Posted on 10/06/2005 5:55:46 PM PDT by Blogger
Breaking America's grip on the net
After troubled negotiations in Geneva, the US may be forced to relinquish control of the internet to a coalition of governments
Kieren McCarthy Thursday October 6, 2005 The Guardian
You would expect an announcement that would forever change the face of the internet to be a grand affair - a big stage, spotlights, media scrums and a charismatic frontman working the crowd. But unless you knew where he was sitting, all you got was David Hendon's slightly apprehensive voice through a beige plastic earbox. The words were calm, measured and unexciting, but their implications will be felt for generations to come.
Hendon is the Department for Trade and Industry's director of business relations and was in Geneva representing the UK government and European Union at the third and final preparatory meeting for next month's World Summit on the Information Society. He had just announced a political coup over the running of the internet.
Old allies in world politics, representatives from the UK and US sat just feet away from each other, but all looked straight ahead as Hendon explained the EU had decided to end the US government's unilateral control of the internet and put in place a new body that would now run this revolutionary communications medium.
The issue of who should control the net had proved an extremely divisive issue, and for 11 days the world's governments traded blows. For the vast majority of people who use the internet, the only real concern is getting on it. But with the internet now essential to countries' basic infrastructure - Brazil relies on it for 90% of its tax collection - the question of who has control has become critical.
And the unwelcome answer for many is that it is the US government. In the early days, an enlightened Department of Commerce (DoC) pushed and funded expansion of the internet. And when it became global, it created a private company, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) to run it.
But the DoC retained overall control, and in June stated what many had always feared: that it would retain indefinite control of the internet's foundation - its "root servers", which act as the basic directory for the whole internet.
A number of countries represented in Geneva, including Brazil, China, Cuba, Iran and several African states, insisted the US give up control, but it refused. The meeting "was going nowhere", Hendon says, and so the EU took a bold step and proposed two stark changes: a new forum that would decide public policy, and a "cooperation model" comprising governments that would be in overall charge.
Much to the distress of the US, the idea proved popular. Its representative hit back, stating that it "can't in any way allow any changes" that went against the "historic role" of the US in controlling the top level of the internet.
But the refusal to budge only strengthened opposition, and now the world's governments are expected to agree a deal to award themselves ultimate control. It will be officially raised at a UN summit of world leaders next month and, faced with international consensus, there is little the US government can do but acquiesce.
But will this move mean, as the US ambassador David Gross argued, that "even on technical details, the industry will have to follow government-set policies, UN-set policies"?
No, according to Nitin Desai, the UN's special adviser on internet governance. "There is clearly an acceptance here that governments are not concerned with the technical and operational management of the internet. Standards are set by the users."
Hendon is also adamant: "The really important point is that the EU doesn't want to see this change as bringing new government control over the internet. Governments will only be involved where they need to be and only on issues setting the top-level framework."
Human rights
But expert and author of Ruling the Root, Milton Mueller, is not so sure. An overseeing council "could interfere with standards. What would stop it saying 'when you're making this standard for data transfer you have to include some kind of surveillance for law enforcement'?"
Then there is human rights. China has attracted criticism for filtering content from the net within its borders. Tunisia - host of the World Summit - has also come under attack for silencing online voices. Mueller doesn't see a governmental overseeing council having any impact: "What human rights groups want is for someone to be able to bring some kind of enforceable claim to stop them violating people's rights. But how's that going to happen? I can't see that a council is going to be able to improve the human rights situation."
And what about business? Will a governmental body running the internet add unnecessary bureaucracy or will it bring clarity and a coherent system? Mueller is unsure: "The idea of the council is so vague. It's not clear to me that governments know what to do about anything at this stage apart from get in the way of things that other people do."
There are still dozens of unanswered questions but all the answers are pointing the same way: international governments deciding the internet's future. The internet will never be the same again.
Nor do I.
The article is pure over-reaction to an otherwise irrelevvant issue
Exactly. Russia has one as well. In fact its highly desirable to have a decentralized net of root servers which is exactly why they are replicated.
But there has to be one place where domain names/IP pairs are distributed from or chaos would ensue.
With a media informing us that it is the natural progression, the way it must be. Just no way around it.
Thats another misconception. The US government funds very little of the Internet.
The US government funded that very early development of the net back in the 70s, but that is no longer the case. All the US pays now is the hosting of (SOME OF) the root servers, these would probably fit in your bathroom.
The net is built via a "Bring Your Own Bandwidth" model, by thousands of little ISPs buying service from bigger telco and long distance carriers, under sea cable operators etc.
And its all funded by (Pay Attention, this is important:) you and me, and every little subscriber from Bug Tussle Mississippi to Leningrad. We bought it, we built it, we pay for it out of our own pocket.
I uestion your claim to the degree that as TLDs go dowhn and stay down for a while, even if they are brought back up after a while, a large number of DNS directories, would find that
most of the sites registartions would have expired. and the more that go down, the biger and longer it takes to rebuild their DNS directories with valid IP's, causing an ever greater overload on the remaining TLDs. Till they eventaully become logjammed. While entering a an IP # may still take you to the site/page, the connection will be slower, as signal will basically have to hunt for the website,
rather than be able use intelligent routing. *also* increasing overhead.
to
World Wide (Web) Takeover
The United Nations wants the Internet.
By Carlos Ramos-Mrosovsky & Joseph Barillari
September 28, 2005, 8:10 a.m.
"In my opinion, freedom of speech seems to be a politically sensitive issue. A lot of policy matters are behind it." So observed Houlin Zhao, the man who wants to control the greatest forum for free expression in history.
Zhao, a director of the U.N.'s International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and a former senior Chinese-government official, is a leader in the United Nations's effort to supplant the United States government in the supervision of the Internet. At a series of conferences called the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), held under the aegis of the ITU, and set to culminate in Tunis this November, the U.N. has floated a series of proposals for doing exactly that.
The U.N.'s professed goals, which include expanding Internet access in developing countries and fighting spam, are laudable. However, the substance of its proposals — shifting Internet governance from the U.S. to a U.N. body — would produce an Internet in which regulations smother free speech, strangle net-driven economic growth, and threaten America's online security.
A typical U.N. enterprise, in other words.
The Internet is decentralized by design, having grown from the U.S. government's efforts to build a computer network that could survive catastrophic failures. Some elements, however, must be centrally administered to guarantee the Internet's orderly operation. The U.N. has its sights set on the most important of these, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). ICANN, a nonprofit contractor for the U.S. Department of Commerce, ensures that top-level domain names (.com, .edu, .uk), specific domain names (yahoo.com, ebay.com), and IP addresses (64.94.177.98, the numeric address for nationalreview.com), do not conflict. An Internet without ICANN would be like a telephone network in which everyone picked his own telephone number. ICANN delegates much of its work to a mix of regional organizations and commercial registries. This system has served the Internet well.
Nevertheless, a 2003 WSIS meeting asked U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to convene a Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG) to develop proposals to internationalize control of the Internet. Composed of representatives from the private sector, NGOs, and governments, including those of Saudi Arabia, Cuba, China, Iran, and a number of supranationally inclined European states, the 41-member body delivered its final report this July. WGIG's proposals include shifting control of ICANN to an "International Internet Council," entrusted with an additional murky mandate over Internet-related "international public policy."
ICANN's critics correctly observe that progress has been lacking. There are too few domain names in non-Roman characters and the number of available Internet addresses has not increased quickly enough. There is much to be gained, and little to be feared, from an international discussion of these and similar technical and policy issues.
Yet even those sympathetic to the idea of an internationally controlled Internet are skeptical of WGIG's proposals: John Palfrey, a Harvard Law School professor and executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, observes that creating an organization with so broad a mandate would be a "terrible idea." Indeed, the history of large bureaucracies, particularly large international bureaucracies, provides little confidence that the U.N. can handle any task without kilometers of red tape, let alone continue ICANN's minimalist private-sector approach. Will the registration of a domain name, now a five-minute process for anyone with a credit card, eventually require approval from UNESCO? Will domain-registration fees, currently a few dollars per domain, skyrocket to subsidize websites for countries without electricity? There are many ways that U.N. control could make the Internet slower and more expensive, and few improvements that the private sector cannot supply. For instance, with AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, Google working on the spam problem, it is doubtful that the U.N. will have much to add. It would also be unwise to entrust the world's largest marketplace to an organization whose top officials are notorious for lining their pockets. Small wonder then, that Senator Norm Coleman (R., Minn.), who has launched repeated investigations into U.N. corruption, describes WGIG's proposals as a "giant and foolhardy step backwards."
Only dictators, and, perhaps, the doctrinaire internationalists who so often abet them, stand to gain from placing the Internet under "international" control. If, for example, the U.N. were to control domain names, its component tyrannies would find it much easier to censor and repress. After all, "internet public policy" is subject to interpretation, and it is hard to imagine international bureaucrats resisting — as ICANN and the U.S. largely have — the temptation to politicize their task. At first, this could even seem reasonable: E.U. officials might seek to eliminate neo-Nazi domains. Inevitably, however, dictatorships would seek to extinguish undesirable foreign web content at the source. Given the U.N.'s penchant for condemning good causes, it is easy to imagine Tehran pushing to suppress "racist" (i.e. "Zionist") websites, or steady pressure from Beijing to eliminate Taiwan's ".tw" domain. (One China, one top-level domain.)
China, a major proponent of a U.N.-administered Internet, already operates the world's largest and most advanced system of online censorship. Thousands of government agents, including some from ITU Director Zhao's former Department of Telecommunications, make sure that websites, e-mails, and even search-engine results deemed threatening to the regime remain inaccessible to a fifth of the world's population. U.S. companies have shamefully participated in this system, as shown by China's recent jailing of dissident journalist Shi Tao based on information revealed by Yahoo!, Inc. Chinese Internet users are unable to access the websites of the Voice of America or, even, the BBC. The regime's filtering is so sophisticated that many sites, such as cnn.com, time.com, and, curiously, yale.edu, are filtered page-by-page, thus maintaining the illusion of openness. Other WGIG participants have similar policies. Like China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia also recognize that control over the Internet brings them closer to control over minds. It is unsurprising, then, that Mr. Zhao and his ilk support the U.N.'s drive to give them more of it.
That the next WSIS summit should take place in Tunisia speaks volumes. The Tunisian government and President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali's relatives control all of the country's internet-service providers. As in China, international news and human-rights websites are routinely blocked. Citizens who post their dissent online face lengthy prison terms. That the U.N. would award a meeting on the fate of the Internet to such a regime betrays the incoherence of an internationalism that insists on treating dictatorships and democracies as equals.
Surrendering the Internet might also increase America's vulnerability to online security threats. It could be difficult to guard against cyber-terrorism or to pursue terrorists online, if the Internet were under the supervision of a body unsure of what terrorism is, but quite sure that it does not like the United States.
Although the Bush administration will not relinquish U.S. oversight of the Internet, a future president may be more willing to make this seemingly small concession to curry favor with internationalist elites or supposed strategic partners. As with the Kyoto Protocol or the International Criminal Court, Washington's refusal to bend to the "international community" over the Internet might be magnified into another gleefully touted example of American arrogance. America's rivals, less constrained by electoral cycles, tend to view foreign policy over the longer term.
They are willing to wait. If we are to preserve the Internet as we know it, the Bush administration must take steps to foreclose the possibility of it ever becoming the plaything of dictators.
The age old problem with that, is the same
problem with *any* law. a law is only as good
as the ability to enforce it. Shall we bas a
miltary division around eavh foriegn based
Top Level Domain server? No, the reason that
the WWW has worked, and continues to work,
unlike with democraciies..is there is one final
arbiter, one body of rule setters. The internet
cannot function by diverse multi-party rules.
electrns, physical and natural laws..on and off
gates...logical programming, does not tolerate
or understand "diversity"...cultural or otherwise.
The TTLs (Time to live) of a directory entry is not advanced when the upstream server can not be reached. Further, is an entry is hit, its ttl is reset so that it will not be purged.
But modern dns servers never purge anymore, it takes more time than its worth. Which is why domain names often work even if you don't pay your registration. Not all registrars will take the time to null-route you the instant your bill goes unpaid.
As for your comment "the signal will basically have to hunt for the website", thats nonsense.
There is no hunting involved. Your machine asks your ISP what the IP for www.foxnews.com is and it gets a number handed back. If for some unlikely reason your ISP didn't have it, it in turn asks its upstream provider. If that provider does not have it goes higher. As soon as this request reaches a server that claims to be authoritative it will go no higher. Most requests (something like 99.999999%) are handled by your ISP and never make it any higher than that.
Once the IP is known, the packets are routed by the router. Again, there is no hunting. Your ISP maybe has two possible routes out if its office. The router chooses one, and sends it off. The next router picks the best route it has and does the same. There is no hunting....
This is not about advancing the net, it is all about power.
With IP v6, we could just give the UN/EU its own address space and they could run it the way they wanted to. Would that make them happy? No, they want full control.
Let the meddling with net liberties begin.
And in other news, the Student Council at Earthgrain Community College has voted unanimously to pull all US trrops out of Iraq...
But my given understanding is that a great many sites have
relatively very short TTLs set for their severs and
intranets, and that in many cases, even a matter of a
25 hrs, can cuse a gret many of them to expire.
They don't know. They don't know anything about controlling the Internet.
But they do know they want to control the Internet.
Local ISPs can get away with this, and some do because they have under-powered DNS servers. The big upstreams (verizon uunet, bbn, etc) have much longer TTLs. Those networks are monitored 23/7. If a root server goes down they switch to their backup automatically and when they have less than two of three root servers available the first thing they do is terminate the ttl timeout. (This is automatic, nobody has to do anything to make this happen). This preserves their existing tables.
But as I mentioned, most of the big boys don't bother enforcing ttls at all anymore. If they get a replacement IP they honor it immediatly, but if the do not get any update they don't expire anything either. Its just not cost effective.
BTW, as I recall the longest outage of ALL root servers at the same time was 1 hour, and it was done as a test, after carefull coordination.
I'm sure I'm not going to invent anything to replace it, but the day the UN takes it over will be my last day using it.
I might be tempted to learn some coding and engage in a little cyber-guerilla warfare. I can't be the only person with this thought, either.
"And its all funded by (Pay Attention, this is important:) you and me, and every little subscriber from Bug Tussle Mississippi to Leningrad. We bought it, we built it, we pay for it out of our own pocket."
I am not sure but I think that is generally what most of the posters mean.. even if they are not aware of it.
I don't think so, an awefully lot of posters seem to think the net is directly funded by tax dollars.
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