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To: softengine
Relax, the UN is not going to "govern" the Internet.

As a practical matter nobody "governs" the Internet. Well ok, there was a window of opportunity back in the late 1980s when it was possible that AOL, MSN or some other gigantic service provider might have bought out everyone else and become the de-facto monopolist on internetworking. But thankfully it never happened.

The UN lost its chance to run the Internet in the late 1980s, when the Europe and the UN via the ITU (International Telecommunications Union) tried to replace the Internet TCP/IP communicaton protocol standards with something called OSI. Basically it was an attempt by the world PTT (Postal, Telegraph, and Telephone) monopolies to wrest control of the Internet out of the hands of the US government. The PTT monopolies are especially strong in the 3rd world countries and they dominate the ITU, which sets world telephone standards.

The ITU is a big reason why phone calls to 3rd world countries are so ridiculously expensive. The bureaucracy of the ITU is Kafka-esque: The OSI documents for TP4/X25 are written in uncomprehensible legalese and you must pay through the nose just to peek at them. (This was one reason why OSI failed - TCP/IP was evangelized through the wide distribution of the source code of BSD Unix; OSI/TP4/X25 had no equivalent.)

If the EU/ITU/UN had taken over the Internet 15-20 years ago with OSI/TP4/X25, today instead of paying $24.95/month for your megabit DSL you would be paying ten times that amount for your X25/ISDN connection at 64 kbps.

But this is all on the dustbin of history. The war is over and decentralization has won. The modern Internet is a concatenation of millions of independent networks that all agree to talk to each other voluntarily (the word "Internet" comes from the term "inter-network"). World connectivity happens through an untold number of independent bi-lateral contractual agreements between peering ISPs.

The only centralization on the Internet is at the root DNS nameservers. These suffer ICANN only by the grace of their respective independent owners. (The largest owner of root nameservers being the US Department of Commerce.) There is nothing to prevent them from bolting and setting up their a new root DNS, or from anyone else using an alternate root DNS.

The transnational progressives and lefty social engineers can chit-chat all they want at their UN workshops about how they want to govern the Internet. But as a practical matter it is a waste of hot air.


25 posted on 04/25/2004 8:03:04 PM PDT by Gideon7
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To: Gideon7
Agreed. But I cannot help but feel that eventually some form of control will evolve from their persistance.
30 posted on 04/25/2004 8:47:38 PM PDT by softengine (Life is like a roll of toilet paper.....The closer you get to the end, the faster it goes.)
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