Transfer of Internet Governance Will Go Ahead On Oct. 1 (computerworld.com) 155
An anonymous reader writes from a report via Computerworld: The U.S. says it will proceed with its plan to hand over oversight of the internet's domain name system functions to a multistakeholder body on Oct. 1. Computerworld reports: "The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), under contract with the U.S. Department of Commerce, operates the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) which enables the operation of the internet domain name system (DNS). These include responsibility for the coordination of the DNS root, IP addressing and other internet protocol resources. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), an agency within the Commerce Department, said in March 2014 that it planned to let its contract with ICANN expire on Sept. 30, 2015, passing the oversight of the functions to a global governance model. NTIA made it clear that it would not accept a plan from internet stakeholders that would replace its role by that of a government-led or intergovernmental organization or would in any way compromise the openness of the internet. The transfer was delayed to September as the internet community needed more time to finalize the plan for the transition. The new stewardship plan submitted by ICANN was approved by the NTIA in June. NTIA Administrator Lawrence E. Strickling said Tuesday that the agency had informed ICANN that 'barring any significant impediment,' NTIA intends to allow the IANA functions contract it has with ICANN to expire as of Oct. 1, said Strickling, who is also assistant secretary for communications and information."
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+1 Oversightful
Thanks Obama! (Score:2, Funny)
Gondor had a better stewardship.
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Wait... Monica Lewinsky had a kid and he is on slashdot ?
Much rejoicing... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Much rejoicing... (Score:5, Insightful)
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As long as the new ICANN Overlords continue to graciously grant me access to Slashdot from my basement, I will be happy.
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What's the alternative? It's wrong to give up US dominance, and it's wrong to not give up US dominance, so...? We certainly do not have a good record of fair and impartial governance from the US, but neither do international bodies, so it's a toss up. Keep US dominance if you're a jingoist, or accept that commerce is an international concern and so the internet should be governed by international bodies just the same as other areas of commerce.
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We certainly do not have a good record of fair and impartial governance from the US...
Can you point to any instances of IANA policy or decision making to substantiate this claim? Keep in mind that you need enough to form a trend that would indicate a bad record.
I won't hold my breath waiting for a reply, but I hope you hold yours while you look. Don't stop looking until you find some.
Re:Much rejoicing... (Score:4, Interesting)
Did you actually read what was written in the post you responded to?
Darinbob was talking about the record of the US as a whole in fair and impartial governance, not ICANN or IANA. ICANN has its issues, but for whatever reason, the Internet has been able to remain above politics in the US.
It is the massive number of countries calling for censorship that are really asking the US to give up governance. The first thing I expect will be regulated will be porn. Russia would rule that all gay porn should be outlawed, while the Muslim countries all agree, meaning half the world would vote to outlaw gay porn. The Muslim countries will feel that is not enough, all porn should be banned, as it is all sinful in their eyes. Pretty soon, porn is not allowed on the public internet.
This is what we have to look forward to. After all, the famous quote starts "First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Socialist." First it will be gay rights, which is a touchy subject in most of the world, but it won't stop there, who will speak out?
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The first thing I expect will be regulated will be porn. Russia would rule that all gay porn should be outlawed, while the Muslim countries all agree, meaning half the world would vote to outlaw gay porn. The Muslim countries will feel that is not enough, all porn should be banned, as it is all sinful in their eyes. Pretty soon, porn is not allowed on the public internet.
And how will that be enforced? Revoking domain names?
That will be fun; it is time to implement an alternative to domain names anyway and of course porn will lead the way.
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"NTIA’s responsibility includes the procedural role of administering changes to the authoritative root zone file – the database containing the lists of names and addresses of all top-level domains – as well as serving as the historic steward of the DNS."
I'm not sure if this will suddenly lead to the "blocking" of "undesirable" content.
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I though the transfer was away from the US Government.
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You mean the US, where none of those things are happening. Don't worry, you Belgians will get to extend your censorship and hate speech laws to the internet soon.
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And that would be bad because... ?
Because of...
Face it: the internet needs policing. We as a society do not need or want hate speech and political heterodoxy
Which is why you shouldn't be involved in the decision making.
People need to be told what to think and only the EU can legitimaly do that
I see what you did there! And I fell for it for awhile. This post should be modded up, not down.
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Look at the bright side, it could speed up the obsolescence of DNS and maybe the whole server/client setup and actually make the internet more robust against censorship. Ad hoc networking could become ubiquitous and make the ISP a useless antique. That would definitely be a good thing.
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Riiight. Handing it over to a committee of committees will speed things up.
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Yes, more people will become more interested in circumvention. A whole new system that can't be brought down by vested interests may emerge. The survival of worldwide computer networking will depend on it.
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"make the ISP a useless antique"
Ah, the magic wires argument. Sure.
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Ah, the magic wires argument. Sure.
Magic indeed [tutorialspoint.com].
Re: Much rejoicing... (Score:2)
None of which makes ISPs 'antiques'.
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But then how would we all exercise the Republican-sponsored right to see what Republicans want us to see, think what Republicans want us to think, and do what Republicans want us to do?
I'll clue you into something -- Democrats have traditionally been the Party of Censorship in the US, not the Republican Party.
Re:Much rejoicing... (Score:5, Interesting)
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We don't like Google, so we'll just arbitrarily reassign their IP addresses to someone we like
We unanimously decided that the world is better off without pornography (as we define it, naturally, LOL) so we're cancelling the domains for all their websites -- for the children, of course!
Ah well, the Internet was becoming too much of a mess anyway. Better start funding public libraries again!
Re:Much rejoicing... (Score:5, Insightful)
I absolutely agree. In theory, one would think that the internet, being a global phenomenon, should be treated as such with no one nation having control. In practice, we have other countries bending over backwards to justify their anti-freedom of speech actions, and that's not okay. I'm not going to say that America is perfect...far from it, and in many many ways...but when it comes to freedom of speech, there's really no one even close.
I keep seeing these stories about how this or another person got fined or arrested for saying the wrong thing, a lot in Europe lately, and I see people defending this as completely acceptable, arguing that they still have freedom of speech, just that freedom of speech does not include unpopular sentiment that they disagree with. Saying unpopular, unsavory, or downright asshole-ish things is the exact definition of freedom of speech. The idea does not exist to defend popular ideas, it exists to ensure that everyone, even people who might be downright wrong or mean, get a voice. There are places where if I say the Holocaust did not happen (wrong and hateful), sing a song about how Erdoan is a scull fucking douchebag (honest and accurate), or reject the state's religion or political ideology (every individual's choice), among plenty of other things, I could face legal consequences.
And regardless of how you feel about any of those things, you don't get to take away another person's voice. There are ideas that I consider to be extremely dangerous and actively harming people and the planet but that I argue against them; doesn't mean I get to censor them. Speech is a human right, and that's end of the goddamn story. Recent events continue to show that not everyone agrees, and now they get greater control over the worlds most important communication medium? I don't like that. They say they will not compromise openness on the internet, but this is in a world where censorship in the name of 'preserving dignity,' whatever the hell that's supposed to mean, is argued to be not a violation of the human right to free speech; I ask them to lay out clear guidelines for openness. Like I said, America isn't perfect, but on this issue I trust the US a hell of a lot more than I do any other country.
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While the US might have strong freedom of speech protections, it has extremely poor copyright laws. Some of the worst in the world, in fact. It's particularly unsatisfactory that US authorities control and can seize non-country specific TLDs like .com, .net and .org. If your site operates legally within your country, but annoys the MAFFIA, your domain can be taken by the US government, and that's just the start of it.
The US also has extremely poor privacy laws. It's less of an issue with IP numbers and DNS,
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US authorities control and can seize non-country specific TLDs like .com, .net and .org.
Those are country specific, they have always been US domains, not worldwide domains. There is also the .us domain, but .com, .net, .org, .gov have always been US TLDs.
Re:Much rejoicing... (Score:4, Insightful)
"Like I said, America isn't perfect, but on this issue I trust the US a hell of a lot more than I do any other country."
But this in itself is just nationalist patriotism, the US has a long history of censorship on the internet via things like ICE domain seizures, which unlike, say, China's censorship, enforce censorship globally to every country, not just the country engaging in censorship (the US).
If you believe in single country stewardship if that country would offer better protections than any other then it's nonsensical to favour the US over many others. If you're going for single country stewardship then why not go for a country that has a much better track record on political neutrality, political transparency, and freedom, such as Sweden, Switzerland, New Zealand or similar?
Personally I think single country stewardship is a bad idea though regardless, in Asia there is censorship over blasphemy, Europe it's holocaust denial, in South America it's criticising government, and in North America it's defying the copyright cartels. All-country stewardship where changes can only occur based on 100% consensus is the only way to really protect free speech on the internet because that way you get all the benefits of the US veto you have currently but with the added advantage of countries like Russia and China being willing to block US copyright censorship.
Long story short though, there is no rational reason to prefer US single country stewardship if you believe in freedom and openness of the internet, and if you do so then it's because you're letting nationalism take priority over the things you're professing to want to protect. That is, when you say you trust the US more, what you're saying is "I want our guys to retain control, even if that means a bit of censorship" - you're arguing in favour of US control and NOT freedom from censorship, because the US already engages in that in a manner that effects everyone across the globe, not just those inside it's borders.
Really, if the US were a good steward of internet freedom then rather than engaging in global censorship via domain seizures it would set up it's own Chinese style great firewall and just block it's own citizens from accessing those sites it finds offensive such that it's politics remains only a problem for it's own people, and not censorship for every single person on the planet, including the 7billion+ that live outside of it's borders.
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It's not that most of what you are saying is wrong, but when you say
Personally I think single country stewardship is a bad idea though regardless, in Asia there is censorship over blasphemy, Europe it's holocaust denial, in South America it's criticising government, and in North America it's defying the copyright cartels. All-country stewardship where changes can only occur based on 100% consensus is the only way to really protect free speech on the internet because that way you get all the benefits of the US veto you have currently but with the added advantage of countries like Russia and China being willing to block US copyright censorship.
you should be aware that Europe will need to get their holocaust denial thing in so they'll abstain when South American Government Slander thing goes up for a vote, and of course for Russia to get their gay porn banned they'll have to go along with US copyright censorship and by the time all of the horse trading is done we'll end up with not the best of all out comes but the worse.
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Actually I completely agree that there are some arguments for US single country stewardship and you're right, removing that risk scenario is absolutely one of them, my argument was simply that freedom of speech isn't an argument for US stewardship because it already enforces worse censorship on the net than any other country because US censorship is applied to all 7.4 billion people in the world, whereas even Chinese censorship only hits their 1.3 billion own citizens.
Though as I say I personally don't real
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To be clear I wasn't referring to the entire continents - only a handful of European countries engage in holocaust denial censorship for example (the UK doesn't, but it does engage in US style copyright censorship).
My point was simply that there is censorship coming from every corner of the globe, and the number of trustworthy stewards on any continent is small. You're absolutely right, Brasil wouldn't be a bad steward, I was thinking more of nations like Venezuela for what it's worth.
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I keep seeing these stories about how this or another person got fined or arrested for saying the wrong thing, a lot in Europe lately, and I see people defending this as completely acceptable, arguing that they still have freedom of speech, just that freedom of speech does not include unpopular sentiment that they disagree with
I prefer racist asshats to spend time in jail than a well mannered and good contributor to society having their life royally screwed up for daring to download a shitty music album.
Yes there is a better way to govern people online. ... err I mean free speech laws are.
No I don't think the US is a good model regardless of how good your right to hate speech
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You just proved his point.
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You just proved his point.
While making my own.
Free speech can go to hell in a world where a corporate entity fucks up lives far worse
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Speech is a human right, and that's end of the goddamn story. ...
Except when it's not, like provoking illegal acts, grooming children for pedophile networks, libel, insider trading,
There are LOTS of things you're not allowed to say or do.
As for trusting the USA? Sort out your political corruption and election-rigging, adhere to the ICC, then let's talk about "trust".
For many of us, out here in the rest of the world, you have too many moneyed and unprincipled scum running around out of control for us to uni
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So, on October 2nd the countries, where it is Ok to block the entire populace from foreign Internet-resources, where "hate speech", "blasphemy", and mocking the president or king are criminal offences â" they will all have more say in how the network is operated than before. Yay!
Correct - what has for a few decades been a de facto international institution will no longer be wholly owned by just one nation, which actually constitutes an increment in democracy. So, I think your rant is misplaced. Firstly, America is not suddenly being put outside the door without influence, and I suspect this is just a formalisation of what is already happening - I'm sure ICANN has for years consulted other major players on the internet about their policies, so the difference is probably not all that
Doesn't change anything (Score:5, Insightful)
The NSA still owns all the Internet's anyways. :)
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Queue the fracture (Score:5, Insightful)
I predict we'll see a split of the internet along international lines shortly thereafter. Under the laws of each nation certain content will be unacceptable and each domain will begin by censoring those that interfere with their personal political agenda's on how things should be represented. Within a year half the net will not 'see' the other half and business and commerce will stutter and survive in certain regions and fail in others.
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Canada!!!
Yes, I'm talking to you.
I'm your upstairs neighbor. Don't you go blocking my Facebooks!
Good.
Now that I have settled that, I can sleep easy tonight.
Re:Queue the fracture (Score:4, Insightful)
Its always been the case that anyone with enough determination could make a new internet that does the exact same thing as the current one but maintained by themselves. If someone wants to jump the shark and break compatibility, companies and countries will decide on whom to follow.
If you think the internet has lasted decades purely because of US based custodianship, then strap on your tin foil hat because every story about interruptions/censorship/shaping/etc.. will now be coloured by this rather non-story forever afterwards.
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I'd strap on my 'tinfoil' hat but I can't get tinfoil anymore. It has been replaced by aluminum foil and that isn't effective.
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I really hope so.
The rest of the cheap outsourcing world can tell us to fuck ourselves. We're cut off.
Then US will experience a boom time again while the previously outsourced countries have civil war trying to figure out why things got bad.
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In a way, that has already happened.
The Great Firewall of China.
Large swaths of the middle east blocking social networking they disagree with.
The USA going after online gambling sites and TPB.
Countries in South America blocking online games.
Countries in Europe clamping down on encryption.
North Korea where only a few high ranking party members are permitted to use it at all.
You're probably right that it will accelerate in the future, but we haven't had one internet for a long time. We had in our grasp the a
Re: Queue the fracture (Score:1)
6 of one, a half dozen of the other (Score:2)
queue - https://www.google.com/#q=queu... [google.com]
cue - https://www.google.com/#q=cue [google.com]
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Fracturing the Internet is a lot harder than you might think. You might want to look up something called, "Internet protocol version 8". The basic idea of IPv8 is that the results of the call to getHostByName() is not actually the address of the machine in question. Instead, it is a magic cookie that can be used to reach the machine in question. The entire Internet is actually divided at special routers, called Stargates; if you are talking to a machine on the other side of a Stargate, then the magic cookie
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If they also suddenly mandate that all voting be done online...
Then I may begin to worry, and don my foil hat.
So this is actually happening? (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously, we should not have given this up.
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Another example of the current US administration actively working to water down the United States role in the world. Their motto - 'No country is special'.
While not perfect, my country has defended freedom, its people voluntarily sacrificed their lives, given hope and freedom to, in summation, close to a Billion people. When you have a solid democracy, a strong method to defend the weak and a good moral compass evil is kept in check.
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Why should the US get to control the internet? Internet access was declared by the UN to be a basic human right. It should not be controlled by one nation. We don't even have a particularly good record of internet freedom anyway.
Yeah, what have the romans ever done for us ?
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Turn in your Nerd Card, you poser.
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Why should the US get to control the internet?
They have had it so far and look what happened. Without that stewardship the internet, which you are using right now, would not exist. Things can only go down from here when we transfer that control to every tin-pot dictator the world over.
Re:So this is actually happening? (Score:5, Insightful)
Second, what kind of "stewardship" do you think they are actually doing? The internet was formed almost entirely by private corporations. The government had a hand in getting the ball rolling, but it is a long leap to say that without the US government we would not have the internet today.
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You're right, Slashdot is populated entirely by people who want more corporate control over the internet. You think Netflix had it rough with transferring a lot of data, wait until private companies take over the domain name registration.
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Re:So this is actually happening? (Score:4, Insightful)
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The US only has control as long as other nations tolerate it. If the US ever gets too heavy handed or doesn't act fairly, other nations will just fork DNS. They have more people, US companies will work with them to ensure that disney.cn and amazon.fr keep working in those markets.
The split is inevitable one day. The two systems will mirror each other for 99.999% of domains, but disputed ones will differ between competing root servers.
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ICANN's shitty stewardship (Score:1)
"Last week, ICANN said Public Technical Identifiers, a nonprofit public benefit corporation, had been incorporated in California, to eventually run the IANA functions under co
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No they wouldn't ban anything, they would just change the domains TTL (Time To Live) to 1 second and make sure the records were on the "slow server" and it would go into a DNS meltdown and not load.
Internet will survive (Score:2, Informative)
The internet will route around the problem. If DNS were to completely go away the only things that would happen is the signal to noise ratio would be vastly improved and some apps will break.
DNS was only created for human comfort.
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Elections have consequences. (Score:1)
To quote the 44th president of the United States. "Elections have consequences", "I won".
$10 Says... (Score:3, Insightful)
$10 says that the US and most of the West will *deeply* regret this within a year at most.
Strat
Not good at all. Beginning of the end. (Score:2)
Oh fuck this is not good. Really not good. I have no words, didn't hear about this coming. May have more words later after I have time to think about it. But this is not good.
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A terrible mistake (Score:1)
Congress (Score:2)
This part of the article is interesting:
"Last week, 25 advocacy groups asked Congress to sue to enforce riders it passed on prohibiting spending of taxpayer money on the IANA transition"
Did Congress get a say-so in letting go of control initially? If riders were added to it, then that tells me that they agreed to handing over control at some point (with conditions). When did this happen?
U.S. giveaways (Score:1)
RIP Internet 1970 - 2016 (Score:1)
How long before the Europeans try to tell everyone they invented it.