European Union Asks US To Free ICANN 503
An anonymous reader writes "Viviane Reding, Information Society Commissioner of the European Union, is calling for the United States to hand over control of ICANN (Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers). She said that the organization running ICANN needs be free of control by a single nation, and rather controlled by a private entity and governed by multiple nations. ICANN, headquartered in Marina Del Rey, California, was created in 1998 to oversee a number of Internet related tasks. Reding said, 'In the long run, it is not defendable that the government department of only one country has oversight of an internet function which is used by hundreds of millions of people in countries all over the world.'"
Re:Uh, no (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The best defense is a good offense (Score:5, Informative)
I think Ms. Reding would be surprised how a great many things she doesn't believe in have reasonable and sometimes convincing defenses.
I think you're starry-eyed, and living in a fantasy world. Maybe I'm just a cynic, but usually people don't get to where she is [europa.eu] by believing their own bullshit [europa.eu].
Re:Uh, no (Score:3, Informative)
Hey, thanks for pointing out the obvious. The occasionally reliable source [wikipedia.org] known as Wikipedia says that Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Israel, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal, Romania, and Switzerland all have laws against Holocaust denial on the books. With the exception of Israel and Switzerland those are all EU members.
So yes, it's true that not every EU member state restricts free speech. But it seems folly to claim that you have the same free speech rights in Europe as you do in the United States, given these restrictions. Name me an American state that restricts free speech in such a manner.
Re:NO. (Score:0, Informative)
>I assume you know that the web was invented by an Englishman in Switzerland.
While working at CERN, an european financed research center.
The UN is more than just the security council (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Let's play point-counterpoint (Score:4, Informative)
No, our law-makers really only care about what angers law-makers. Thus, they ban child porn and the pirate bay.
Even if the Pirate Bay is banned in the United States, which I have no idea what you mean by that, I can still happily go to that site by typing in the domain name. There is nothing suspicious going on with the DNS servers stopping me from resolving their address. GP's worry is that the EU would impose such restrictions.
Also, I heard that after 9/11, people weren't supposed to play "Leaving on a Jetplane". And Comedy Central put a black box over Mohamed in Cartoon Wars (a South Park episode) after the big Mohamed hubbub, despite Mohamed being depicted in Super Best Friends (an earlier episode).
Those were private corporations making those decisions, Clear Channel and Viacom respectively.
Re:The best defense is a good offense (Score:3, Informative)
Re:French died fighting while the Yanks made excus (Score:2, Informative)
I'd like to point you to "Enemy at the Gates". A 2001 Hollywood production led by Paramount Pictures, it starred Jude Law and Ed Harris. Law played Vassili Zaitsev, the most famous Russian sniper of the war. The film was set at the Battle of Stalingrad.
Re:Uh, no (Score:5, Informative)
The Soviets were being taken over by Nazi Germany. Just like Europe was. The Chinese were being taken over by the Japanese. The Soviet Union, Europe, and Asia would all look and sound a lot different if Japan hadn't dragged the US into the war. I'm thinking things like, no Jews, with lots of German and Japanese speakers.
Try reading a history book or two.
Weren't the Soviets the first ones into Berlin?
Also, Battle of Kursk.
Re:NO. (Score:1, Informative)
ICANN doesn't control the root servers. They are all independently run (well, OK, ICANN controls one of the root servers, "L"). The only real thing ICANN (as a community of stakeholders) controls is the policy defining what goes into the root zone. ICANN doesn't even edit the root zone, VeriSign does.
As for the telephony system, the ITU settlements regime was probably the biggest barrier to the spread of telecommunications technology. The only reason the Internet was allowed to exist and grow was because the US bucked the PTT-controlled ITU and declared data an "enhanced" service.
Re:Uh, no (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I've always wondered... (Score:2, Informative)
Time to look at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hIQjrMHTv4
You will notice that the Internet is actually based on ARPANET, Cyclades (French network - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CYCLADES), CERNET (Swiss network), SERCNET/Janet (British) and several other commercial and non-commercial networks.
So ARPANET might have existed first, but it certainly isn't the absolute base on which the Internet was built, since technology from other networks was used to link up... technologies which eventually controlled the Internet. In that respect, you could say that ARPANET was replaced by a network based on global technologies.
Re:French died fighting while the Yanks made excus (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Uh, no (Score:5, Informative)
Why is this marked as a troll? It's well documented that the Soviet army was, especially at the start of the war, terribly equipped and horribly trained (thanks mainly to Stalin decapitating the army in his many purges prior to the outbreak of WW2, leaving no effective chain of command or indeed any combat experience) - witness how poorly the Russians fared against the Finns in the opening stages of the war.
And during Barbarossa, Russia literally threw men at the germans whilst they were still gearing up their war machine. Where they could they retreated eastwards, where they couldn't they fought with whatever they could find. Even when supplies did start becoming available, supplies to "hot spots" like Stalingrad were kept to a trickle as part of the military strategy that culminated at Kursk, resulting in the annihilation of the german 6th and the beginning of the end for Hitler.
Statistically, the russians lost ~13% (23 million) of their population during WW2, second behind Poland with 16% (about 5.5 million dead) - remember lots of Poles who had been lucky enough to escape were first on the beaches of Normandy too - in fact most places in eastern europe suffered much higher rates of civilian death due to internment in labour camps (as the slavic races were considered "subhuman" by the believers in Hitler's regime); Russia's death toll was 50% civilian - much of in labour camps, much of it due to Russia's lack of regard for individuals safety and a callous attitude towards the individual that was, some say, inherent under Stalin's communism. Witness his choice to not evacuate Stalingrad once it became evident that it was going to be a cataclysmic battle - "they will fight harder for a live city than an empty one" - using the lives of the inhabitants as incentive for the soldiers. Similarly, Germans were told that the Soviet's lack of regard for their own was symptomatic of their animal nature. That's the sort of thing that happens when two of the world's greatest fascists go head-to-head in a battle that was more about their personal pride than anything else. Stalin could just afford to lose alot more men than Hitler.
Comparatively, both the US and the UK lost less than 1% of their population. Not saying that the Russian contribution wasn't anything other than catastrophic for Hitler's regime, but alot of the deaths *could* have been prevented had Russia been better prepared (which, in turn, would have relied on Stalin not having shot all of his best men), and neither Hitler nor Stalin were too worried about the lives of their troops by the time of Stalingrad. Parent is spot on about soldier deaths though; Russian weaponry and military expertise were in colossally short supply up until the closing stages of the war in europe.
Mods - if you can't tell the difference between a troll and WW2 military history, please use your points on something else. Even better, use your time to educate yourself on one of the bloodiest and most epoch-defining events of the last thousand years which *still* serves as a reminder why letting fascist bastards get into a position of power over others frequently causes those others to die quite horribly.
Re:Uh, no (Score:3, Informative)
Just fyi, from your link:
Re:Gotta give Stalin some credit... (Score:3, Informative)
For the record, 2/3 of all German casualties in WW2 were on the Eastern front. That is manpower, for artillery and tanks it's up to 4/5
Very true... I think it is only really in aircraft that German sustained more losses on the west...
Soviet soldiers did that, and Stalin, in fact, made a lot of blunders,
Tis true that the troops win the war, but the troops cannot win the war unless they are capably equipped, deployed and led. The Germans bungled in all three as the war the progressed whereas the Russians improved in all three.
Stalin relinquished control of his military mostly to Zhukov after his disastrous orders. He put into place capable production people. As much as a command economy would later fail the Russian people, a command economy saved them during World War II. The Russians produced more tanks, more artillery and more aircraft than the Germans, and not even by a narrow margin... but by a larger margin.
As far as casualties go, I would be willing to bet that the greatest proportion of Russian casualties took place in the earliest part of the war, while the reverse held true for the Germans. As the war progressed, Russians got better at keeping their guys alive, and the Germans got worse.
All of these improvements made by Russia suggest that, for a time at least, the Russian leadership and that means Stalin, was able to look at what was happening on the ground and respond to it realistically, whereas the Germans got increasingly worse at it.
Re:Uh, no (Score:3, Informative)
More often than not Soviet forces sent out 100 men with half a rifle each (every other carried a rifle; the rest carried the ammo).
The famous line from Enemy at the Gates:
"The man with the rifle shoots! When the man with the rifle dies, the man without the rifle picks up the rifle and shoots!"
Re:French died fighting while the Yanks made excus (Score:1, Informative)
And we have a long tradition of insulting the French. The hand gesture of the "V"s (2nd & 3rd finger making a V) originated from English archers taunting the French. The 2nd and 3rd fingers are used to pull back the draw string on a bow and English archers kicked arse, back in the days.
Not to be confused with the '60s peace sign which is the opposite way around.