Governing the Internet Report Released 344
An anonymous reader writes "After the speculation on earlier this week, the Working Group of Internet Governance
(aka the United Nations attempt to govern the Internet) has just
released their much anticipated report. News
coverage and a helpful
summary point to the four options on the table and the likely
outcome in the months leading up to a final conference in Tunisia in
November."
Give control to the ISPs (Score:5, Interesting)
Sort out some fair means of representation, and get them to select a root administrator. They all have the same ultimate goal - a stable internet - and they al understand the internet. The same cannot be said of the US government or the UN.
Re:Hmmmm (Score:2, Interesting)
Nationalized, Fractured Internet? (Score:4, Interesting)
Option 5. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Give control to the ISPs (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Hmmmm (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not so simple as "US vs. rest of world"--it's a balance between "how much do you trust the US to be a fair custodian" vs. "how much do you trust an organization giving weight to what Libya and South Africa and Papua New Guinea want to be a fair custodian".
As far as I'm concerned, having an organization in the US, with some involvement by the US government, "running" things is not a great solution but a lot less worse than, say, whatever the ITU would come up with.
That said, remember that the Internet works on the principle of routing around failure. Neither the UN nor ICANN nor the US government are known as organizations which always work quickly, logically, unbureaucratically and in the best interests of both their constituents and the greater community at large.
The "US", aside from a few fun Internic fuckups in the 1990s, didn't ever "turn off the Internet" or come up with idiotic international requirements. Carnivore? Try enforcing that in France. Nobody's stopping me from using encryption between Ghana and Mongolia. I wouldn't, however, put it past some atechnical third world level 50 career bureaucrat to come up with something stupid wthich might try to do just that.
Not that it'll ever work, but it'll just create more work for everyone. Another thing I'd like to see pro-UN-control folks to ask themselves honestly would be "is this just a pure control question"? I hate to say it, but like Magellan, anyone can always build their own...
It's a luxury (Score:3, Interesting)
05.41622 -6-
Absence of an appropriate and effective global Internet governance mechanism to resolve the issue.
When did the internet become a NESSESITY of life???
Why must thier be a "even" distribution of costs?? If it costs more to get connectivity to your isp then it costs more for that isp to do buisness.
internet next generation (Score:3, Interesting)
- there is an unneven distribution of cost in developing countries -- why not offer development grants and support the infrastructure
- they fix internet stabilty, spam -- each country should make their own laws
- intelectual property protection -- figures.
- they will help developing countries with a "forum" -- no way to do this now, is it ?
Basically their proposal is ok as long as there won't be a single country in charge. But I do fear the expansion of this "governance" into other areas.Re:Screw the UN (Score:2, Interesting)
How comes that the same people speaking about democracy and freedom have so much problems to give other nations the right to vote where they are concerned?
BTW, there are no small meaningless countries.
BTW 2, funny that you speak about "random leaders".
why bother with the US ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Free the DNS ! (Score:2, Interesting)
What do you do when two or more different organisations share the trademark on the same word? E.g. Apple computers and the Apple music label; Frosties the breakfast cereal and Frosties the sugar coated sweets.
Re:Free the DNS ! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The four options... (Score:3, Interesting)
UN reforms (Score:2, Interesting)
2. UN still expects US to hand over control of the internet
3. US refuses (duh)
4. UN has a hissy fit.
If the US thinks the UN is corrupt.. why would we turn over control of a critical piece of infrastructure to them?!
Re:The four options... (Score:4, Interesting)
The British developed North America, with many large investments (buying New York from the Dutch etc.), and now we are expected to just give it up?
The British empire has perhaps the most to lose, economically, if the new world were to "go down(whatever that means)"
No taxation without representation scares me. You don't need a tinfoil hat to see why no taxation without representation is a bad idea and an awful precedent.
The new world has become a security issue- Aside from all the defense networks etc, we need to be able to keep tabs on extremist groups in the new world, note that there is a widely circulating how to pamphlet about how to cause the most damage with a b#mb on a coach.
As popular as "Britain is an Imperialist" sentiment has become, we still believe in freedom of speech. What happens when New York decides that no one should use the word teatime? What happens when Boston decides that the words Your Majesty can't be used?
Just some thoughts.
This is progress? (Score:3, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Postel [wikipedia.org]
To a committee:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Corporation
And now we need the whole fscking world collaborating on this?
Seriously. It's a fscking database of IP>Hostname mappings. This is NOT rocket science. Jon Postel, why did you have to leave us to these asshats? We miss you.
Re:The four options... (Score:2, Interesting)
What I think your hinting at here, but perhaps not touching is that while the most common TLD's are run by the department of commerce, and overall that the Americans involved in the "control" of the internet act more as just maintainers, despite what they could theoretically do. The US government has put little (perhaps even none) real influence into running TLD's, after all they could always just ban any IP address's associated with Cuba from being associated with
ICANN has had a reasonably sketchy history in the past and seems to be VERY political and at times discriminatory. Not to say that the UN does not have its place, but if you look at UN Security Council, overall you find that politics get in the way of its job most of the time. I cannot honestly believe that ICANN will be much better. One could even draw that the Internet would be affected MORE by current American politics if power were transferred to ICANN then the current system.
Your off of what position of control that the US department of commerce holds over the internet, they cannot remove sites, only ISP's can, but what they do is change any DNS entry that falls under there TLD set (through there TLD root server). The fact that we still have thepirtatebay.com makes me believe that the current US control is both fair and functional, as the site clearly breaks AMERICAN laws (the legality of the site doesn't really matter in this case, more that the American law considers it illegal.) This site has identified it as a target of many American crackdowns on this or that, but it still exists today, despite the fact that they could theoretically have their
I suspect that if that the department of commerce abused the power it wielded to further American politics that either the TLD system would be redesigned to sap power from the US government, or that many new TLD's would be created that aren't in the US's control (such as
To this date, ICANN wants total control because what they currently control is only because of the graciousness of the department of commerce. Even if the current system works perfectly, they do not like that spectre hanging over their heads of the American control (which I can justify). ICANN has been creating lots of new TLD's that the Americans don't control, and they actually do, but at the end of the day most internet sites still live on either
I am personally of the opinion of, if the system works well, tweak it, but do not do major changes until it breaks. TLD's might have been claimed by the USA that they perhaps were not totally entitled to, and if this was the department of commerce trying to seize the TLD control, I would be outraged. Overall, the department of commerce has peacefully maintained the TLD root server and allowing ICANN (and who ICANN appoints to control the DNS set for each TLD) what it needs to do ICANN's original goal (to standardize the internet).
Medevo
What about the Internet Society? (Score:4, Interesting)
I read the entire 24 page report, with I hope some thought and consideration. What I found very, very interesting is this "fact-finding" body did nothing to examine the current structure of "Internet Control" and the role of the Internet Society and its divisions. They mention the IETF *once*, and neglect to mention that IETF RFCs are now accepted in the Standards community as Standards. International standards -- the ITU says so. Instead, the report concentrates exclusively on the role of the United States Department of Commerce and *one* US corporation, ICANN.
What about the role of the technical committees that have kept the Tier One routers running all these years without too many hiccups? How would they fit into a UN-based "oversight"? Either the routers work, or they don't. Does Grand Fenwick have anything to contribute to that process? Oh, let's not forget that NANOG is not a US-centric organization now...
A previous contributor showed the country breakdown of the participants. For my part, I looked through all the names of the people on this commission and didn't recognize a single name as part of the original Internet Construction Crew (ICC).
The report, if I were grading it on completeness, would get a D+. The report concentrates on those few things that bring certain peoples to a slow boil. I'm sure that one of the most important questions will be how to handle right-to-left writing systems in the current structure. It completely neglects those portions of oversight and control that mean the life and death of the Internet, either as we know it or as people have envisioned it in the future.
My great fear? "Regulation." As in putting together a list of conflicting requirements on users of the Internet that will spawn a whole new industry that generates not one cent of revenue. Oh, and someone has to pay for all this work and effort to make my life as an admin miserable. Can you say "Internet Tax"? I knew you could!
As a system administrator, I will continue to run my network. my routers, and my servers as I see fit. If the UN wants to play power games and screw it all up, then I as an operator and administrator will do everything technically possible to be sure that UN screwups don't affect my customers.
My network, my rules.
Re:Delusions are fun! (Score:1, Interesting)
Of course its the fault of the US..
How could it possibly be any fault of the "smugglers".
If you stub your toe.. Its the US's fault
Its never the fault of those that commit henous acts. No Never! Its all the fault of the US.
Sarcasm:Off
My..my..my.. the moral relativists mindset.
Such a fragile and incompetent thing..
>>Maybe next time you can elect leadership who are >>not a bloody embarrassment the world over!
We are trying very hard not to elect another clinton or carter, thank you very much.
===
Liberalism is non-judgemental. Judging what is 'good' is yet another liberal puzzle.
Completely off the wall suggestion (Score:2, Interesting)
Root servers will now be considered diplomatic territory, no matter what country they exist in.
Allow peoples around the world the opportunity to be considered dual citizens (their home country an the CyperSpace) and allow them to vote for representation to manage the space and then provide a representative to the UN.
This would take some doing as some nations (i.e. the United States) do not recognize dual citizenship, but that would be the 'price' to have diplomatic relationships with CyberSpace.
Ok, so it's totaly crazy, but it is a Friday of a very long week.
Its not control of the Internet... (Score:3, Interesting)
Basicly, the internet consists of the following core elements:
1.The core Protocols that underly it (that are drawn up as RFCs and put out by the IETF). The IETF seems to be doing a good job of this (although its slow to get a RFC out, there is no reason you cant go and use without one plusd RFCs need to be very well thought out in order to work)
2.IP address allocation.
Right now various agencies (I know the IANA used to do this but they dont do it anymore, someone else does) hand out IP address blocks. That function seems to be running right (other than the physical lack of usable addresses that is)
If IPV6 was more widely deployed, you wouldnt have any address problems since IPV6 provides so many addersses that even a home user could have an IPV6 block where the upper 120 bits were fixed and then they would get 8 bits of address to allocate to devices (IANA IPV6 guru so 8 bits for a normal home user might be too much but even 6 bits would give them 64 or so addresses to use)
You could give different countries a block of IP addresses which could then give ISPs and hosts etc parts of that block and so on down to the users.
Also IPV6 adoption would mean a greater adoption of encryption (via IPSecV6 or something similar) and multicasting.
3.DNS. Right now, this is controled by those who run the root servers. And by ICANN and DOC who ultimatly control the root zone file (which points to the ccTLD and gTLD nameservers run by verisign and others). Then, verisign and others control the ccTLDs and gTLDs. What is needed here is for control of the root zone file as well as control over the key gTLDs (like
Special gTLDs like
ccTLDs would be run by whatever agency the governments of those countries decides should run them (e.g.
and 4.the cables, routers and systems that actually make the core of the Internet work. The problem right now (IMO) is that too much of this infrastructure is held by too few companies (a lot of it is held by phone companies/large ISPs)
There is not enough redundancy (and this isnt just to do with a lack of physical cables, its also to do with the fact that the large ISPs and phone cos that own the backbone wont allow/dont want/charge to much for their systems to talk to each other and route data over the other guys links when theirs is down.
In addition to this, the consolodation of data links (including the fact that there are not as many possible ways for data to get from A to B as their should be) makes it easier for governments, police forces, spy agencies (friendly and otherwise), corperations (MPAA/RIAA/etc for one) and others to "Spy on" and "Monitor" and "Censor/control/block" internet traffic.
So, the question is, exactly which of the 4 key parts that make up the Internet as we know it is the part that people seem to think could be run better by an agency other than ICANN or the US Goverment?
It was never about a single country (Score:3, Interesting)
No one country did. That's exactly the point. For a start, the Internet is almost by definition a network of networks, many of which are not in the US. Moreover, there is no clear "creation date"; different aspects of what we know today as "the Internet" appeared at very different times in history.
What became today's Internet was mostly driven by academic research. While I'll certainly concede that much of the initial research during the '60s and early '70s happened in the US, it's still clear that from a very early stage, the research effort was international. For example, ISoc's brief history of the Internet [isoc.org] mentions researchers in the UK working in parallel with the US research as early as 1967, until the groups discovered each other and started collaborating.
The infrastructure is obviously international, and for the most part quite capable of surviving without any one country. Networks that now form major parts of the Internet have existed in other countries for over 20 years. (The same history notes the existence of the JANET in the UK in 1984, while another [zakon.org] mentions satellite links to Hawaii and the UK as early as 1975 and the creation of EUnet, connecting the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and UK, in 1982.)
The software side, in particular the established communications protocols for things like e-mail, WWW, Usenet or FTP communication, has come from diverse sources. What was effectively the first TCP/IP standard was presented to an international working group at Sussex University in the UK in 1973.
Bodies like the IETF and W3C have geographically diverse memberships. While the US has by far the largest single category of W3C membership today, it still represents less than 40% of the total [w3.org], which isn't much more than Europe, for example. There are a total of 28 countries with member organisations.
For any one country, including the US, to claim that this whole picture developed because of it, or wouldn't have happened in a similar way without it, is simply a delusion of grandeur. It might not have happened as fast, or in exactly the same way, but it would still have happened, probably working off the research done in Europe.
I find it deeply ironic that one of the other replies to my GP post was an AC who claimed I was trolling, and challenged me to provide information about other countries that contributed to the Internet's creation, while another accuses me of rewriting history. Fortunately, while a lot of mostly US-based Internet history pages choose to ignore the contributions from outside and focus on the US academic network during the early stages, the kind of information above (all of which is written by the people and organisations at the heart of the Internet) is freely available, even to those in the US.