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."
even as a european... (Score:3, Interesting)
Kinda silly (Score:3, Interesting)
Didn't we invent it? (Score:2, Interesting)
create their own version and write the bridges, they
can go ahead, but it was our tax dollars (DARPA) that
developed it in the first place.
Now, there are more than a few decisions our gov't
has made and continues to make that I *strongly*
disagree with, but that's for another conversation.
Peace & Blessings,
bmac
Re:even as a european... (Score:2, Interesting)
(Then again, there should be no governments at all in my ideal world, but hey - let's start with the easiest things first.)
Grow up (Score:2, Interesting)
Ok, who controls what again? (Score:2, Interesting)
There is absolutely no sense in having a government of any country in charge of the root DNS servers. Given the nature of the "internet" it's almost completely out from under the control of any government anyway. The control is entirely in the hands of the communications industry anyway.
Politicians are dumb (Score:5, Interesting)
All this is about is who controls the main
If we really wanted to fix the whole issue without trying to figure out whose dick is bigger, you go to something like this:
1) Make sure every country code is managed only by that country, and give them control of all root servers for that country.
2) Create a
3) Give every
4) Blow away the
Then, every country has their own little "piece" of the internet, so to speak, and can regulate it into oblivion if they like.
Come to think of it, as long as countries have control of their country code root servers (if such a thing exists), then we're practically there. There's no reason why the US can't keep control of
Who cares? (Score:3, Interesting)
What I feel more uncomfortable about is carriers not playing fair. I expect bandwith providers to start tailoring their offerings to only work with content they approve of or promote - eg a broadband provider preferring his own VOIP service over competition services or his own digital TV access over the one from others. How long till 'internet access' means a big fat pipe to my provider, and a little trickle to the rest of the world, instead of the universal 'do as you please' open network we enjoy today? Unlike root servers, I cannot self provide my bandwith.
My (monopolist) cable provider bugs me with his ridiculously priced VOIP access. I currently use competition, but I expect them any day now to throttle access to the competition's IP block by just enough to not make it work anymore....
I still don't get the controversy (Score:2, Interesting)
This statement is just plain wrong. P2P has shown that. What TFA probably means to say is "Every big network I can think of requires some centralized control"
And I think this assumption is at the core of the controversy here. If there has to be a single unique owner of something, then yes, you're going to see fighting over who that gets to be. But why does there have to be?
First of all, it's only DNS. Any TCP/IP stack that is correctly implemented can accept multiple DNS servers. It's part of the redundancy built into the system. The worst case scenario from this whole issue would be that Europe establishes its own version of ICANN, with its own root DNS servers. People will still want to communicate with eachother, so those servers will cross-pollinate entries. Some way to handle collisions will be invented - maybe you just specify an extra level of TLD to determine which root servers you use. Maybe there'll be arbitration. What I'm saying here is that the world will go on. It's only DNS.
So I guess that, aside from political blustering on both sides of the pond, I just don't see enough controversy here to warrant the media circus it's causing.
The "market" should decide this. (Score:5, Interesting)
If they want them to just forward requests to the ones in the US, that's fine.
If that nation wants to break those searches, that's fine too. The only people they'll be hurting are their own citizens. And the smarter ones will be able to re-direct the queries to other servers.
This is the biggest stupid fight about NOTHING.
The ONLY issue would be
If they can't play nice, they're only hurting their own people.
Re:even as a european... (Score:2, Interesting)
Hmmm (Score:4, Interesting)
While I can understand why America (well some American politicians) wants to hold on to the governance of the Internet I think it's about time it was handed over to a multi-nation body (maybe the UN maybe a separate entity completely).
While the Internet was largely academic and US focused it made sense for it to be run from the US but it quite simply isn't like that any more. The Internet is world wide and some non-US countries have a huge amount of money riding on the Internet. In some cases democracy itself is partially dependent on the Internet.
There is not shame in passing the Internet over to a multi-national body. In fact America could have won quite a bit of respect from the rest of the world and shown it's maturity by handing over control with little fuss and complaint. Instead America has come across as a little child that won't let anyone else play with their toy. I am sure that most of the world would have been happy with America continuing to run the Internet as long as there was a set of procedures for them to veto unwanted changes. America could have had it's cake and eaten it.
There is one thing that is certain. The Internet will not be run by America alone for much longer. One way or another at least some of the power will be removed from American hands. The choice America has to make is simply how much power they want to keep.
order through choice (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Not a very good analogy (Score:1, Interesting)
Really?
Which services in the US can't the rest of the world do without?
The 'rest of the world' typically want access to *their own* services. The US having control over them is what pisses the 'rest of the world' off.
DNS != Governance, Internet != Arpanet (Score:4, Interesting)
But this "Governance" nonsense is mostly a smoke-screen for governments that want world-wide censorship, trying to use DNS as a level for lots of currently non-existent control. Sure, there's some US-centricness, and .gov and .mil ought to be shoved under .us, but governments that want to govern their countries' DNS space have country-code DNS with their own personal 2-letter abbreviation on it, and they can call things whatever they want under that (though if they use non-ASCII naming, there are some interoperability issues - but the big player on that issue is China, who can do their own thing just fine.) The US government does meddle a bit, first encouraging ICANN to do .xxx and then ordering them not to, but there's not that much. The problem is that China not only wants to block websites like falun-gong.cn, they also want to block falun-gong.org and falun-gong.co.uk and asian-pr0n.com.
The big policy meddlers at ICANN are the WIPO-types. ICANN really only cares about one kind of IP, and it's "Intellectual Property", not "Internet Protocol", so they do insist that all registrars require and publish lots of privacy-violating information in whois records, to make it easy for companies that want to initiate trademark lawsuits to find who they're suing (and to make sure they don't sue the registrars or registries), but that's pretty easily evaded, and country-code DNS administrations can ignore those requirements if they're big enough.
IPv4 space is another smokescreen excuse - yes, we're running out of the stuff, and there's obviously nowhere close to enough address space if every cellphone in Asia wants its own IP address. The fix is not to impose UN governance on ICANN, it's to deploy IPv6, and the Internet community has been doing a pretty good job of getting universities and other early adopters to hand in their old Class A space, but the big impact was really that HTTP1.1 and sendmail/etc. allowed one IP address to support many domain names for web and email. For a while, ICANN had ridiculous pricing policies for IPv6 space, which appeared designed to delay adoption of the addresses until technical policies had really been worked out (making multi-homing scale without totally exploding all the routing tables on all the world's routers is still a hard problem), but they seem to be backing off on that.
There were also some early WSIS issues like poor third-world countries wanting to tax the Internet to pay to have infrastructure built to their countries, which is a wrong-headed approach. For most of them, the first steps need to be getting rid of their incompetent telecom monopolies, getting rid of radio spectrum monopolies so people can build widespread wireless and satellite, and getting reliable electricity at least to the big cities, and too many of those countries either view telecom as a taxable cash cow or
Re:a new internet (Score:2, Interesting)
What about IPv6? The US appears to be ignoring it at this point. Couldn't the EU or whoever mandate IPv6 usage for their part of the world? Then they would have control of that address space before the US could do anything about it. Perhaps charging ($) for v6-v4 translation at the border.
Don't know enough about it all works so maybe I'm totally wrong.
The other plan I came up with is to give each country control of "The Internet"(tm) for one month in a round robin scheme.
Re:a new internet (Score:3, Interesting)
I hate the French (government) as much as any God-fearing red-blooded American, but how much could they screw up the internet if they had a few other nations looking after things too?
Re:even as a european... (Score:5, Interesting)
What is relivant is the fact that the US governing bodies have been in a trend of increased censorship and denial of liberties to it's citizens since the information boom began. Don't get me wrong, I am a US citizen, and I love my country, but my government has been placing a higher and higher value on the needs and wants of the few as opposed to the many. The liberties of the majority are now infringed upon and at times out-right denied in order to maintain the liberties of the minority. Let's think about some issues here:
Ok, without getting into a political argument, let's just all quitely reflect on some major issues in the US in recent times with regards to fair access and technology.
Affirmative Action (forcing companies to hire certain people based on ethnic background rather than employable skill or experiance)
Excerting influance on video game companies, example is Grand Thieft Auto: San Andreas (the game was pulled from shelves after comming under heavy fire because it was posible to hack the game to show sexualy explicit content)
Pressuring and even prosecuting P2P networks because thier service could be used for illegal activities. I'd like to point out that I can commit a felony crime with a telephone, but they're legal.
Prosecuted Microsoft for having a monopoly on the OS market (a market with very little competition outside of the Open Source world, BTW, TUX=ROX).
Forcing broadcasters to switch to digital signals (it's been passed already, it just won't come into effect for a few years).
And the list goes on and on and on. Our governemnt seems technologicaly ignorant at every turn. The conservatives cling to the dead and dieing, the liberals want Hippy Freedom which just doesn't work (that was proven in the 60's, sure it was fun, but the 80's really sucked because of it), and the moderates just don't care. Put that together with the foringe policy tendancies to be the global watch-dog, and see what happens:
1) Argentina calls for a boycott of US trade policy (this was on CNN THIS MORNING by the way).
2) The US responds by inacting a trade embargo of Argentina.
3) This embargo includes de-registering all Argentinian domains from the global DNS.
4) Well, you can see how this would be bad.
Think this would never happen? Think again. The US is famous for it's trade embargos. Cuba, Iran (I think), Iraq pre-war, North Korea at varous times, the USSR, and the list goes on. Does anyone honestly believe that a nation that has such policies would wave them for the most valuable resource on the planet (free exchange of information)? I think not.
Just think about it for a minute. Some of the US's chief threats now reside on the Internet. The terrorist groups, the US-hostile news agencies, and the governments of the world are all online. If the US is to control how it's enimies are addressed on the global intranet, you can be certain of the answer. "port.iran.ml could not be found. Please check the name and try again later".
But the rabit hole goes much deeper my friends. The US doesn't do anything piece-meal. Think about it: this country was started by a minority of people that didn't like thier current government, so they rebeled and won. Just a few short decades later and this country was "Manifestly predestined by God to expand over the whole of the continent". And once that was done, we started taking over yet more places, such as Hawiai and Alaska, and accquired yet more so-called "protectorites" such as Guam and Purto Rico. And now durring the 2000's, we're reshaping countries in our own image. We didn't like the Taliban, so we took over thier country. We didn't like Saddam, so we took over thier country.
What's the point in all of this? The US won't stop with DNS, oh no my friends. That may be what is at issue currently, but if the US is allowed control it won't be the issue tomo
Re:a new internet (Score:4, Interesting)
Robert
Re:Control of Internet is argument about ICANN (Score:3, Interesting)
How about the two years it took Haiti to get it's ccTLD assigned to the registrar of it's choice?
How about the contract that ICANN makes countries sign in order to redelegate their domains, which basically states that that country recognises ICANN as the ultimate authority in domain name issues?
With regards the sitefinder business, ICANN did too little too slow. Verisign's actions broke many uses of DNS, and fundamentally altered the nature of the DNS system so they could profit by domain-squatting on all unregistered domains. ICANN should have been all over verisign to do it's job properly (ICANN's only legitimate role), and failed at even that.
It's long past time that ccTLD redelgation process was clear, transparent, fast, and at the command of the government involved, not unaccountable people at ICANN or the US department of Commerce. If ICANN can't do it's job properly, it should be given to someone else, like the ITU. They seem to have done a pretty uncontroversial job of running the international phone codes and standards, which is more than can be said of ICANN's handling of DNS.
Re:a new internet (Score:3, Interesting)
The real dispute is then with the names, considering the value in the transactions of some of those names and the some what excessive control of US politics that US corporations have combined with the instiable greed and competitiveness of most corporations globally, interesting things will be happening to the domain name system.
US corporations will not be happy to lose the value internationally of their domain names. Other countries with a strong need to define their own culture politically will be more than happen to disconnect themselves from the US temporarily. Right now it just makes the US government look bad, greedy and seeking to dominate all other governments and their citizens.
An interesting difference in views, when an Australian government exspoused the idea that it's prime role was to make the world better for its citizens (oil dispute with east timor) it was rejected by the majority of Australians who expect the Australian government to be fair and just whether it is operating locally or internationally. When a country devalues the citizens of another country with out the blink of an eye (it just sees them in US dollar terms) don't expect them to value the majority of it's own citizens with any greater degree (reconstructing a newer, "richer" New Orleans, when the rich look at the poor they only see the colour of their own money).
Re:a new internet (Score:2, Interesting)
Having said that I don't think it would be painless either. Unlike afghanistan or iraq the next war might cause massive civilian casualties on our side. The american people are perfectly happy to wage war as long as all the civillians that are killed are on their side but if they start dying it might collapse the country into a civil war.
You have to remember that we are not really a unified country. We are in a very real sense two countries who despise each other.
Re:a new internet (Score:2, Interesting)
But I otherwise agree with everything you say.
Re:Damn it (Score:3, Interesting)
Mmmkay. Let's try this. (Score:3, Interesting)
http://european.de.orsn.net/rootzone.php [orsn.net]
IPv6 root servers, too. Rather nice.