An Argument For Leaving DNS Control In US Hands 607
An anonymous reader writes "Ariel Rabkin has a piece over at News Corp.'s Weekly Standard arguing that the US should maintain its control over the Internet. After reading his piece, I have a hard time arguing that it should be handed over to some international body."
There have been complaints (Score:2, Informative)
Actually there have been complaints about how ICANN has run things including some cases where there were disputes about who was the rightful group to handle CC TLDs. In some cases ICANN used these disputes to gain leverage over the parties running the affected CC TLDs.
The guy who wrote the article clearly hasn't done his homework.
Conservative much? (Score:1, Informative)
-- Conservatism is in good shape
-- The Golden Age of Lobbying : Also known as the Age of Obama.
-- Arabs vs. Iranians : Courtesy of the Jews....
And then we'll discuss as rational people..
Re:Seriously? (Score:0, Informative)
the US created the internet, and has freely and openly allowed the rest of the world access to the technology.
Ever hear of tim berners-lee?
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Informative)
You mean the guy who created HTML (based on a lot of previous work by many others) and had complete boo to do with the hardware side, which came from ARPANet?
Look, nothing against Tim Berners-Lee, but I keep seeing this growing meme that he somehow fathered the entire blessed Internet.
Got the basic facts wrong (Score:4, Informative)
Internet domain names (such as www.google.com) are managed hierarchically. At the top of the hierarchy is an entity called IANA, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, operated on behalf of the Commerce Department.
Not correct. ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is under contract to DOC. ICANN has two components: control of the DNS root and control of the IANA. IANA, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority deals only with numbers: IP addresses, protocol numbers, AS numbers, port numbers, etc. IANA is almost completely unrelated to the DNS.
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Informative)
There's alot more to internet than "a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet" and in fact, Tim Berners-Lee's system wouldn't work without the internet. I would say you are partly right about this since WWW (or Internet Explorer) is what the public sees as "the internet" and you are partly wrong because TFA talks about DNS which has basis in ARPAnet.
TBL didn't create internet, USA/ARPA did in 1958 (Score:5, Informative)
The USA created ARPA in Febuary 1958 in resonse to the launch of Sputnik by the USSR on October 4, 1957.
The inter-computer transport medium that eventually became 'the internet' of today was tested successfully on October 29, 1969 and was named ARPAnet.
(Sir) Tim Berners-Lee conceived the World Wide Web, in March 1989. He tested it successfully on 'the internet' on 25 December 1990.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee [wikipedia.org]
Re:Legal Eagles (Score:3, Informative)
Well, there is one thing to be said about US control of DNS. Any and all attempts to change the system will be met with years of suits, counter-suits and legal quagmires of the n^th degree before such changes can even be discussed.
That is of course, when it is Americans who are adversely affected by the decisions.
Horseshit. Read up on the history of DNS. The only major DNS decision that affected a specific country was back in the early 90's when IP's started running a little short due to too many large blocks having previously been given out. To US companies.
Those companies were forced to do a full accounting of their IP scopes and most of them ended up giving back large chunks of IP space, and in the process spent a lot of money on network migration and redesign.
I'd say based on the track record the current system has already proved itself to be impartial, and at the direct expense of American interests.
Re:Why mess with it (Score:2, Informative)
I seem to remember when InterNIC had sole control before they turned to IANA and the split up registration system that it cost $75/year to register a domain. And I seem to remember this because I still have the faxed receipts and my faxed domain registration submission from 1997. Lest we forget, InterNIC sucked, AND was expensive. It was also a much bigger extortion racket then we have now, where I can get a 2 year registration from Joker for $25.
Re:Why mess with it (Score:4, Informative)
There was a time before the National Science Foundation charged nothing for domain names. Then they turned things over to InterNIC. Oh, by the way, InterNIC is still around, but they go by Network Solutions [networksolutions.com] these days.
Re:Seriously? (Score:4, Informative)
And really...'illegal war'? What the hell is a LEGAL war?
One that has been approved by the UN security council in accordance with chapter 7 of the UN charter. For example, the war in Afghanistan is a legal war. The 2003 Iraqi war was not.
Note that's a judicial perspective, not a moral one - it is a defensible position to think that the war was illegal, but justified.
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Informative)
Nope; I think the GP has it exactly right. AOL had Internet e-mail by 1991, as well as X.400 gateways (for MCI, I think?), SprintMail/Telemail, a fax gateway, a U.S. postal mail gateway, and some others. Licensing wasn't an issue at all; development time was the only bottleneck, since AOL's proprietary mail system didn't map well onto most of the interoperable standards.
AOL got USENET and FTP in 1994, but only through a server-side gateway. Native Web browsing (using the client-integrated BookLink browser) came along a year or two later, and it was anything but a sure win; browsing over slow dialup links was painful, especially as IMG tags became widespread. Our proprietary P3 protocol made things even worse, with overhead that duplicated functions in TCP, and an architecture that made lightweight back-and-forth roundtrips (as in HTTP/1.0) horribly slow. We ran the first large-scale caching proxies, and the infamous .JPG-to-.ART graphics recompression servers, and only then was dialup web browsing tolerable.
Meanwhile, the smartest minds at Johnson-Grace came up with a truly elegant solution: a format called ARTDOC. It contained all the information you'd see in a web page today - video, audio, graphics, text - and a "choreography" that would render each part at the desired timing. It was designed to let you pre-author media for specific modem speeds, and it was sent in a single stream so the client could progressively render it at any baud rate. Everything was compressed to within an inch of its life. It was gorgeous, and it offered capabilities that even today would require Flash or something similar, yet it ran on the slow PCs and servers of the day. HTML couldn't come close.
If the web's popularity had been delayed by a year or two, we'd probably all be running ARTDOC [uspto.gov] browsers.
Re:Seriously? (Score:3, Informative)
> For example, the war in Afghanistan is a legal war. The 2003 Iraqi war was not.
You fail at history. The first Gulf War never officially ended. That means every time Saddam violated the cease fire agreement we had the option of resuming the war. That we went to the UN again and wanked away was purely for domestic consumption. Without making that effort, and proving to all the UN was ineffectual, the Democrat leaders in Congress would have never voted for the use of force resolution. Because Bush thought that if Congress blessed the 2003 phase of the war the Democrats would be forced to support the war effort against their will after they had voted for it. Well despite degrees from Harvard and Yale Pres. Bush still suffered under the delusion Democrats have any honor and will keep their word. They aren't and don't because they know their media corps have their back, ready and willing to push any inconvient facts down the memory hole. A lie isn't really a lie if nobody calls ya on it is their motto.