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Four States Sue To Stop Internet Transition (thehill.com) 296

Posted by BeauHD from the time-is-ticking dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: Republican attorneys general in four states are filing a lawsuit to block the transfer of internet domain systems oversight from the U.S. to an international governing body. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt and Nevada Attorney General Paul Laxalt filed a lawsuit on Wednesday night to stop the White House's proposed transition of Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) functions. The state officials cite constitutional concerns in their suit against the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, U.S. government and the Department of Commerce. "The Obama Administration's decision violates the Property Clause of the U.S. Constitution by giving away government property without congressional authorization, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution by chilling speech, and the Administrative Procedure Act by acting beyond statutory authority," a statement released by Paxton's office reads. The attorneys generals claim that the U.S. government is ceding government property, pointing to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) review that "concluded that the transition does not involve a transfer of U.S. government property requiring Congressional approval." Paxton also echoed Texas Sen. Ted Cruz's warnings that the transition could harm free speech on the internet by giving Russia, China and Iran a voice on the international governing body that would oversee internet domain systems. "Trusting authoritarian regimes to ensure the continued freedom of the internet is lunacy," Paxton said. "The president does not have the authority to simply give away America's pioneering role in ensuring that the internet remains a place where free expression can flourish."
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Four States Sue To Stop Internet Transition More

Four States Sue To Stop Internet Transition

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  • GAO is right (Score:2, Insightful)

    by phantomfive ( 622387 )
    The GAO is probably right, it doesn't require an act of congress, but the lawsuit only has to delay it long enough for Trump to become president. If Hillary becomes president, then it's pointless.

    It could cause problems if domain names are influence-able by governments hostile to free speech, but If it gets too annoying, we'll all just switch to another name server. They can't keep the speech itself down, only certain domain names. My point is, that in the worst case, it's not the end of the world, and t

    • How exactly then will this work when one DNS server has a record for one Ip address and another points to another such as an anti Putin site?

      Also the DNS is replicated off the core servers and trusted so your solution does not work unless you use your own DNS server but really who does this outside of IT geeks?

      • Re:GAO is right (Score:4, Informative)

        by heypete ( 60671 ) <pete@heypete.com> on Thursday September 29, 2016 @04:58PM (#52985835) Homepage

        How exactly then will this work when one DNS server has a record for one Ip address and another points to another such as an anti Putin site?

        DNSSEC.

        Due to the nature of DNSSEC, so long as the root is trusted all DNSSEC-enabled domains (assuming they're part of a signed TLD) are protected from such forgeries.

        A large-scale attacker could certainly setup their own DNS infrastructure that's essentially the same as the standard system but with some minor modifications to redirect specific domain names to systems they control, but this would cause DNSSEC failures (assuming the resolver supports DNSSEC).

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by heypete ( 60671 )

          Gah. I borked the quoting a bit. Apologies.

      • The top registrars get together and decide to start their own name server. They give some payments to a few of the top ISPs, and it's basically a done deal.

        Let's look at it with a concrete example, of a site that Russia actually tried to block: recently, Russia decided to block pornhub. If it got removed from the top registrar, then everyone who wants to visit pornhub will be upset, and look for alternatives.

      • People seem to be forgetting that IANA _and_ ICANN are on the chopping blocks. Forward look ups could use an alternative service, but what if someone just takes half your IPs away and gives them to someone else because they don't like what your sites do?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        You do not DNS is just the first IP address your computer goes to when resolving a name back to an IP address. You have no power over my computer's DNS request, the entire United States of America has no power over my DNS address preferences be that 8.8.8.8 or 208.67.222.222 or 192.231.203.132 .

        That DNS is nothing much of anything and pretty much just a nickname matcher. In fact they can pretty readily cut back on it's import by listing the IP address with the nickname in the address window of the browse

    • If Hillary becomes president, then it's pointless.

      Not really, even if it's a great idea there's bound to be some negative consequence at some point.

      If Obama is the one that did it then that mini-scandal is politically useless.

      But if it's delayed till after the election then Hillary has to own the decision, and it becomes a talking point for the next election cycle.

  • The only thing of importance IANA has power over is the DNS root zone, but that is just meaningless (yes, lots of real estate value connected to it but in essence its meaningless). If google would be bought by the chinese it would be far worse.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Etcetera ( 14711 )

      It's symbolic, not meaningless. There's actually a lot of meaning there...

      About the only thing worse than having the UN (the majority of members of which are not democracies and don't have much value on free speech) control it would be having GoogleAppleFacebookUmbrellaCorp controlling it.

      • Actually most countries are democracies. Obviously some like Russia are "democracies" but what you're claiming sounds like someone's anti UN talking point.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
          Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • The US is only sometimes a democracy. At the state level we had to basically drag them kicking and crying into equal apportionment, and even then we still have totally messed up representative districts continually being redrawn to cement power relationships. Even a mere 50 years ago it was common place to have grossly unbalanced legislative districts (disproportionate apportionment), denial of voting rights to a very large fraction of hard working and law abiding citizens. The US is new to democracy and

            • The US is new to democracy and still stumbling over it.

              The US has never tried to be a democracy, but it has paid it lip service. If it wanted to be a democracy is would have given the vote to blacks and women to begin with. It was government executed by, of, and for the rich.

      • Well having the US control it is pretty bad too, and it only works because the US government almost totally ignores ICANN anyway which is essentially a private company indirectly controlled by Google, Apple, Facebook, and UmbrellaCorp Subsidiaries.

        Of all the government agencies that Republican libertarians and small government aficionados want to get rid of, ICANN should be the *first* to go. And yet they're suing to keep it? This seems like a good strategy to keep more stuff in government. Let's say PBS

        • Let's say PBS and NPR claim they're going to sell themselves to the Chinese, would that cause the Republicans to start increasing its funding? We could give control of the Department of Education to Canada and see what happens.

          Well, the movement to go back to small govt isn't really about what you're trying to paint it as....

          But there is some good thought to maybe just abolishing the Dept. of Education, and leaving the management of the educational system to the states. Having it on a federal level certai

          • They're not government agencies, but they take some small amount of public funding, just one of millions of companies that get government money (ie, defense contractors noted for their extreme waste which legislators never even dream of hindering).

  • I wonder what his progress is and yes the US constitution clearly says both houses must vote for Obama to do this

  • do it like the communist brother country of north korea and opt out of the imperialist domain name system controlled by the united states! Enter bare ipv4 addresses instead! Its much better because everyone who owns a domain is a filthy capitalist who lives off the hard work of other people! Down with the imperialist west!

  • That our authority over DNS is legally US government property in any sense the framers would have agreed upon, even stretching that concept of property to include intangible property.

    Even if you can argue that DNS is American government property, it's pretty useless property. Since it is largely administered in a decentralized fashion, if the rest of the world wants it can set up its own DNS system and have people in their country point to their preferred root servers.

    • Re:I'd like to hear a coherent argument (Score:4, Informative)

      by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Thursday September 29, 2016 @05:40PM (#52986039) Journal
      Isn't that a pretty easy one? Unless you adhere to a reading of the constitution that allows for virtually no federal government activity at all(in which case ARPA probably shouldn't have ever had the cash to spend on the project; and the Department of Commerce either shouldn't exist or should be a tiny fraction of the size and scope); the US government clearly has the authority to spend allocate DoD funds to an R&D project deemed to be of military interest; to hire somebody to handle the technical work bundled under the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority; and to transfer the contract for the same functions over to the Department of Commerce once it became clear that civilian and commercial applications of the technology were where the action is.

      That doesn't mean that the US has any right to get other people to care what its DNS servers say; what media types it defines, etc; but it takes a pretty narrow reading of their powers to suggest that they don't have the authority to set up a body to publish that sort of thing in the hopes that others will adopt it because being compatible is more valuable than getting to DIY every aspect of the system.

      So far as I know, nobody has ever claimed US authority over 'DNS'(indeed; back in the heady days of the .com bubble, companies trying to get users to point to their nameservers so that they could sell shitty vanity domains were a dime a dozen; and nobody even argued that US nationals had any duty to abide by ICANN-defined names and numbers; it's just that the market value of DNS servers that live in a strange world of their own turned out to be pretty limited). ICANN's authority, to the degree it has any, is founded in the fact that it's a pain in the ass to administer and maintain systems that have drifted out of compatibility with what the majority is using.

      Even today, and for years now, DNS servers and other infrastructure routinely flout ICANN in situations where the benefits are greater than the costs(oddball hostnames on LANs; lazy content blocking by providing bogus IPs for sites you don't want users getting to, just choosing your own damn port because you feel like running your protocol on it, etc.) They pay more attention in places where incompatibility would hurt more: competing claims on various TLDs would get to be quite a mess; your life would really suck if your pet flavor of IP starts to differ enough that you need custom routing hardware, that sort of thing.

      Nobody needs ICANN's blessing to just ignore them; but it's pretty easy to justify the Department of Commerce paying some people to be DNS jockeys.

  • Surprising display of ignorance... (Score:5, Informative)

    by bwcbwc ( 601780 ) on Thursday September 29, 2016 @05:03PM (#52985875)

    One would think that Attorneys General are good enough lawyers to understand the concepts of legal standing and tangible harm. But if they had they wouldn't have wasted taxpayer dollars filing suit on these grounds. Politics as usual in the good old USA.

    • Re:Surprising display of ignorance... (Score:4, Informative)

      by guruevi ( 827432 ) on Thursday September 29, 2016 @06:33PM (#52986265)

      Most politicians are lawyers and their suit makes perfect sense. The Internet domain system was created by DARPA and some/most of the root domain system is still under US (through military, universities and NASA) control and property of the US. The question is obviously whether or not the "virtual" system itself can be meaningfully separated from the physical to where the US is not giving away the system.

      All-in-all, whether or not you want the US to control the system, I also have to wonder as to the reason Obama didn't just send the proposal to congress, there is a reason we have the separation of authority, so the president can't just do as he wish without oversight.

      • Last I checked, the Federal Government didn't run any of the root nameservers so I can't see any way they could be considered to belong to the US (as opposed to the private companies that own them). Not that owning the roots would mean much, since all they do is identify the (privately-owned) nameservers belonging to the various (privately-owned) registries that control the top-level domains. The only TLDs owned by the US Government (ie. the US Government operates the registries for them) are .gov and .mil,

  • I'm confused... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Thursday September 29, 2016 @05:19PM (#52985945) Journal
    Even if one considers the ICANN handoff to be a terrible plan; that still leaves the "and a state would have standing to block this why exactly?" problem unsolved.

    I'm having trouble thinking of a reading of the constitution where one of the several states gets to stop the feds from making a change in management to a Department of Commerce contractor(handling a job previously done by a DoD contractor) overseeing the outgrowth of a federal military research project.

    It'd be like Vermont going to court because they think that selling F-15s to the Saudis is a terrible plan. They may well be entirely correct; but even pretty minimalist readings of the constitution tend to give the feds most of the foreign policy power.

    I'm deeply unclear on what the world thinks they'll get from ICANN that they haven't under US administration; and also unclear on what we have to gain from changing the situation; but I'm still baffled as to what possible standing state governments have on the issue.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      Re "I'm deeply unclear on what the world thinks they'll get from ICANN that they haven't under US administration; and also unclear on what we have to gain from changing the situation; but I'm still baffled as to what possible standing state governments have on the issue."

      The US has protected free speech and even protects freedom after speech. The press is also fully protected from gov, mil.

      A lot of other nations hate that and a lot of leaders and people hate their politics, style of gov, police actions
      • Cool story bro. Too bad the real truth is that ICANN will just keep on operating the same as it always have and nobody will notice any difference at all.
      • While I fully agree that (while we sometimes do our best to pretend otherwise) US constitutional protections of speech are vastly better than the world's in general, even the parts not commonly considered to be despotic hellholes; and I think that letting Team Morality into the TLD business will be a clusterfuck; it isn't clear that ICANN being under US contract ensures that US standards prevail on the internet; or that the aforementioned clusterfuck is avoided.

        Since ICANN has no actual teeth, aside from

    • Even if one considers the ICANN handoff to be a terrible plan; that still leaves the "and a state would have standing to block this why exactly?" problem unsolved.

      This is actually a pretty easy question to answer. Just bring up a map of red vs. blue states. It has nothing to do with "we have the authority to do this" and everything to do with "screw you, you pansy Democrats".

  • Wake up white people! (Score:3, Funny)

    by PopeRatzo ( 965947 ) on Thursday September 29, 2016 @05:44PM (#52986053) Journal

    It's about time we have a president who really gets the cyber.

    https://youtu.be/bYJ_H2c5IWc [youtu.be]

    • Considering that "Cyber" is often used as a slang term for cybersex, it was all I could do to not bust a gut laughing while listening to him drone on about whatever he might have thought he was talking about.

  • Alternative; Countries Unite to Create New System (Score:4, Funny)

    by FrodoOfTheShire ( 3459835 ) on Thursday September 29, 2016 @05:56PM (#52986111)
    Politicians in the US want to keep control because it gives the US an advantage. The point of transferring control to ICANN is because countries do not like the US holding control and having that advantage. If the US takes their ball and goes home, the other countries have a plan to create their own system. Either the US will have to join the new system or get shut out of E-Commerce internationally. The reason they are considering a transfer to ICANN is because they will still have some influence.

    So either share the ball, or the other kids will just buy their own ball and won't let the US play.

  • The internet has been a wholly commercial entity for decades now.

    If the government wanted to keep control of it, they shouldn't have handed it over, practically for free, to the various commercial interests that now have a stranglehold. It's a bit late to be complaining about it being "US property".

  • Goodbye, internet! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mveloso ( 325617 ) on Thursday September 29, 2016 @06:17PM (#52986225)

    The internet has flourished in many ways because it's been controlled by a liberal free market country like the United States. The US is all about free speech, free flow of ideas, etc - much more so than any other country on Earth.

    For most of the countries on Earth the idea of free speech (as in "say anything you want") is an alien concept. Go ahead and say something bad about the Thai royals in Thailand. How about registering "putinsucks.ru"? Have fun in the gulag.

    Hey, you're going to create a website that competes against the national phone company? Good luck with that, little toad. You're going to blog about how government ministers are idiots? Yeah, goodbye to that too.

    It'll happen slowly, and accelerate over time, like everything.

    It only takes one bureaucrat to decide that zombo.com is a threat to the world order, and bam it's gone.

    If anything, the whole-hearted embrace of the "world internet" here shows that most slashdot readers never left their parents' basement.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by FrodoOfTheShire ( 3459835 )
      If you are ranking countries by freedom of speech, then the US is only ranked 41st in the world as ranked by the 2016 World Press Freedom Index.

      • There may be some countries that have even more freedom of speech than the US, but the USA still produces more words. Therefore it does, mathematically, have more free speech than any other county on Earth. USA! USA! (c'mon everybody)

        I'm not American but I didn't feel particularly oppressed by the country who invented the internet overseeing this function. But I would also be surprised if it turns out that Americans are the only decent, freedom loving people in the world.

    • Please tell me this is satire.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by SEE ( 7681 )

      The control you speak of is nonexistent.

      As a technical matter, anybody can set up their own root servers, and anybody can aim their machines to point at different root servers. The maximum damage anyone can do with control of any particular root servers is to make people have to decide to re-aim at an alternative.

      As a legal manner, any less-liberal country can already try to pass a law censoring root servers -- Turkey did that to its ISPs. Since Turkey couldn't control root servers outside of Turkey, thou

    • The US is all about free speech, free flow of ideas, etc - much more so than any other country on Earth.

      You mean free speech agreeing with a corporate agenda, and free flow of ideas that suit the people in power.

      I think the US were the first to persecute people linking to content of others for commercial reasons. I think the US were the first to persecute someone for putting a 3D model online for download. I think the US were the first to seize domains at the request of a dying industry. Certainly it was the US who proposed a model that allows a corporation to nuke any content you put online without establish

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