Can There Be a Non-US Internet? 406
Daniel_Stuckey writes "After discovering that the US government has been invading the privacy of not just Americans, but also Brazilians, Brazil is showing its teeth. The country responded to the spying revelations by declaring it'll just have to create its own internet. In reality, although Brazil President Dilma Rousseff is none too happy with the NSA's sketchy surveillance practices, Brazil and other up-and-coming economies have been pushing to shift the power dynamics of the World Wide Web away from a US-centric model for years."
Oblig. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oblig. (Score:5, Insightful)
Non-US Internet (Score:5, Informative)
Iran has already done it. It has built an Intranet like network which connects to outside world through few gateways. The transition of the network users to the new Intranet is being done at the time being and will complete in year.
The main purpose is the:
1- Avoid the internal Iranian traffic to travel over the internet (i.e. unknown countries). ....
2- To control in/out traffic (deep packet inspection, control access to outsider websites, attack and spying control, allow access to Iran-only websites just from inside Iran, emergency kill switch).
3- Force Iranian organizations to host their website in Iranian data centers.
4- Save traffic costs.
5- Flourish local hosting and cloud business and local peering between ISPs.
Re:Non-US Internet (Score:4, Informative)
Iran has already done it. It has built an Intranet like network which connects to outside world through few gateways. The transition of the network users to the new Intranet is being done at the time being and will complete in year.
The main purpose is the:
1- Avoid the internal Iranian traffic to travel over the internet (i.e. unknown countries). 2- To control in/out traffic (deep packet inspection, control access to outsider websites, attack and spying control, allow access to Iran-only websites just from inside Iran, emergency kill switch). 3- Force Iranian organizations to host their website in Iranian data centers. 4- Save traffic costs. 5- Flourish local hosting and cloud business and local peering between ISPs. ....
6. Control the ideas/speech of all websites within Iran.
Technically yes; practically unlikely (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Technically yes; practically unlikely (Score:5, Interesting)
Initially, yes.
But after a couple of years I don't think there would be that much of a difference.
As long as all the on-line commercial entities in that country were okay with never having any US business. Otherwise the NSA (and others) can demand access to their data in exchange for access to our markets.
And that isn't even considering the old spy standby of either getting one of your spies hired by them or offering one of their employees money to get you access.
The problems are not technological. They are human nature.
Re:Technically yes; practically unlikely (Score:4, Insightful)
It's quite amazing how many commercial entities get by just fine by never having any dealings with the US at all.
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Re:Technically yes; practically unlikely (Score:5, Insightful)
You are assuming that people in other countries actually find USA content interesting. Most people don't. That is why there are different countries.
It really depends on what you use the internet for.
Personally (I live outside the US), local US politics, news and so on are of little to no interest to me. However most of the television and movies that I enjoy (downloaded) are from the US, with at most 25% produced elsewhere. Right now, we're using Slashdot - not only hosted in the US, but also with a very large number (majority?) of commenters from the US. Even if there were a 'slashdot for non-US' that covered the entire world excluding the US, I would miss out on a lot of interesting discussions and insights.
The US, whether we like it or not, is a major influence in the world and will likely continue to be for quite some time.
You say "That is why there are different countries", but to me at least, the world is becoming less 'country oriented' and more 'groups of people, potentially separated by space' oriented. I don't know you or where you live, but it's probably nowhere near me. Regardless, I'm communicating with you right now. Remove one country the size of the US and the pool of people just got noticeably smaller.
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notably for offering an easier way to avoid 'namespace pollution' by seperating the networks into regions based off a numerical 'country id'
We already have this. That's why we have amazon.com and amazon.co.uk and amazon.de and amazon.fr etc. This has nothing to do with IPv4 vs IPv6, especially since the latter has more than enough addresses to last until we are off this planet (which will never happen).
Amazon.*** namespaces (Score:2)
Amazon's actually using the namespace partly because the publishing world has lots of weird national boundaries - a given book might be published in the US but not yet available in the UK because UK publishing rights haven't been sold to a UK publisher yet, or the UK edition may have different text, title, or cover - and they use the namespace to help keep that isolated.
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They do so more in some regions than in others.
On Amazon.de I can choose between the US, British and German editions of many books. On Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com the choice is more limited.
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Given that the national language of Brazil is portuguese I would be amazed if there is much US-based information available in that language.
Given that the majority of well educated people in Brazil also speak English reasonably well, I would not be surprised if they regularly access content in English from the United States.
I live in a non-English speaking country myself, but the majority of internet use I see around me is on English language websites.
National DNS roots (Score:3)
The day may be approaching when some countries will have their own DNS roots and root servers. That's been threatened before, but now it's more likely to happen.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
No (Score:3)
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Not even nuclear mines?
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So you don't believe nuclear mines would be an adequate deterrance?
How about large conventional ones?
of course you could read between the lines and guess that I mean there is a way given sufficient determination. Of course, I expect a certain percentage of ACs to be raised by wolves and barely literate.
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I can't help but find this [palegray.net] a little ironic given the context of this story.
56 Marietta is a nice facility, though.
To get firmly back on topic, what you're suggesting is unworkable for many reasons. I've seen a few of those reasons firsthand.
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Why ironic?
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There are two methods: satellite based infrastructure, and fortifying undersea cables against submarines and anchors.
The problem with both of them is that they are both economically prohibitive. The NSA essentially found a Sorority that had an unlocked front door and got caught engaged in the most epic panty-raid in the history of unencrypted communications. End to end encryption is going to become the new norm, and stronger defenses against MITM & encryption back doors are going to become a requirement
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In cypherspace noone can read your stream.
Seriously though, satellites have too much latency, real ships have anchors too big to armor against. Especially considering they can use a supertanker or container ship if they have to and the sub can scope out a likely vulnerable spot to put the anchor. Quantum crypto: once the cable is cut you then need a subsea quantum repeater. Even if the tech were available it would be electronic and therefore subject to traditional signals intercept. Traditional crypto
WTF is the point? (Score:5, Insightful)
The only thing unique about the United States is the resources. That is what is so sad about this: the entire idea of "American Exceptionalism" is the notion that the United States stands alone as a country; Unique in it's respect for freedom and human rights. The NSA's violation of every honor code existing in TCP/IP has demonstrated the United States to be equally mediocre as any other country, where virtue and abuse of power are concerned.
Once you lose your credibility you can never get it back. Its actions have left the entire internet community in search for new social & technological methods for enforcing these basic tenets of privacy that were previously easy to support via a fragile honor system: the United States promised to not be a dick and molest other people's cake as it got passed to the left.
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The only thing unique about the United States is the resources. That is what is so sad about this: the entire idea of "American Exceptionalism" is the notion that the United States stands alone as a country; Unique in it's respect for freedom and human rights. The NSA's violation of every honor code existing in TCP/IP has demonstrated the United States to be equally mediocre as any other country, where virtue and abuse of power are concerned.
Any country claims to be excellent in some way. Even the best. Problem is, there can only be one best and bugger me if I'd know which one it is.
Once you lose your credibility you can never get it back. Its actions have left the entire internet community in search for new social & technological methods for enforcing these basic tenets of privacy that were previously easy to support via a fragile honor system: the United States promised to not be a dick and molest other people's cake as it got passed to the left.
The reputation of the US has been so thoroughly ruined during the last 50 years that hardly anybody notices the the UK is the worst offender in this. The GCHQ has been far more aggressive in its snooping and the way the UK deals with it(ie not at all) is a bit of a concern. In contrast the US has been quite open on admitting things they had been caught with and are
Re:WTF is the point? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not what exceptionalism means. Exceptionalism is when you say "other rules ought to apply to us, because obviously we're special". When the US supports trials of war criminals, but demands that their own forces can never be subject to war crimes inquiries, that's exceptionalism.
Some countries are relatively open about doing whatever they can get away with. Other countries justify it with an ideology of exceptionalism. US is one of the worst offenders in the latter category.
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the entire idea of "American Exceptionalism" is the notion that the United States stands alone as a country; Unique in it's respect for freedom and human rights.
Has that notion ever been valid?
The NSA's violation of every honor code existing in TCP/IP
So what parts of RFC 791 and RFC 793 mention an honor code?
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the United States promised to not be a dick and molest other people's cake as it got passed to the left.
That's one of the weirdest metaphors I've heard.
Re:WTF is the point? (Score:4, Interesting)
Once you lose your credibility you can never get it back.
Well, apparently you've proven this not to be the case, since you're crediting the US government with credibility, even though they started eugenics before the Nazis, [wikipedia.org] built and stocked concentration camps for US citizens [wikipedia.org], re-invented the witch hunt with McCarthyism [wikipedia.org], and still continue to use McCarthyist accusations [wikipedia.org] and false threat narratives [wikipedia.org] against their own people to manufacture consent for war atrocities, [youtube.com] and frequently wage other forms of socio-economic terrorism [youtube.com] on everyone, including their own people, and have installed pervasive domestic spying apparatuses [wikipedia.org], multiple times [wikipedia.org], and even been caught red-handed doing so. [wikipedia.org]
And, somehow, miraculously, in the mid 1990's they suddenly became credible enough to hold DNS roots? Somehow you imagine that only now they have lost credibility that can not be restored? I'm sorry, no. We've always needed a decentralized infrastructure that's not susceptible to censorship or centralization. That's why the Internet was built to be resilient from entire cities or countries disappearing off the map -- Packets routed around the holes in moments.
However, you foolish morons built "The Web" atop the Internet. You used a hierarchical naming tree instead of an associative hash based naming convention where the data itself could be requested regardless of name or endpoint address. You fill data silos with information, causing congestion at "servers" by funneling all those "client" connections into single places -- When in reality there is no such thing as a client or server at the traffic level: Just source and destination addresses. You espouse separating content from style and form, but can't get it through your thick heads you need to separate data from URIs in much the same way, for similar reasons.
Because there is a centralized name system corporations and governments can be gate keepers for any who would make data available online. Instead of connecting directly to the people's systems you want to stay up to date with you fill data silos with all your personal information and (private) correspondences, and trust the untrustworthy 3rd parties to hold your data for you -- despite the fact that your own home computer already had such information in it and could have served it to only those you trust directly.... It's not like public key cryptography doesn't exist, but you refuse to use it out of ignorance or apathy, then have the gall to complain only now... your demagoguery knows no bounds. Threaten to build a whole "non-us" Internet, when it is only the web that is US based... If only it weren't for the hierarchical naming system which ties data to IPs and host names, the people could be free from much censorship and spying -- Perhaps consider using a distributed hash table instead? Oh that's the "crazy" talk... Pffft, looks who's talking, fools.
The BBS era was an interesting experiment. Because the Internet was taking so long to get off the ground, common folks built their own Internet. We drew out maps of local calling areas and scheduled batches of data to transfer from node to node via store and forward. My first email was via Fidonet. Took 1 to 2 days to get a message from Texas to California if the route was timed just right. With an always online system like the Internet, instead of nightly BBS to BBS sync, suc
Yes, but it won't make any difference. (Score:5, Insightful)
Fundamentally the reason that the internet is US centric is partially the fact that ICANN is located in the US, but mostly because the most used services are based in the US. To create a truly non US-centric model you would have to relocate ICANN and come up with significant competitors to people like Google etc who have no US presence(once they have a US presence they're subject to all the same laws that allow the NSA to spy on you in the first place).
You could technically achieve this, but the countries which could be candidates for replacing the US in this position are not Brazil and would also spy on traffic. So unless this is yet another pissing match where idiots go in with the slogan "Anyone but the US", making the internet non US centric is a gigantic waste of everyone's time and money. I mean does anyone seriously believe that if Chinese companies displaced the US ones that China wouldn't spy on everyone, or that the Europeans wouldn't either also spy or allow the NSA to spy?
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Also, and not to sound like an apologist, pretty much every other country has just as crappy government reputations for things like privacy.
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No.
Re:Yes, but it won't make any difference. (Score:4, Insightful)
This seems to be a common strawman argument used when discussing the NSA and spying. No one has suggested that the only government spying in the world is the US. However, the US seems to be granted special privilages by the most of the world in that it is the only nation:
1. That does extraordinary rendition without having to be held accountable by any international body
2. Attacks and kills people in other countries via drones that they are not at ear with
3. Mandates cyberwarfare against not just "intelligence" targets
4. Operates prisons that were specifically created to circumvent human rights treaties and allow torture
Other countries may do some or all of these things but they are belittled, sanctioned, or bombed (usually in that order). The US does this "to protect its interests" and the rest of the Western world says "ok".
All of the items mentioned above happened after someone received "intelligence" and then acted on it. The US is not infalliable and they have made many mistakes that have resulted in innocents getting killed or imprisioned for years. If any other country did this (China, Iran, Iraq,etc) ....well the US and allies would have bombed them by now for being a threat to the rest of the world.
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How quickly you seem to forget what the world has seen more wars since Pax Americana than ever before.
But many of the big ones were before 1945.
here's a hint, it was a HELL of a lot more peaceful than it is today.
Maybe, maybe not. There was rather a lot of nasty violence, both in Europe and in the rest of the world [wikipedia.org], from the mid-to-late 19th century to the mid 20th century (a lot of it coming [wikipedia.org] from [wikipedia.org] or taking place in [wikipedia.org] the United States), just as there has been rather a lot of nasty violence, much of it coming from or supported by the US, from the mid 20th century to today.
But, yes, the person to whom you were replying was wrapped so tightly in the US flag that they couldn't
Re:Yes, but it won't make any difference. (Score:4, Interesting)
Other countries have done lots of these things in the past themselves. They stopped doing it because they couldn't afford it anymore; some time in the 1950's and 1960's, countries like France and Britain increasingly just picked up the phone and asked the US to clean up their messes; it was cheaper, simpler, and less risky. And why did the US do it? Because it was pretty easy for it to do so, and because it gives it great power. So, the rest of the Western world doesn't just say "OK", it says "yes, please".
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I have. The EU laws on privacy laws have huge holes and exemptions in them for national security and other shenanigans. And even if they weren't, there is no guarantee that they are enforced either.
Re:Yes, but it won't make any difference. (Score:5, Insightful)
ICANN? Give me a break, that's nothing. Do you even know what ICANN does? Not route traffic, of course.
Fundamentally the reason that the Internet is US-centric is that the US has paid for much of the infrastructure. It's not necessarily about the services either, it's about the routing. If Latin/South America wants to avoid traversing US infrastructure to route their packets to the rest of the world, they will have to build their own backbones and lay their own transoceanic cable. Until they do that it's pretty obvious their data is going to be inspected...
Re:Yes, but it won't make any difference. (Score:5, Informative)
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China's ambitions of world domination are quite open. They just follow the old doctrine of communism: There's no need to conquer by force. Communism is the natural end state, all they need do is wait and victory will come peacefully.
They are officially communist still, even though their economy has adopted so many elements of the free market system now there isn't lot of actual communism left.
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They just follow the old doctrine of communism: There's no need to conquer by force.
Nothing to do with communism. That's Sun Tzu [wikipedia.org] 25 centuries ago.
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Man, what the hell kind of dream world are you living in. China may not give a crap how many pressure cookers you want to buy, but they sure as fuck care about your political opinions. Especially if you are or ever were Chinese. Ask any Chinese dissident whether they'd prefer the US was spying on them or China, hell ask most US dissidents.
The US spies on you, but for the most part it seems to have done a whole lot of nothing with any of the information that it has gathered, it's also restricted by law in te
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What actually makes the internet useful is all of the user created content like Wikipedia. Having 2 versions of such a service would be a tremendous waste of human resources.
There wouldn't need to be two versions, just two sets of servers: one for the US, one for everywhere else. The NSA could spy on the US servers to their heart's content, but non-US users would be safe. Updates would be mirrored in both directions.
This already happens to a great extend due to geographically diverse content distribution systems. What needs to happen is we replace the likes of Akami with non-US systems, completely separate and cut off from the NSA.
Unfortunately due to having our head up America
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...ICANN is located in the US, but mostly because the most used services are based in the US...
Even companies that are perceived as American are no longer really so. Yes, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, IBM, Oracle, ... have head offices in the US, but the have a very real, physical presence in many other countries, including China. So, today "American company" very often means "a company that started in America", that's all. People in Europe, who use Google probably only pass through the US occasionally. The internet is already "non US-centric". The Brazilians, if they put a cable across the Atlantic dir
Re:Yes, but it won't make any difference. (Score:5, Insightful)
For the purposes of this argument any service which has any physical presence in the US whatsoever is a service based in the US. All such companies are required to comply with US law, which would include FISA warrants. That's the tricky bit you see.
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Actually Yahoo challenged the FISA orders. They lost and so they complied. Google may or may not have.
The thing you're not understanding. FISA is a court, it might be a ridiculous court that rubber stamps every government request, but it's still a court. It's presided over by judges and it's orders carry the full force of the law. These aren't the usual fishing expeditions which Google and others can and do say no to, these are legally equivalent to a warrant. I don't know whether anyone would have been cha
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As another point, Google no longer have operations in China for the specific reason that having any offices there subjected them to Chinese law.
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No escape from the NSA (Score:2)
That global US backed standard infrastructure was invested into by many countries on good faith with 'private/public' hard currency loans with real interest rates.
The US and UK baited countries with speed, trade deals, low costs, crime fighting laws to ensure global uptake.
What can be done? Reconfigure all public and private core gov networking? No more wi
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Thats a lot of trade law and basic telco infrastructure to rework for any single nation. As far as Soviet or German occupation experiences - people knew their countries where occupied, standards where set, secret police where well networked. Globally cryptographers, telco experts and their politic
Why do we keep discussing this... (Score:5, Insightful)
...as if the United States was the first, last, and only country to hold a government that spies on its own citizens in some way?
Are we really THAT naive to think that A) the United States invented this concept, and B) no other government thought to do it too?
It's mentalities like this that shock me more than anything Snowden could reveal. I find mass ignorance far more alarming, as it tends to hint as to what governments are yet capable of doing to you. To all of us. While the deaf and blind vote for it.
We were ignorant enough to pay for and allow a program like PRISM to come to fruition. Sitting back assuming that no other country has a similar or same capability is like assuming no one masturbates because people don't talk about it.
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Domestically most nations can do anything they want to their own telco network and any links in/satellites systems above their country.
The rest is embassies, aircraft, spy ships, limited satellites and human spies - easy to track, limited and hard work.
Every other country has to use the US (NSA) telco network at some point if they want to reach out, or make a dea
Re:Why do we keep discussing this... (Score:5, Insightful)
...as if the United States was the first, last, and only country to hold a government that spies on its own citizens in some way?
Nobody thinks that. But the United States was supposed to be different to the hundreds of abusive governments that had preceded it. This does demonstrate that the US is worse than any other government - it shows that it is exactly the same. And that's damning enough.
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Remember when? (Score:2)
It wasn't all that long ago that most stories about internet freedom covered the abuses of North Korea, China, and the Islamic Republics. Of course there were always a few comments, usually from our brave AC's, who claimed the US did the same but was better at hiding it. Bless all the slashdot anonymous cowards, keep up the good work.
in reality (Score:3)
In reality, although Brazil President Dilma Rousseff is none too happy with the NSA's sketchy surveillance practices
In reality, getting a 'non-USA' internet won't do anything to stop the NSA. What difference does it make who gives out DNS names and IP addresses? (because that's what they mean when they say non-USA internet).
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What it will prevent is the ability of US law enforcement, which has long been the whore of US corporate interests, from stomping into US-based server farms and demanding all kinds of "evidence" which will then be used to file charges against people who are doing things US corporate interests might find inconvenient.
It's one thing for the NSA to spy on people and gather information illegally. It's another thing entirely to present such information in a US court and use it to shut down a website in anoth
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What it will prevent is the ability of US law enforcement, which has long been the whore of US corporate interests, from stomping into US-based server farms and demanding all kinds of "evidence" which will then be used to file charges against people who are doing things US corporate interests might find inconvenient.
Moving DNS and IP assignment responsibility outside the US will not do any of that. Sorry, bro.
It Does Not Need To Be Done (Score:2, Insightful)
That is not what they declared (Score:5, Informative)
That is not what they declared, building local cloud, secure email services and infrastructure is different from "creating it's own internet" and I never heard this wording here, only in "international" press. The big difference is that when someone talk like that it gives the idea that it will be separated from the rest of the internet. That is not what the Brazilian government is proposing.
The national constitution (I'm Brazilian) states that the State has to provide the basic rights that are not met otherwise (if you can't buy water the State has to provide it, there is free medical care, the best universities are free, etc). Since private communications are a basic right (our constitutuion and the universal declaration of human rights), they are planning to offer alternatives for people who care.
Honestly, to force local clouds seems like a double win. On one hand you make companies accountable for our citizens rights, on the other hand - the one I think is the main point here - it creates investments, infrastructure, brings technology and high tech jobs. The cables to Europe are a need, our internet sucks. I hope they make some cables to China and Russia too, as online gaming is better over there.
But mainly, there is no censorship here, Brazilians will not be separated from the internet and nobody in the country thinks that even a possibility. Specially since this government is the one that fought against censorship in the past, you know, during the US created military dictatorship from 64 to 86/90.
It doesn't really matter... (Score:2)
Because the NSA is still going to p0wn your routers. And find a way to get the data home. Done.
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If only the NSA had satellites, or at least long range radio capabilities...
I still use a remainder of a non-US internet (Score:2)
In Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri terms (Score:3, Funny)
"You cannot build The Planetary Datalinks here. The US have already completed this project."
And now they get to spy on everyone else for the rest of the game.
own OS, routers and firewall too (Score:3)
Re:WWW (Score:5, Informative)
There Internet (Arpanet) existed before WWW. WWW is a subset of the Internet.
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The WWW Internet is a global phenomenon now. And the WWW Internet was invented by a physicist who was trying to solve a real physical problem.
He was trying to solve a problem of distributing scientific papers among CERN scientists. He did it during work time paid by CERN and on the CERN's computer.
The main database of the Internet, MySQL, is also an International project.
It is just not true that the Internet is sort of an US present t
Re:WWW (Score:5, Informative)
Ever use email? Dropbox? Online games from your XBox or PC? FTP? VOIP? Bittorrent?
All these and thousands more are internet protocols that don't use WWW.
And, by the way, we do have multiple Internets (with a big I). Read up on Internet 2. And there's lots and lots of internets (with a little i) that you don't know about because they're not connected to the Internet (with a big i)
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By the way, the actual invention was done not by a programmer but by the an engineer who was doing the real work.
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This is a common misconception. The WWW is not merely stuff transmitted over TCP port 80 on the Internet. It's an information space that has the ability to use the Internet as a transport mechanism. It's not a subset of the Internet, it's a higher level abstraction than the Internet.
Anything addressable by URI is a node in the WWW. For instance, POTS telephone numbers are leaf nodes because you can address them with tel:. They are on the WWW but they aren't on the
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Sorry, WWW is the web - nothing else.
But, yes - commonly, when people say "the internet" they do mean the web.
tel URLs may be part of 'the web' in the sense that you may put tel:-links in your web pages -- but that doesn't make tel: or ftp: or telnet: or gopher: whatever other protocol identifier you may have "the web".
The Web was invented at Cern, not the Internet - the Internet has been around long before then.
If you can still find it, maybe have a look at Ed Krol's "The Whole Internet" (see wikipedia [wikipedia.org]) -
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The government of Switzerland may disagree that Geneva is an international city. Cosmopolitan might be the world you are looking for.
Also, it wasn't the web that prevented closed-garden internets, but rather universities. Until the mid 1990s, nearly everyone on the Internet (on any protocol) was at a university or research institute (like CERN). The universities weren't trying to make a profit, so they embraced an open architecture. It was US dominated, because then as now, most large research universities
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*word
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It is Geneva International all right. It started with another grand idea. Henry Dunant, the founder of the International Committee of the Red Cross, came out with the idea that the wounded soldier does not belong to any state or government anymore. That she/he belongs to the higher authority.
This idea still keeps changing the wold.
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So the networking protocols were invented in the US, the hardware was invented in the US, and the most commonly used markup language was created by a British Physicist while subcontracted to work at a Swiss research lab. FTFY
You forgot about the protocol known as the Hypertext Transport Protocol, running atop of one of those US-developed protocols (which were at least inspired by work done in France [utexas.edu]); that protocol was created by a British physicist working at a European research lab located in Switzerland.
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No one wants to disconnect the North America from the Internet. But its contribution should be positive. Nowadays it leaves an impression of a total eavesdropping of the Internet and it scares people.
The article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights gives the right of privacy of communication and home to all people on Earth.
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did the USA actually sign up to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
When it was voted on, the US voted yes [un.org].
However, as that part of the UN Yearbook 1948-1949 says (see p. 535), "the Declaration only marked a first step since it was not a convention by which States would be bound to carry out and give effect to the fundamental human rights; nor would it provide for enforcement", so I'm not sure what it would mean to "sign up"; I don't think there was a treaty to be signed in that case.
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but once you disconnect the USA, in its entirety, from your little country's network then it is not the Internet
Not that this is what Brazil, for example, is proposing. (Some countries might want to disconnect their networks from the rest of the world, including but not limited to the US, but that's another matter.)
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Different Governments have Different Issues (Score:5, Insightful)
The most common reasons governments want to have non-US "internet governance" these days are that they want to restrict free speech and free reading by their citizens, or restrict some kinds of commerce by their citizens (US restricts gambling, drugs, etc.) There are other issues; most governments used to have telecom monopolies, either state-run or quasi-nationalized, though the 90s liberalized much of that away. Some governments would like more money to stay in their countries, or keep people from buying goods online that are heavily taxed locally.
It really irks me when international groups get together to talk about internet policy, and advertise their shindig as being about "ending the digital divide" or "providing connectivity to Africa" or other noble-sounding goals, but actually devote most of their agenda to governments wanting censorship. These days, of course, the NSA is giving them a good excuse to want internet governance so they can do their own wiretapping in case the NSA isn't sharing.
Re:Different Governments have Different Issues (Score:4, Insightful)
The most common reasons governments want to have non-US "internet governance" these days are that they want to restrict free speech and free reading by their citizens, or restrict some kinds of commerce by their citizens (US restricts gambling, drugs, etc.)
There already was good reason for countries who wanted less freedom to want independence from the US, but now there's also a very clear reason for countries who want more freedom to want independence.
Anyway, get some big backbones from Brazil to Europe to Canada to China to Australia and back to Brazil again, and I don't see why any non-US traffic would have to pass through the US anymore.
Re: (Score:3)
What does having your own internet even mean?
It means nothing. Strictly speaking, there's no such thing as the internet anyway. An "internet" that wasn't connected to the internet couldn't possibly succeed. What they really mean is they want international network conections that don't go via the US. That's not very hard really - just lay a cable to Europe.
Re:Different Governments have Different Issues (Score:5, Informative)
Right now most places access the internet by buying capacity on a fiber to the US or western europe (usually whichever is closer) and then buying transit from a teir 1 provider there. They will sometimes peer or buy transit locally if they think it's in their interests to do so but the US and western europe act as the "routes of last resort".
There are various things a country could do to reduce the ammount of thier traffic that goes via the USA.
1: order local providers to keep local traffic within the country (whether by peering or by buying transit from the country's main provider) even if they don't see it as being in their commercial interests to do so.
2: Install direct links to major trading partners and order providers in their country to use those links even if they don't see it as being in their commercial interests to do so.
Re:US = questionable value proposition netwise (Score:5, Informative)
Their own internet might simply mean "not connected or dependent upon" the current network
I have seen nothing to indicate that Brazil is thinking of not allowing packets to be routed to the rest of the Internet, or even just to US; they are thinking of allowing packets to much of the rest of the world to be routed there without passing through the US [bricscable.com], but that's another matter (and that appears to have been an idea originated in South Africa, well prior to the Snowden revelations [itweb.co.za]).
Re:US = questionable value proposition netwise (Score:4, Informative)
And U.S. workers average ~40 work hours per week (42 for men, 38.5 for women), whereas German workers average 35 hours per week, so if you are measuring per hour, Germany wins, but if you are measuring per work week, the U.S. has a 14% advantage due to amount of time worked, and the U.S. wins.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#United_States [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#European_Union [wikipedia.org]
Re:US = questionable value proposition netwise (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Not an exceptional part, but, perhaps, substantial or even leading.