Ted Cruz Proposes Bill To Keep US From Giving Up Internet Governance Role (washingtontimes.com) 280
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Washington Times: Internet legislation proposed Wednesday in the Senate would prohibit the U.S. government from relinquishing its role with respect to overseeing the web's domain name system, or DNS, unless explicitly authorized by Congress. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), a division of the Commerce Department, currently oversees control of the DNS, a virtual phonebook of sorts that allows internet users to easily browse the web by allocating domain names to websites the world over. The NITA has long been expected to give up its oversight role to a global multi-stakeholder community, however, prompting lawmakers to unleashed a proposal this week that would assure the U.S. government maintains control unless Congress votes otherwise. The bill, the Protecting Internet Freedom Act, "would prevent the Obama administration from giving the Internet away to a global organization that will allow over 160 foreign governments to have increased influence over the management and operation of the Internet," according to a statement issued Wednesday by the office of the bill's co-sponsor, Sen. Ted Cruz. Specifically, the bill aims to ensure that the NTIA's relationship with the DNS doesn't terminate, lapse, expire or otherwise end up cancelled unless authorized by Congress, while a separate provision would guarantee that the U.S. government's exclusive control over .gov and .mil domains remains intact. In the UK, the controversial Snooper's Charter -- or the Investigatory Powers Bill as it's officially known -- has been passed through the House of Commons by UK MPs.
Ham-handed (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a delicate balancing act. If we tick off enough nations, they'll fork and go their own way without us.
We'll probably have to settle for a degree of control if we want some control. We don't get the whole enchilada in the longer run.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Ham-handed (Score:4, Interesting)
That already exists. It's called ccTLDs, and each country has one. .us is the one assigned to the USA, .uk is assigned to the United Kingdom, .ru to Russia and so on. Each one could create the 2LDs you describe, but not all of them actually do.
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But no-one wants a .us, because it isn't cool enough.
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While we are altering the deal, we should make .com and .org and .gov as sub-domains of each country domain. so Google.com would become Google.us.com or Google.ca.com.
You may not be aware of this, but domains work in the opposite direction. It would be .com.us, .org.us and so on. HTH, HAND!
P.S. It would be better to appear as if you understood DNS before making suggestions
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Bullcrap (Score:2)
Bullcrap. That's the same bassackwards thinking that leads to continual erosion of people's rights. This is not like having to suck up surveillance cameras everywhere or tracking of meta data. Authoritarian regimes want you to believe that nothing will change so that you'll go along with their plans willingly. Their M.O. is to propose something that solely benefits them knowing that you'll never say "Nope. Not ever," because you want to be a "good citizen of the global community." That's when they've g
Re:Ham-handed (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not like the US has an unblemished record of openness and propriety when managing this either.
The US has stronger laws and a stronger tradition and culture of supporting freedom of expression. According to a Pew Research poll published in this week's Economist [economist.com], 80% of Japanese, 70% of Germans, and 50% of French, think the government should be able to silence people offending others. In America, only a quarter felt the same. The next closest countries were Canada and Britain, both at about 40%.
US stewardship of the Internet has not been perfect, but I doubt if others can do better, either individually or collectively.
Re:Ham-handed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Ham-handed (Score:5, Insightful)
80% of Japanese, 70% of Germans, and 50% of French, think the government should be able to silence people offending others.
That's precisely why we need to make that as difficult as possible [slashdot.org].
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The US has stronger laws and a stronger tradition and culture of supporting freedom of expression. According to a Pew Research poll published in this week's Economist [economist.com], 80% of Japanese, 70% of Germans, and 50% of French, think the government should be able to silence people offending others. In America, only a quarter felt the same. The next closest countries were Canada and Britain, both at about 40%.
US stewardship of the Internet has not been perfect, but I doubt if others can do better, either individually or collectively.
The exception to free speech laws in Europe relate to specific classes, such as inciting hate speech.
But public opinion aside, in practice, the US censors more actual content on the net under the guise of copyright or national security than many other nations. Why shouldn't Switzerland be the ONE government in charge, if the argument is that the most free and open one should have stewardship?
The point to me is that trusting a consortium of free governments is better than putting all faith in one government
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Why shouldn't Switzerland be the ONE government in charge, if the argument is that the most free and open one should have stewardship?
Sounds good to me. The copyright cartels wouldn't like that though.
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And you're almost certainly younger than that. What's that say about you?
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The USA is only 200 years old. It has no culture whatsoever.
Wrong. The US was born out of rejection of the culture in which it had been living as colonies of the British crown. The charter that formed the new country IS the culture, at least in every way that counts. Because it lays out a system of governance that doesn't allow the government to create a crown-like culture, and the resulting liberty is the central theme of US culture, warts and all.
"War of succession" (Score:2)
Oh please stop swallowing the propaganda. US culture did not change overnight with the war of secession.
LOL. You must be a Brit. Over here in the USA (that's "the colonies" to you) we use the term "Revolutionary War" exclusively to refer to this. My personal favorite though is when a guy claimed he heard a Brit call it the "War of Amicable Separation" but that may have been a joke and not something someone actually said.
It could be worse I guess. The Russians call WWII the "Great Patriotic War" which I guess is better than what they probably wanted to say, which would be something like "The War In Wh
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Its fascinating to see the moderation by time-zones.
The above comment goes from "Score 4: Insightful" to "Score 0: Troll" as the earth rotates and different continents start reading.
I guess we don't have so much in common after all.
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There is not much here to refute. Good day sir.
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Was remaining in the Commonwealth, like Canada such a horrible alternative?
It depends on how you measure. We can pave Canada, so by some measures, we win.
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The USA is only 200 years old. It has no culture whatsoever.
As opposed to Europe that was essentially wiped off the face of the planet in WWII?
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I don't think you know what wiped off the map means.
Re:Ham-handed (Score:5, Insightful)
Jazz
Blues
Swing
Rock'n'Roll
Hollywood
Television
Numerous authors and poets: Too many to even list
Numerous artists: Andy Warhol, Norman Rockwell, etc.
Culinary inventions:
Buffalo wings, Cheese-steaks, barbecued ribs, and the whole fast food industry, which has spread globally.. (well, I didn't say it was a healthy culture)
Re: Illusion (Score:5, Funny)
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because stamping out bigotry, the things the divide us and create instability and chaos, is a bad thing....?
Censorship does not "stamp out" bigotry. It just pushes it out of public view, where it festers in the shadows.
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2016 freedom of the press, the USA is 41 according to https://rsf.org/en/ranking [rsf.org]
Democracy Ranking put the USA 16th (The top 5 were all EU countries)
The main reason for this ranking is America's lack of a journalist shield law that gives reporters special privileges and protections. In America, ALL citizens have a right to say and write what they want, not just the elite, so it is silly to penalize America for that.
Re: Ham-handed (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed. It's not like the US has an unblemished record of openness and propriety when managing this either. The US has seized domains names and banned activities they don't like. Europe is actually much farther along on ensuring preservation of internet liberties, data protection, etc.
Actually that's not true at all. The US seizes domain names only within its own jurisdiction, just like everybody else. However Europe, and especially China, Russia, and numerous third world countries, have expressed a desire to force other countries to censor speech, regardless of the other countries laws. Case in point, France wants Google to censor search results in ALL of its domains.
The US hasn't had anything even approaching an equivalent.
Re: Ham-handed (Score:5, Insightful)
And there is the 'European' idea of a 'right to be forgotten'. Which is really either the 'right to be forgiven', or the 'right to conceal the past'.
Sure, giving any meaningful control over the Internet to other nations couldn't possibly go wrong for us in the USA. Let's leave this as it is for a while, and if other nations or coalitions choose to form independent DNS systems, then fine. They can restrict access to Google, Apple, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, etc, or try to force these services to accomodate dual DNS registrations and resolution. That'll work real well.
No other nation on earth can be trusted to defend liberty as much as the US, even in our current failing state.
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That's a pile of crap. The US has a few advantages, until some corporation disagrees with something.
There's only one nation I can think of that can be really be trusted with this job: Switzerland.
Re: Ham-handed (Score:4, Funny)
the US is NOT exceptional,
What? That's bollocks. Notably, nobody else invented the internet.
There are freedom loving people the world over
And yet, more people in about every other developed country think that the government should be able to clamp down on free speech online than we do. Maybe they don't love freedom as much as we do.
and to claim you are PROTECTING anybody's freedom by wresting power over things that directly influence their lives in YOUR government they have no vote or say in - is literally the worst kind of double-think.
But that's exactly why these other countries want more power over the internet — specifically so that they can clamp down on dissenting speech!
There can be nothing more ANTI-freedom than the US controlling ANY global resource
Of course there can. We could hand it to the UN, and then the UNSC can control the internet instead of just the USA. Guess what the rest of the USNC thinks about freedom of information. Hint: They are against it.
If you truly believe in freedom - start with it's most foundational principles.
So, we're building another internet, with blackjack and hookers?
Re: Ham-handed (Score:2)
The Germans and Swis were at least as important to the birth of the internet as tge US was. Everything else you say is less true than that.
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Re: Ham-handed (Score:2)
For a start yes. Do you think the internet would have grown large enough to even need the move from host files to dns without its killer app ? What about the thousands of non-US folk who contributed to the RFCs for technologies like DNS and contributed code to the open source projects that implemented them ? Hell what internet would have happened without Turing (British), Zuze and Von Neuman (both German) ?
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Re: Ham-handed (Score:2)
Fine. Give china back gunpowder. Give germany back the automobile. Give agriculture back to Iran and Iraq. Give the Turing machine design back to Britain and the Von Neuman architecture to the Germans. Lets give each country exclusive control over how other countries can use technologies they developed. Right back to giving exclusive control over fire to ethiopia and archery to South Africa. Finnland gets exclusive control over Linux. Austria gets exclusive control over nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Te
Re: Liberties - after Snowden (Score:2)
Yes it's much worse elsewhere, almost everywhere.
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France wants Google to censor search results in ALL of its domains.
As a matter of fact, since it's pretty important here, France wants search results in France to respect French laws. It isn't trying to force Google to block those results from Americans, it just wants French users who use google.com instead of google.fr to not see personal information about French citizens that Google has no legal right to present.
It's really, really important that everyone understand this, because every debate about it is always derailed by people labouring under this misconception.
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...it just wants French users who use google.com instead of google.fr to not see personal information about French citizens...
If that's the case, then French ISPs need to force all traffic to redirect from google.com to google.fr in order to comply with French law. It's probably easier to regulate the national ISP than a local affiliate of an international corporation.
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Google does in fact redirect google.com to google.fr automatically. You have to click something stop it happening. Even if you use google.com, it still returns search results in your language (reported by the browser) and uses the country it thinks you are in to supply stuff like shopping results. Again, you can tell it not to, but as the court noticed they clearly have the technical ability to do what they are asking.
Re: Ham-handed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Ham-handed (Score:5, Insightful)
There's zero difference between the Chinese trying to censor Tienanmen Square and what the RIAA tries to do, and because of that, the US government is no better at protecting "free speech".
Yes, there's quite a difference. If the RIAA/MPAA could bring down just any domain it wants, then public torrent trackers would have a very hard time even existing. The reason they are able to float from domain to domain is precisely because the USA doesn't have jurisdiction over non-US TLDs, which means that US based corporations can't obtain a court order to shut them down either, unless they have a presence in another country and go through the legal channels in that country. In the case of TPB, there's an organization called BREIN that was able to get a takedown of their .se domain recently, but it took them a VERY LONG time to do so.
However you'll never see any purely US based entity get a domain seizure for a website registered in another country unless that country's government specifically consents for that to happen. The US government does not, and there are no indications that it will ever, seize another country's TLD.
In fact, what the US actually controls is what you call the root domain, which is just a dot. For example, www.slashdot.org is actually www.slashdot.org., just the last dot at the end is always implied and never shown in most client software. When we talk about "keys to the internet" what we're really talking about is who ultimately owns the dot at the end. In France for example, the US delegates complete control to France the ownership of the "fr." top level domain, and doesn't set any terms for what France can or cannot do with it.
Now, if we turn this over to some international entity, like say the UN, they can and probably will set terms for what a country can and can't do with their top level domain. The first thing that comes to mind is mandating that countries de-list sites that speak negatively against a particular religion, or just in some way sound negative against some kind of ethnic group, regardless of whether or not that is what a site is. For example, they could set rules requiring that slashdot should be delisted unless it outright deletes posts that have GNAA material, and that having them downmodded just isn't enough.
If you want to argue that said international entity won't require such censorship...then I have to ask...what exactly does anybody gain by turning it over to an international body? And again, I need to emphasize, the US doesn't set any rules for what websites can and can't say. Other countries can even host ISIS propaganda websites, pro-drug websites, copyright infringement, and everything else the US government hates with a passion, and the US still doesn't intervene, nor does it have any kind of "unenforced policy" or anything of that nature. When a country owns a TLD, it's theirs to do as they please.
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I do not think it is really a matter of trust. If the DNS system is not being managed well, then it can be taken control of more easily than you might think. For instance, if the EU wanted to take 100% control of all of their TLDs and make them subordinate to a new root, it could be done. It would create issues temporarily, but nothing that could not be worked around. I think the issue with handing over control of the existing root and management of new TLDs is that it is hard to identify an organization an
Re: Ham-handed (Score:2)
You are right about there being governments that should not be involved. You are wrong that the US government is not one of them.
There are two acceptable options. An international consortium of non-governmental and non-profit organisations would be the ideal. Take all governments out of it. Else give them all equal votes and hope they will all be restrained because any power I grab I am giving to my enemies as well. A mutually assured destruction for DNS.
Bad as that may be its not nearly as bad as the thoug
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Sorry, we don't share your blind trust in your government - and having nominated the orangutan with the bad checks - we trust your government even less now.
You don't trust you OWN government, but you demand that WE must trust them ?
So in one statement you say I blindly trust my government, and in the very next you say I don't? I think that in your case, the truth is that you can't even figure yourself out, let alone my opinion on anything. Try being less of a scatterbrain, and then after that, come try again at making an argument.
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If we don't trust our own Government, can we imagine what the fuck we think of your Government?
If you actually read the article the bill being proposed, all it's really about is preventing the POTUS from transferring control of DNS to a non-governmental agency through executive action alone.
Is it really much better to Trust the EU Government who is trying to make mandatory to use a Government Issued Identification Card to make certain online postings; or maybe the UN, Dictator's Social Club would be better
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Yeah, has Europe jumped on civil forfeiture the way US police forces have? Suddenly, everything is the proceeds of crime.
RFC2468 -- I remember IANA (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:RFC2468 -- I remember IANA (Score:5, Insightful)
IANA would put the stuff in control of mostly engineers, but most countries don't want it there, they want it at ITU. At the same time, if you are worried about corporate control and abusive use of the DNS system you could look no further than ITU. ICANN is it's own hotbed of money being funneled into the pockets of connected people but they can't even shake a stick at all the slush funds and money changing hands at ITU, hell ICANN probably learned the game from ITU.
ITU would be a disaster for the internet DNS. Every tin pot dictator would be trying to get domains shut off for saying bad things about them. And at ITU, they would succeed. The DNS would rapidly devolve into a censored piece of crap.
Preventing Internet Freedom (Score:2)
Did I read the name of the Bill correctly. Considering the Snowden revelations I would have thought it was actually *more* in the interests of US citizens that the root TLDs were not controlled by the US government anymore.
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You of course believe that freedom of speech isn't a right, just a privilege if you say the right things.
No way! I just believe that it is a right that *everyone* should have, not just Americans.
Find another country that has as strong proections on the freedom of speech. Seriously, go ahead. Oh wait, yeah, there aren't any.
Probably the UK. In a lot of aspects English rights are a super set of American rights. The French and Canada as well. However here is a list [wikipedia.org] showing about 32 countries with a press freedom index greater than the US.
The purpose of removing control of the internet is to enhance censorship, nothing else.
Bullshit. The purpose of removing TLD control from the US government is so it can't shut people up at will, including Americans.
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Is there evidence that the US government has used TLD control to shut people up at will? That would be a compelling argument.
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Is there evidence that the US government has used TLD control to shut people up at will? That would be a compelling argument.
Yes, Homeland security took 84000 .org TLDs down [torrentfreak.com] by mistake under the Pro-IP act.
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We're not happy with how things have been operating here.
No one is.
However, Russia and China operate on a completely different level. Pushing control of things to the United Nations does not make them "more free".
Stop pretending you care - that's their problem. Let everyone else who is free-er be free
When we hand control over, we give up a lot of freedoms.
No, the US government hands over a lot of control. There is no 'we' here, you are as censored as anyone else - so stop pretending otherwise.
Ownership of Internet is just an illusion (Score:2)
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Congratulations... you just made the argument for excusing Microsoft upgrading everyone to Windows 10!
The rest of the world *could*, if they wanted to setup their own root systems, updated routes, patch oodles of systems to use the new system (ie jump through a bunch of extra hoops)... or just let the system keep on working as it's configured to... even when new configurations are pushed from on high.
Sure, if you are extra careful you or I can tweak or DNS settings... just as we could block Windows 10 updat
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Congratulations... you just made the argument for excusing Microsoft upgrading everyone to Windows 10!
The rest of the world *could*, if they wanted to setup their own root systems, updated routes, patch oodles of systems to use the new system (ie jump through a bunch of extra hoops)... or just let the system keep on working as it's configured to... even when new configurations are pushed from on high.
Sure, if you are extra careful you or I can tweak or DNS settings... just as we could block Windows 10 updates (WU is blockable at the router) or telemetry... most don't have the skills to do so and largely don't care.
WHAT? Windows 10 is a closed source, proprietary operating system. Making changes to the update mechanism would be considered copyright infingment by Microsoft at the very least and most likely they would call it hacking and call the FBI. DNS is just a standardized protocol that anyone can freely implement however they wish
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Speaking as a member of the rest of the world - yeah, going 'nuclear' option on this would be a lot of work, but it's entirely feasible.
We want a say in the management of a resource that directly impacts OUR freedom and livelihoods. We have a problem with a foreign government, ANY foreign government including the US one, having exclusive control over ANY aspect of the internet.
We would much rather NOT build a competing system with all the difficulties that entail - but if the US does not eventually give up
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Just for my own curiosity.
What if one day a neighbor of yours put in a very nice dock allowing easy access to the pond adjacent to most of the properties in your neighborhood. And if over time you, and your neighbors, and all of your friends decide that rather than build or continue to maintain your own dock you would instead use your neighbors.
Then one day you decide you don't particularly like that neighbor, or you don't like all of the choices they make about how to maintain their dock (you don't like t
Re: Ownership of Internet is just an illusion (Score:2)
Bad analogy. Let me fix it for you. My friendly neighbour built a dock and in the interest of keeping the rest of the shorelime pristine begged us all not build our docks and in return would give us untestricted access to the one he already built.
We expressed some concern about vesting all our pond access in a dock he could stop being nice about but he assuaged our concerns by promising to sign the dock over to a trust run by the whole neighbourhood, we just had to be patient while the lawyers sorted out al
He misnamed the bill I think (Score:5, Funny)
Don't
Undermine
Muricas
Awesome
Surveillance
Systems
Seems fair (Score:2)
After all it was an American, namely Al Gore, who invented the Internet.
I have it on good authority, that back then it was essential a series of tubes. [youtube.com]
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Good lord, partisan much? There were two lines in that comment, both of which were jokes, one making fun of a Democrat and one a Republican.
Also, your 100% on no invasion of Iraq under Gore is questionable at best. [theglobeandmail.com]
Typical politics. (Score:2)
He's a Republican, so he is obliged to snipe at Obama given half a chance.
If the government is about to do something unpopular, always refer to it as the 'Obama administration.' Never mind if he actually has anything to do with the decision at all, it's important to create the association in people's mind between the Democrat president and Bad Stuff. That's how the game is played.
Do we have to point this out? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm reading arguments that the USA should indeed have this as a natural possession, because they are the best, most moral and/or effective steward.
Irrelevant.
Americans would never accept somebody else's opinion that, say, Canada should regulate the US finance system because our banks never went under or needed bailouts; the argument that Canadians were more responsible stewards of a national financial system would cut no ice at all, despite being objectively true.
Governance - of anything - draws legitimacy from the consent of those governed, not some arbitrary opinion of how much merit it has.
The argument that "I must be in charge because I'm the best guy for the job and the need is great" has been used by every dictator.
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Who is that old woman on your money? Is she a native Canadian, or do you more or less borrow her from somewhere else (you know, because they were in charge a long time ago and already had a decent system in place).
How often do you try to change that woman's nationality or place her under the control of an international body?
Information (Score:4, Informative)
The DNS root zone is the top-level DNS zone in the hierarchical namespace of the Domain Name System of the Internet. For example, it contains the name servers of top level domains (TLDs).
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), an agency of the United States Department of Commerce exercises ultimate authority over the DNS root zone of the Internet.
Through the NTIA, the root zone is managed by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), acting as the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), while the root zone maintainer is Verisign.
In March 2014, the NTIA announced that it will cede this authority to an organization whose nature has yet to be specified.
Also regarding who would take over from NTIA, they state:
"The U.S. Government has made it clear that we will not accept a proposal that replaces its role with a government or intergovernmental organization.
The criteria specified by the Administration firmly establish Internet governance as the province of multistakeholder institutions, rather than governments or intergovernmental institutions, and reaffirm our commitment to preserving the Internet as an engine for economic growth, innovation, and free expression.
The U.S. government will only transition its role if and when it receives it receives a satisfactory proposal to replace its role from the global Internet community - the same industry, technical, and civil society entities that have successfully managed the technical functions of Internet governance for nearly twenty years."
Note that there is a history of alternative DNS roots (OpenNIC [opennicproject.org] for example). Generally few people bother to use them.
Root Zone file (Score:3)
By the way, here is a link to the Root Zone file [internic.net] if you want to see what it is.
There is also is a human readable version here [iana.org].
Re:Clueless moron (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Clueless moron (Score:5, Informative)
Any country, or any company, or any kid with spare time can set up their own root servers, their own TLDs, and their own domains. Then with the authority of laws, policies, or a note passed around the local high school, users can be convinced to point their resolving to that custom DNS, bypassing anything the US government wants to do.
The whole notion of maintaining control of the internet is somewhat asinine.
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They can do anything they want, but as soon as they want to do name resolution outside their root servers, they're going to have a problem.
Re:Clueless moron (Score:5, Insightful)
If you break the Internet, you won't put it back together again. The US has been a pretty damned good steward. If you want the likes of China to be running the show, then you'll get the Internet you deserve.
Re:Clueless moron (Score:5, Insightful)
Nice strawman. You build that yourself?
Nice way of trying to dodge the substance of the matter, about which he's correct. And you know it, which is why you're attempting to sling the "you're fighting a straw man" defense even though of course that's not what's happening. No, we do NOT want places like China, or Iran having any influence international communication standards or things like root DNS.
Re:Clueless moron (Score:5, Insightful)
No he's not fucking correct. The Internet has flourished under the US's protection. Deliver it over to some international agency, and the next thing you know it will be cut to ribbons, censorship will become internationalized, and it will fall apart. Simply put, as little as I trust the US government, I trust the UN, the EU, Russia, China, India, Australia, the UK, and well, just about everyone else much much much much much much much less.
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Aye, that dirty little squit, Erdogan, was able to reach into Germany to stifle someone saying Erdogan's mother wears combat boots (or something like that).
The U.N. just got "lobbied" by Saudi Arabia to take it off the its human rights blacklist. They used the tactic of threatening to withhold funding, and that they wouldn't be able to stop their clerics from declaring the U.N. anti-Muslim. And the U.N. caved, declared victory with honor, and removed those jerks from the blacklist.
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The Internet has flourished despite the US's "protection".
FTFY
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Yes, And I'm interested now in how dual DNS would work for most devices. How would Google resolve if the US domain google.com were competing with an EU service of google.com.eu, or the French version google.com.fr? Plainly nations would force software vendors to make their root DNS primary, and possibly even block competing root zones.
And then we have Balkanization, with France blocking the US, former French colonies blocking France, chaos. Really cool. Get the popcorn and drinks.
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No shit. Bit they can get away with a lot more without significant complaint if the actual governance is in the hands of an "appropriate international body" that they can jerk around like a puppet.
Re:Clueless moron (Score:4, Insightful)
Obviously Ted Cruz has no idea how the internet works. Any country can set up a top level domain and authorise anyone that they want as registrars. This isn't something that is within the power of the United States to decide.
Pot, meet kettle. The DNS system asks the root servers what TLDs are valid, if your new TLD isn't accepted it doesn't exist. Sure a country could fork the root servers and force ISPs to redirect their citizens to their root but effectively it wouldn't exist for anyone else. Same as I can set up a domain on my local network and call it whatever, doesn't have any effect on the outside world. And then it's really just a country intranet, not the Internet as we know it.
Re:Clueless moron (Score:5, Interesting)
If all of the countries other than the US were to agree to use the same fork, then the original DNS system would become the USA's very own intranet.
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If all of the countries other than the US were to agree to use the same fork,
You have boundless optimism in the level of agreement and cooperation of the entire world.
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Sure a country could fork the root servers and force ISPs to redirect their citizens to their root but effectively it wouldn't exist for anyone else.
Interestingly control is something repressive countries exert on their own people, not people of other nations. The rest of the world may not care, but that doesn't stop screwing with DNS from being a problem to some.
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Re:Clueless moron (Score:4, Insightful)
https://yourlogicalfallacyis.c... [yourlogicalfallacyis.com]
Yes, his comment may be a fallacy - but that doesn't mean it's not also true.
I say "may" because I'm not convinced that it IS even an ad hominem fallacy. The definition of pretty much every fallacy includes "without any other substantiating evidence" (appeal to emotion and appeal to tradition are notable exceptions) but most things are *only* fallacious if they stand by themselves, NOT when used as a part of a larger argument with strong evidence.
The evidence in this case is Cruz's entire career - which has been massively anti-freedom (and particularly anti-civil-liberties while his time as an AG includes one of the worst breaches of due process in the history of the United States) and pretty much always being on the stupid side of every issue. It is perfectly reasonable then to start assuming that he is more likely than not to be on the stupid side of THIS issue.
Saying it must be the case - that would be fallacious, inductive logic does not lead to absolute truths, but saying it is "probably" the case (as the OP did) - that is absolutely logical and a perfectly reasonable argument. Nobody is saying Cruz can never be right about anything because he is Cruz. We are simply applying the laws of inductive logic - in a thousand "experiments" Cruz has been found to be wrong 999 times, it is reasonable to think he is probably wrong this time as well.
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"The chance that the UN will start pulling .com addresses for porn or hate sites is small,"
And you base this opinion on what? Only UN incompetence is plausible. Most member nations would burn the US flat if they could.
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Transgenderism pretty much destroys gender as a static concept, so feminism seems to now be a movement that can include anyone at any given time, depending on their instantaneous self-identification.
Which is likely to last as long as the ACLU's support, given that sane people are offended that their teenage daughters are being confronted with biological males in bathrooms, which breaks down much support for transanything.
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... I just mind the part where its illegal to run a competing service.
Where does it say that?
Re:Internet Governance (Score:5, Insightful)
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What's that? Free speech? Sorry, China does not believe in free speech.
So... you were saying?
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CERN is in the US now ? Because quite a lot of "core technologies" were developed there - not least of which the internet's killer app, the world-wide-web. Are you seriously going to argue that control of the web should be vested in the government of Switzerland ?
Let's take your argument to it's logical conclusion. Gunpowder was invented in china so I guess the US will be handing over control of all it's fire-arms companies, guns and bullets to the Chinese government ?
Cars were invented in Europe - so I gue
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I know it's been said here, but I feel like you keep missing the point. No one is exerting control over your networks, servers, etc. You are voluntarily ceding control, so it's within your own power to stop.
Don't like the US control over DNS, put up your own root servers and use your own DNS. Want it to be international, then set it up in an international body and convince other nations to join it.
If I offer you a service, and you like it so much you decide to rely on it in lieu of starting your own service
Re: Control Of DNS (Score:2)
But thats exactly what Cruz is trying to prohibit. Now there is no practical way to prevent the rest of the world doing so and the US said 2 years ago that once a suitable and accountable alternative exists they will join it rather than balkanise the internet to everybody's detriment. Cruz is trying to legally prevent the US from joining such an international venture and actually use the force of law to require America to balkanise itself when it inevitably comes into being.
The history of the net is one of
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CERN is in the US now ? Because quite a lot of "core technologies" were developed there - not least of which the internet's killer app, the world-wide-web. Are you seriously going to argue that control of the web should be vested in the government of Switzerland ?
The web is not centralized, and was not designed to be. DNS management was designed to be centralized. The two are not comparable. Nice try, though.
Re: Control Of DNS (Score:2)
What ? DNS is hierachical but it is absolutely not centralized. Its one of histories first massive distributed databases. There is nothing in the design that mandates centralized root servers. Why not a cluster of them all of which are synchronized but no single entity controlling more than one.
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Your CPU was probably conceived of and designed in the U.S. And made wherever.
Probably.
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The key designs for it was conceived independently in Germany (Konrad Zuze) and Britain (Alan Turing). The first person in America to realize such a design was Von Neuman but he was more than ten years after Zuze and he wasn't an American.
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Each country has a strong culture, a strong heritage, a strong system of beliefs and the US must learn to recognise and respect these. US culture is NOT superior.
"Having culture" is something to be ashamed off, not proud off, considering all cultures have more negatives than positives. The US, in contrast, does not have a single homogenous "culture" so I have no idea what it is you appear to believe will be forced by the US onto the rest of the world?
Religion or Atheism? Pro-[some-right] or Anti-[some-right]? Hipster culture or Ghetto culture? Redneck culture or Yuppie culture? Whatever you *think* the US culture is, I can just about guarantee that there is a non
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Actually - I think he was parodying the large number of idiots above him. Pretty good job too. Seems like Poe's law in action. Was it parody or ACTUAL insanity ?