US Internet Control To Be Topic #1 In Rio 325
Crazy Taco writes "It looks as though the next meeting of the UN's Internet Governance Forum is about to descend into another heated debate about US control of key Internet systems. Although the initial purpose of this year's summit was to cover such issues as spam, free speech and cheaper access, it appears that nations such as China, Iran, and Russia, among others, would rather discuss US control of the Internet. In meetings leading to up to the second annual meeting of the IGF in Rio de Janiero on Monday, these nations won the right to hold an opening-day panel devoted to 'critical Internet resources.' While a number of countries wanting to internationalize Internet control simply want to have more say over policies such as creating domain names in languages other than English, we can only speculate what additional motives might be driving nations that heavily censor the Internet and lock down the flow of information across it."
Just wondering? (Score:2, Interesting)
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Russia, Iran and places like that could help a lot in that regard.
Re:Just wondering? (Score:4, Informative)
The US "control" of the internet is administrative control (address space allocation, DNS stuff, etc); it's not the hub for worldwide internet traffic.
Re:Just wondering? (Score:5, Interesting)
There is very little in the way of west to east Internet infrastructure east of the turkey and ukraine.
Check your BGP routing table and you will see I am right.
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Re:Just wondering? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Just wondering? (Score:5, Insightful)
You miss the point. It isn't about who's "responsible" for anything. We recently passed something called the "Protect America Act" [wired.com]- in full view of everyone, ironically with limited public debate- that allows the American government to engage in warrantless surveillance of any Internet traffic routed through the United States [washingtonmonthly.com] if either or (commonly) both endpoints of that traffic lie in a foreign country.
And it turns out, surprise surprise, that most people in the world would rather not have their packets routed through a police state.
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If you want to know "what country I would prefer over the US" most of all, I would have to say it would be the United States that I grew up in as a kid. I'm sorry that people keep calling you stupid a
Re:Just wondering? (Score:5, Insightful)
north korea, china and most of the middle east actively filters what its citizens are allowed to read. china has imprisoned journalists for publishing information it does not want posted, and have frequently deemed things 'state secrets' to cover up goings on inside their borders.
meanwhile the US is not perfect, however a group of senators recently had a very rough conversation with the yahoo execs regarding china and what happened with a journalist there. its better than nothing.
youll understand why im somewhat hesitant about allowing iran and china a say in how this whole thing is being run.
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The USA actively filters [wikipedia.org] what its citizens are allowed to read. The USA has imprisoned journalists [ap.org] for publishing information it does not want posted, and has frequently deemed things 'state secrets' [wikipedia.org] to cover up goings on inside
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.xxx TLD considered stupid. (Score:3, Insightful)
Except as part of some totally unfeasible net-censorship scheme, it would serve no purpose. No good can come of it.
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It is in the very begining part of the charter that provides free speech as long as the government thinks it is important at the time.
section 2 gives the free s
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Anyways, in the US or anywhere, you have a right to say it. Not a right to the platform your going to say it on. There is nothing wrong with saying your piece somewhere that doesn't disrupt the rights of others. And quite frankly, if you think that denying others rights in order to take
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It just depends on if those two other countries have built the infrastructure necessary to not use US lines. If there isn't a line between Iran and Europe, then it will have to go though some other country first. If there is a line and it is packed full of traffic, then the routers would rout around that line anyways.
What the US controls as far as the Inte
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However, if I'm underestimating your ISP or I'm misunderstanding s
Re:Just wondering? (Score:4, Interesting)
Traces to:
Japan - through USA
India - IPs with no rDNS (Teleglobe, so it could be either. Only 2 hops, so it's probably direct/via SA?)
Saudi Arabia - direct
Iran - direct
China - across Europe (NL, DK,
Hong Kong - USA, Japan, HK
Australia - via USA
New Zealand - via South Africa
Of course, you're probably correct that the vast
Re:Just wondering? (Score:5, Funny)
Do you ralise how expensive that would be to the NSA? They'd have to tap into a lot more undersea cables that way.
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Because there might be people clued up enough to use "internet" instead. This used to be a tech site.
Censorship? (Score:5, Insightful)
While a number of countries wanting to internationalize Internet control simply want to have more say over policies such as creating domain names in languages other than English, we can only speculate what additional motives might be driving nations that heavily censor the Internet and lock down the flow of information across it.
Not to be confused, presumably, with a nation whose government has a demonstrated history of violating the privacy rights of its own citizens and stating on the record that it doesn't accord any such rights at all to anyone who isn't one of its own citizens, including the vast numbers of Internet users from other nations whose traffic is all but certain to pass through systems under its jurisdiction, and within which it has repeatedly been shown that major communication providers are more than willing to provide the government with access to traffic they carry without proper authorisation anyway.
Nope, I can't imagine how any other nation in the world could see a problem with that. There is no danger whatsoever of industrial espionage, interception and decoding of confidential government transmissions, or investigations of private citizens of high influence, and none of them could be used to further the interests of a nation with such access at the expense of others anyway.
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You're delusional if you think funneling it through more countries or even just different countries is going to make it more private.
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Maybe not from a technical point of view, but from a legal point of view, you can certainly get into a lot of trouble intentionally intercepting private communications over the internet.
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Not to be confused, presumably, with a nation whose government has a demonstrated history of violating the privacy rights of its own citizens and stating on the record that it doesn't accord any such rights at all to anyone who isn't one of its own citizens, including the vast numbers of Internet users from other nations whose traffic is all but certain to pass through systems under its jurisdiction, and within which it has repeatedly been shown that major communication providers are more than willing to provide the government with access to traffic they carry without proper authorisation anyway.
As long as their are major systems in place (routers and such), that will always be the case, as it is in any country.
Bad News... (Score:3, Insightful)
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Unless its encrypted, you have no privacy online. Just ask any SMTP admin, or for that matter, anyone with a packet sniffer. This means that privacy means absolutely zilch when it comes to infrastructure. (Note that how individual sites handle your personal information is another story entirely...)
Very true, and even if they can't decrypt your encrypted traffic, they still know who's talking to who, and that can be pretty useful for them as well. Sometimes you might be better leaving it unencrypted to ensure you don't arouse false suspicion.
Create their own network then? (Score:5, Insightful)
Though I doubt anyone has the balls. Personally ICANN/IANA does a pretty good job at what it does, and the FCC seems to only step in extremely rarely (if at all). And I promise you that a large majority of nations, if not every nation, intercept/store/decode internet information. Changing who 'owns' the internet would not change that at all. It would just potentially change who gets what IP blocks (alot of businesses would be pretty upset if this changed), what TLDs are official and valid (and nothing stops a nation from having their own ISP's DNS servers adding TLDs), and I guess some protocol stuff.
The US may do some terrible things but with regards to the internet it's policy is typically 'do not regulate if possibly'. Unless that changes this is all just a bunch of moaning to stur up anti-american sentiments.
Re:Create their own network then? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I want a world where encrypting internet traffic is as routine as locking the house when you go out.
I want a world where encrypted internet traffic (especially email, IM, chat, voice chat, video chat and other private communications) is the rule and not the exception. And the encryption should be done in ways that prevent man-in-the-middle attacks and snooping. No computer outside of yours and the one at the other end should ever see the plain text or encryption keys.
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Re:Censorship? (Score:5, Insightful)
Apparently you live in some sort of reality distortion field. Well here's the deal: communications used to use microwave communications. These were easily intercepted and routinely. This sort of stuff is called 'Signals Intelligence'. A nice British chap,a former assistant directory of MI-5, was at the forefront of this this, and he wrote a book about his experiences called spycatcher [wikipedia.org].
These technologies have been updated for fiber-optics. Yes, a lot of interception takes place directly in the United States, but in fact it is going on all over the world. Its done by all of the major powers, not just the United States--and guess what, they are all spying on eachother
You're mistaken in thinking that privacy is better part of liberty. No, liberty is only liberty when it doesn't matter who knows or doesn't know what you are doing. Its our liberty that makes the US different from the autocratic regimes which rule many countries in the world. Every government is listening; only some let you do what you choose regardless.
Wrong issue lemming (Score:4, Insightful)
Stop right there, privacy is a different issue than censorship.
"Brave Guy" indeed, what a lemming. Just spouting off the same message about privacy issues even when it has nothing to do with the topic under discussion!
And as a last thought, are you seriously going to sit there and say a U.S. citizen has more to worry about from their government than a citizen of *Putin's Russia*? Than any Chinese citizen?
Come on.
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England, through CCTV, has shown that it's no better than the US when it comes to privacy. Germany's laughable in its computing laws and
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Say what? What's the privacy issue with the CCTV cameras in Britain? They are in public places, where there's no expectation of privacy. This is completely different to the wholesale tapping of private phone conversations and other communications.
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Well I'd hope (Score:5, Insightful)
However I have a feeling that it is going to be like most of these meetings where people just whine that the US companies should have to give up control of their resources to some international oversight body. In addition to being rather greedy, this is also stupid. Having a bunch of systems in the US that control everything but are theoreticly under international control changes nothing. The US government could change their minds at any time, and if the companies and servers are in the US they'll do as the government says because they won't have a choice. You haven't really solved anything, just added more bureaucracy and more people who can control what's going on normally but the buck still ultimately stops with the US government.
The real answer is many systems, all around the world, that are controlled by many groups. In that way there really isn't a single group that "runs" the Internet. Of course that isn't what most nations are at all interested in. They are interested in just having the US keep control, so long as the US will do what they are told.
Precisely! (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless they're willing to actually, y'know, INVEST in supporting the infrastructure (their own root servers, etc), they need to step off.
It's like some of these nations that get sent food demanding steak instead of the grain.
Really, (Score:5, Insightful)
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The real answer is many systems, all around the world, that are controlled by many groups.
Good idea. The group in Russia is actively attempting to hack all the other systems, the Chinese group is hacking other systems while censoring everything coming/going out of it, and the US group is setting a standard and then not following it so that you get locked into a proprietary system. Whether you like it or not, the best government is a benevolent monarchy; when there's actual wrong doing, then something will be done. Until then, too few people will care to build momentum for a change.
why not set up a `seperate internet?' (Score:2)
Instead of whining, these nations should explore means of setting up a separate Internet backbone. I understand this is entirely possible, though I cannot speculate on how it could be implemented at all. Go figure!
Re:why not set up a `seperate internet?' (Score:4, Insightful)
The whole point of the Internet was to interconnect systems.
On a more general note, are any other non-american slashdotters noticing a rather alarming number of questionable political posts on this site recently?
Us non-americans might need to go get ourselves our own slash site too.
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Especially the little rider to the summary "we can only speculate what additional motives might be driving nations that heavily censor the Internet and lock down the flow of information across it." There was nothing in the Yahoo article linked about censorship. So who is "we"? And how about the motives of countries that know that the US is spying on every byte that passes thro
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I for one welcome our new A-level domain overlords.
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When they do set up their own highspeed internal networks or even talk of doing so, slashdotters and the US gvt say omg restriction form the world wide web. A quick google shows this: "China's bid to divide the Internet" [slate.com] where the author slams china's development of a high speed internal network and participation in protocol design.
Give the guys a break.
In Soviet Russia, (Score:3, Funny)
Uh, what? (Score:3, Insightful)
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It's all about censorship (Score:3, Insightful)
Muslim countries block access to web sites deemed too sexual or which differ in religious outlook from their repressive theology. China? Well, we know that story all too well. The quest of these regimes toward control of the the Internet is not rooted in a desire for "freedom" or "diversity". Quite the contrary. It is a desire to control and repress.
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Bullshit. You might want to learn a few things about the rest of the world.
thought crimes (Score:3, Insightful)
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If they just thought about it, it wouldn't be a crime. Heck, if they just talked about it, it wouldn't be a crime. But when someone plans to commit a crime, and then shows up to commit it, then it's no longer just "thought", is it?
There are plenty of other ethical issues with this sort of thing, but it isn't punishing people based solely on their thoughts.
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Judge: right, we're here because apparently you intended to have sex with a minor, is that correct?
Defense: yes, your honor, my client was on Nightline NBC and..
Judge: oh, this shit again. Where is this minor that you intended to have sex with? Is she in the court room today?
Prosecution: uhh, no your honor, but we have members of the police and..
Judge: I'm sor
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If all you did was think about it then nobody would ever know and "thought crimes" would be impossible to prosecute. The question here is at what threshold to their actions based on their thoughts cross the threshold? Speaking about them, intending to act on them, actually acting on them?
This clearly should depend on the severity of the crime because the goal here is to protect people/society and not to punish people whom we just don't agree with.
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Land of the Scared.
Re:It's all about censorship (Score:4, Informative)
Russia is not the entirety of Europe, nor does it make up a majority of the countries in Europe. How did your bullshit manage to get modded +4 Insightful?
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It is sometimes difficult for Americans to comprehend that very few countries understand the concept of the free speech and a free press. For example, in our 21st Century, most European countries will prosecute individuals for thought crimes. In Russia, the state continues to repress the free press. The Russian web and broadcast outlets have become targets for Putin's heavy handed interference.
If by "thought crimes" you mean things like mass slander, mass libel, mass threats, denying genocide with one hand while encouraging it with the other then yes. They're more than words, and if said about a specific individual the US courts would react too. Why they think it doesn't matter when it's a group I don't know, perhaps they're under the mistaken impression that it is too generic, too vague to punish. We have learned the hard way that this is false, that this is how you drive a people into committi
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2. People who commit murder are the criminals, not the people who tell em to do it. That goes for hit men too.
3. Limiting any kind of speech is starting down a slippery slope that has been shown again and again to lead to persecution.
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Really? Allow me to acquaint you with a tactic of the IRA. Kidnap some poor sod's family and tell him to drive a car filled with explosives into an army checkpoint or else his wife and kids will all get murdered. Technically you are correct, driving the car into the checkpoint to murder soldiers makes the guy a criminal....but I think we would all agree who the real criminals are in this, unfortunat
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How patronizing...
It is sometimes difficult for Americans to comprehend that very few countries think that farts from the U.S. smells better than the rest either.
The one who posted this article made a careful choice of listing countries like Russia, China and Iran. Nice manipulative way to put this situation.
Where's "Brazil" in that list? (the article ment
On the US side too (Score:2)
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It's true! When it comes to free speech the USA is in the zone!
For a comparison consider most of Europe, Canada, Australia and US newspapers from ten years ago. The point was valid BUT other parts of the world at looking at trends in the USA and are worried about exactly what is described in the previous post. Look past blind pariotism and muttering dark things about the darkies - they
Rather Ironic... (Score:2)
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The key is that if we distribute control of the Internet to all nations then nobody has control of it, and no single party can regulate it. It wouldn't take long for people to figure out how to route their traffic through the right gateways that would ensure freedom of that particular kind of traffic.
Transparent solutions that work for mom'n'pop
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Why is this blatant troll modded Insightful?
Just in case the poster really believes what he wrote:
It is sometimes difficult for Americans to comprehend that very few countries understand the concept of the free speech and a free press
Got that from USA Today did we? Or is it just what you were told in school? According to the Press Freedom Index [rsf.org] the only European nation to rank lower than the US is Bulgaria (as far as I can see).
For example, in our 21st Century, most European countries will prosecute individuals for thought crimes
I assume you're talking about the French and German anti-Nazi laws? They're not really thought crimes as you can only get prosecuted if you act on those thoughts, for example by prominently displaying a Sw
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Neocons are in decline, any movement lacking that much common sense is destined to fizzle out. Now its just a scare term those on the f
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Like you seem to understand, the far right is very much like the far left (look at Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich). Absolute liberty and extreme isolationism, for some reason lead to similar conclusions from the opposite point of view. Socialism in practice sometimes works through fascism.
Anyway, a neocon is similarly blended, but in an attempt to be moderate. It's not really all about
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The americans have contribute
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Jew? Hardly. More like "American Tyrant-Lunatics bent on turning the Middle East into a glowing crater at the behest of the Zionist Tyrant-Lunatics in anticipation of the Apocalypse where Jesus will come and blow up all the Jews who don't convert."
Or something along those lines.
You will note my use of the word, 'Lunatic'?
Please also note; 'Zionist' and 'Jew' mean very different things, Zio
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On the other hand self-censorship can be viewed as a lot more insidious than government censorship, simply because if government censorship is taking place people know about it and can fill in the gaps themselves. With media self-censorship it is not usually apparent that it's taking place and the consumer believes he is getting the full story, when in fact he is not.
I hope you're right about the second point (and interestingly it seems to be the states that are really getting frustrated by the feds now,
Same old song and dance (Score:2)
Iran
Russia
Are these nations known for their defense of liberty? Are their citizens free?
The more things change, the more they stay the same. The internet is just another area where those who seek power to oppress their fellow man are hard at work erecting barriers to the free flow of information, barriers against truth. They did it with the spoken word. They did it with the printing press. They did it with broadcast media. Now they're sinking their claws into the internet.
Evil never sleeps and st
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Are these nations known for their defense of liberty? Are their citizens free?
Yes, and no. The concept of society in general is, at its most basic level, the relinquishment of individual freedom in exchange for human gain. To a certain extent, freedom harms a society, just as a certain extent of control would be just as harmful. All of the nations you've listed have prided themselves as being the best nations ever (most free, best society). The USA is no exception among these.
To put it differently,
People in glass houses (Score:2)
I looked at some of your other posts, and I wish you had worded this one a little differently.
Are these nations known for their defense of liberty? Are their citizens free?
Patriot Act
Warrantless Wiretapping
Guantanamo
America is hardly at its height in the human rights game. Hell, we're confirming an Attorney General who isn't sure that waterboarding is illegal/torture.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21698732/ [msn.com]
No, we're not yet as bad as the nations you listed.
Evil never sleeps and stupid never dies.
But
Why not make it international? (Score:3, Insightful)
After all, the UN is a model of efficiency and transparency. It should be easy to share control of the Internet!
The internet is... (Score:3, Interesting)
...a network of networks. If every company I've ever worked for set up a private network, and decided to provide a restricted gateway, so can China. And, guess what? None of those companies created an international incident to do it. They just did it. And don't say that doesn't scale, either. It does.
That's a hell of a choice... (Score:2)
The devil you know or the devil you don't. We know that *many* in the US want to limit free speech or otherwise censor the internet. So, how much further down that road will others take it.
IMO, the many could provide (depending on setup) a redundancy that could make many types of censorship moot. It's pretty hard to cut something off in a robust distrib
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Well, that and the US's politics makes me *very* nervous about the future on freedom of speech on the 'net.
Not to insult you, but it seems to me that reacting to something that hasn't happened yet is what got us into the war in Iraq. Breaking everything apart now seems premature when there's nothing concretely wrong with the current setup, just the potential for abuse (which would be larger were it broken up).
p.s. The countries chosen to be in that list seems rather loaded to me.
Yes, it was, but it was also the list of countries that are the biggest worry for what would happen were this to come about. Canada would be no worse than the US, I also find it unlikely that they would b
It's broken. Fix it. (Score:2)
There is something broken with the Internet if people are discussing who gets to control it. Control indicates centralisation and a point of failure. Rather than discussing who gets to control IP addresses and domain names, the discussion should be how do we eliminate these points of weakness and make those who want to have control irrelevant?
While it doesn't hurt to be politically active don't let it become an end in itself. Once the bickering starts the geeks are probably better to leave the politici
Many topics are not on the agenda for Rio (Score:3, Interesting)
Both the US Gov't and ICANN have tried to put many issues off limits, not the least of which is ICANN itself.
It is slowly dawning on people that there is a mad grab by industrial interests, with a lot of assistance from certain parts of certain governments, to lock-down large parts of the net and keep "the mob" (you, me, and the other people who use the net) as nothing more than puppet consumers.
That exclusion, which amounts to a total inversion of the idea that governmental authority derives from the people, i.e. a rejection of democracy, is a foundation stone of most of internet governance - see my note "Stakeholderism - The Wrong Road for Internet Governance" at http://www.cavebear.com/archive/rw/igf-democracy-in-internet-governance.pdf [cavebear.com]
Divert Attention (Score:2)
Better the "devil" you know? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm British and yes, I can hate Bush and [Blair|Brown]'s little crusade with the best of them but I fail to see why we should fix something that isn't broken. If you really are worried about US control, use ORSN roots as I do. So far, the only reason I have had to use them is IPv6 accessible root servers, but they also go into independent mode if anyone screws with the roots with malevolence. So far, touch wood, nobody has.
Would it also be so terrible to say "thanks, USA and ICANN" for the stability they've given the gTLDs over the years? I shudder to think what would happen if the UN ever got control of the roots. Can you say "bureaucracy" and not think inefficiency and inaccessibility?
It's de facto control (Score:3, Interesting)
This kind of discussion always comes up... (Score:4, Interesting)
My suggestion would be that the UN sets up an organization that maintains an alternative set of opt-in dns servers, maybe with a recommendation to use these in UN countries. The same organization should also be responsible for trying to remedy geographically uneven routing in the core internet infrastructure. Please, spare me of the criticism of the UN, which in this case might not be relevant or warranted (oil for food, poor peacekeeping track record, dictatorships in the UN, etc.). A lot of that dislike for the UN comes from the fact that US politicians actively try or tried to turn public opinion against the UN, because ignoring the UN served as a means for executing a unilateral foreign policy. Of course, there are legitimate criticisms, but the UN merely reflects on the state of the member countries. You can talk about China or North Korea, just as well as you can talk about Sweden or Denmark and their UN track record. But I'm diverging from my main point about the UN: it has a good track record running technical organizations like the ITU that runs the phone system of the world or like the WHO.
Yes, North Korea and China is in the UN. They would censor the whole world if they could. The problem with US foreign policy is that it sees itself as the sole beacon of light and hope in the world, while it is not. The US wants to protect us from censorship? Great news! You CAN oppose China or North Korea when they demand censorship in setting up a UN run system. Just band together with Sweden, Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, UK, etc.. That would require bilateral negotiations and a little less sovinistic attitude, but if you're not doing that, don't hide behind cheap excuses.
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Fine you can have the net, but by your logic, world wide web design and content should be approved by Switzerland since it was invented there.
Have fun with your bbs
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Re:Give it to the UN? FU! (Score:4, Informative)
The web was invented at CERN, so if you're Swiss you can be proud of that. It was an evolution of Gopher, however, which came from the University of Minnesota. Go gophers!
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Umm, I would rather say that the US (actually DARPA) founded the Net, and back then it wasn't anything like it was now, they didn't even have IP, let alone TCP/IP.
If I'm not mistaken, TCP was invented in the US and tested ca 1977 (see a recent CNet article on the 'Internet Van'. The focus outside the US was drawing up the specifications for the OSI networking stack. The first widely available OS to support TCP/IP was BSD 4.2 - though it may be argued that Berzerkeley isn't really in the US...
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I agree -- there should be an internet UN that handles this. I'm just thinking of 9 years from now when the Republicans take control again... and this time there really will be the technology to control everyone if thats what people want. Why would a foreign business want to have to deal with the US if they didn't have to anyway? (sad but true)
Being something like 20% if the consumer market helps in getting business to want to 'deal' with the US.
As far as the UN 'handling' the internet, is this the same body that puts Cuba, Syria, and Libya on the human rights committee? The same guys that watched the Rwandan claim 10% of the population? Yeah. The UN is not exactly a model of speed and efficiency. By the time they realize they have a problem, it is a decade too late.
Of course, this is all an utterly moot point. The "control" the US has is j