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To: poconopundit
I like your analogy. And there’s so much redundancy in the telecom network that any one bottleneck is solved by automatic routing of traffic around it.

Route around it and go where exactly? The ip address determines where you can be found and we would no longer have control over those addresses.

This not about the physical web, it is all about the control over traffic to ip addresses, which you don't get to pick.

64 posted on 09/29/2016 5:59:50 PM PDT by itsahoot (GOP says, Vote Trump. But if your principles won't let you, Hillary is OK.)
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To: itsahoot

With a monopoly over domain names Icann can charge whatever it wants and censor:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/an-internet-giveaway-to-the-u-n-1472421165
Without the U.S. contract, Icann would seek to be overseen by another governmental group so as to keep its antitrust exemption. Authoritarian regimes have already proposed Icann become part of the U.N. to make it easier for them to censor the internet globally. So much for the Obama pledge that the U.S. would never be replaced by a “government-led or an inter-governmental organization solution.”

Rick Manning, president of Americans for Limited Government, called it “simply stunning” that the “politically blinded Obama administration missed the obvious point that Icann loses its antitrust shield should the government relinquish control.”

The administration might not have considered the antitrust issue, which would have been naive. Or perhaps in its arrogance the administration knew all along Icann would lose its antitrust immunity and look to the U.N. as an alternative. Congress could have voted to give Icann an antitrust exemption, but the internet giveaway plan is too flawed for legislative approval.

As the administration spent the past two years preparing to give up the contract with Icann, it also stopped actively overseeing the group. That allowed Icann to abuse its monopoly over internet domains, which earns it hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Earlier this month, an independent review within Icann called the organization “simply not credible” in how it handled the application for the .inc, .llc and .llp domains. The independent review found Icann staffers were “intimately involved” in evaluating their own work. A company called Dot Registry had worked with officials of U.S. states to create a system ensuring anyone using these Web addresses was a legitimate registered company. Icann rejected Dot Registry’s application as a community, which would have resulted in lowered fees to Icann.

Delaware’s secretary of state objected: “Legitimate policy concerns have been systematically brushed to the curb by Icann staffers well-skilled at manufacturing bureaucratic processes to disguise pre-determined decisions.” Dot Registry’s lawyer, Arif Ali of the Dechert firm, told me last week his experience made clear “Icann is not ready to govern itself.”

Icann also refuses to award the .gay domain to community groups representing gay people around the world. Icann’s ombudsman recently urged his group to “put an end to this long and difficult issue” by granting the domain. Icann prefers to earn larger fees by putting the .gay domain up for auction among for-profit domain companies.

And Icann rejects the community application for the .cpa domain made by the American Institute of CPAs, which along with other accounting groups argues consumers should expect the .cpa address only to be used by legitimate accountants, not by the highest bidder. An AICPA spokesman told me he has a pile of paperwork three feet high on the five-year quest for the .cpa domain. The professional group objected in a recent appeal: “The process seems skewed toward a financial outcome that benefits Icann itself.”

The only thing worse than a monopoly overseen by the U.S. government is a monopoly overseen by no one—or by a Web-censoring U.N. Congress still has time to extend its ban on the Obama administration giving up protection of the internet. Icann has given it every reason to do so.


73 posted on 09/29/2016 7:34:07 PM PDT by Democrat_media (Hillary promised EXECUTIVE amnesty for 40 million illegals in her 1st 100 days as prez)
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To: itsahoot

OK, yes. I stand corrected. If you control the dictionary of how traffic is routed and which addresses are “authorized”, then yes, the globalists can effectively stop people from finding your website or sending you email.

Fortunately, if that happened, I think an alternative internet would be born. Rogue and “illegal” networks would rise up. It would take a long time for those new rogue networks to scale, but they would, and they would probably grow out of US-based networks first.

Look at Twitter. It’s steadily losing its credibility as it tries to censure people’s free speech. It’s stock value has tanked and alternatives to Twitter are being given a chance to take power from Twitter.


76 posted on 09/29/2016 10:34:54 PM PDT by poconopundit (When the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government. Franklin, Const. Conv.)
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