet (Score:5, Insightful)
I really didn't want to say that, but spending too much effort on making the world a better place for its own citizens without much regard to others resulted in a lot of theocracies, kleptocracies and dictatorships, a couple planes being flown into buildings, lots of dead people, a few questionable wars, a bunch of kafkesque prisions with kafkesque prisioners and a quite questionable presidential re-election.
Most definitely, the world is far worse a place now. For just about everybody.
Re:a new internet (Score:2, Insightful)
Like you I would like to encourage people to move out of the US too. Why would I want to stay in a country where there was a whole television network trying to convince people that I was un-american because I disagree with the president? I don't believe in staying where I am not wanted.
Re:a new internet (Score:1, Insightful)
Barracks bombings, hostages, everyone blown up on airplanes for 20 years, all of the US embassys that were hit, the USS Cole... and I have just scratched the surface and am purposely leaving out sept 11...
We are at war against an ideology. Should allied soldiers have interviewed every Nazi they found, to discover their true feelings about the jews before they decided what to do with them? No. We dont have to do that now either. It is not hard to tell who needs to be destroyed. Any member of a group that has initiated the use of force against innocents deserves total war.
Yes, Osama was no fan of saddams. Of course. One is a religious zealot and the other was much more westernized...
Iraq:
1) harbored terrorists, and in a world where terrorists are striking on the scale of 9/11, ALL TERRORISTS DESERVE NO MERCY. A lot of countrys in the middle east meet this criteria.
2) is right next to Iran, the true seat of fundamentalist terrorist politics.
Bush probably percieved Iraq as an easier target to get political support behind, and probably hoped that large US bases surrounding Iraq on 2 sides would discourage Iranian support of extremists.
td
Re:a new internet (Score:3, Insightful)
ICANN is seekingn money fron other nations NOW. Let me see - Taxation without representation......does that resonate?
The problem is that ICANN is looking for money from countries with no real input on governance. Why should the UK or France pay ICANN? Yet ICANN seems to want ccTLD's to pay it's operational costs. ICANN does not fund or pay for the root DNS servers. They have no oversight except a theoritical and not often role of redelegation of a ccTLD.
Why does the EU have to ASK ICANN for permission to add
Why do YOU have to pay ICANN 50,000 to apply for the right to manage a new TLD?
ICANN rips off Americans as well. We are just to dumb to see it because rather than think logically and inform ourselves about how we went from Ponytail management to facist management of DNS, we just pull out the flag, vomit up our brains and reason and start the Rah Rah football chant.
Sad.
Re:Damn it (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly what I wanted to say. If we could just trust enough that the US [i.e. the actual US government] doesn't want to retain full control over an international association that controls the DNS space for the reason that they may want to use this control against the rest of the world whenever they see fit, we probably wouldn't have much against it. But recent couple of years have proved the world that the US isn't anything near a friend who you could trust.
FUD? (Score:3, Insightful)
As far as I can tell, the release reaffirms 4 key points the US has stated before:
1-immediate changes to the status quo are premature; the article even notes that this is likely the best option for the short term.
2-individual nations have a right to manage their own domains; stability is a concern for determining the best way to do this.
3-ICANN is still in charge, and ICANN still operates under the same mandate as when it was set up.
4-the US is willing to talk about these issues and others in various venues, including but not limited to the UN. The only reservations the US notes is that it ain't broke, let's not break it.
Hardly seems like a declaration of cyberwar to me; the implication that this indicates that the Internet is a US only playground is overbroad to the point of sillyness. Discussions are open. The US is only stating that immediate, precipitate change is not going to get US cooperation, and that since US cooperation is necessary for immediate change, it's time to slow down and talk things over.
At least that's how I read it.
-------------
The Release Text:
Domain Names:
U.S. Principles on the Internet's Domain Name and Addressing System
The United States Government intends to preserve the security and stability of the Internet's Domain Name and Addressing System (DNS). Given the Internet's importance to the world's economy, it is essential that the underlying DNS of the Internet remain stable and secure. As such, the United States is committed to taking no action that would have the potential to adversely impact the effective and efficient operation of the DNS and will therefore maintain its historic role in authorizing changes or modifications to the authoritative root zone file.
Governments have legitimate interest in the management of their country code top level domains (ccTLD). The United States recognizes that governments have legitimate public policy and sovereignty concerns with respect to the management of their ccTLD. As such, the United States is committed to working with the international community to address these concerns, bearing in mind the fundamental need to ensure stability and security of the Internet's DNS.
ICANN is the appropriate technical manager of the Internet DNS. The United States continues to support the ongoing work of ICANN as the technical manager of the DNS and related technical operations and recognizes the progress it has made to date. The United States will continue to provide oversight so that ICANN maintains its focus and meets its core technical mission.
Dialogue related to Internet governance should continue in relevant multiple fora. Given the breadth of topics potentially encompassed under the rubric of Internet governance there is no one venue to appropriately address the subject in its entirety. While the United States recognizes that the current Internet system is working, we encourage an ongoing dialogue with all stakeholders around the world in the various fora as a way to facilitate discussion and to advance our shared interest in the ongoing robustness and dynamism of the Internet. In these fora, the United States will continue to support market-based approaches and private sector leadership in Internet development broadly.