US control over Internet dominates discussion at UN conference in Brazil

Source: Sydney Morning Herald

US control over Internet dominates discussion at UN conference in Brazil
November 13, 2007 - 10:05AM

U.S. control over how Internet addresses are assigned _ and thus how people around the world access e-mail and Web sites _ dominated discussions as a major U.N. conference on the Internet opened here Monday.

Although few participants at the Internet Governance Forum attacked the United States directly, most were well aware of the role Americans play over domain name policies, including whether and how to assign suffixes in languages besides English.

"The Internet is transnational. It can't be under the authority of one country or even some countries," said Brazil's Culture Minister Gilberto Gil, who is also a major pop star here, setting the conference's tone at the opening ceremony. "The Internet should be the territory of everyone."

The Internet Governance Forum, an annual conference to discuss emerging issues including spam and cheaper access to the Internet, resulted from a compromise world leaders reached at a U.N. summit in Tunisia two years ago. There, they agreed to let the United States remain in charge, but to keep discussing the issue over the course of five years.



Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/news/Technology/US-control-over-Internet-dominates-discussion-at-UN-conference-inBrazil/2007/11/13/1194766629313.html

like GPS, the us retains control of the system it invented. Like GPS another nation has the ability to sink the billions into a system to duplicate ours.

The us remains in charge because if you look at a map of data flows, the us is a massive hub for data.

My 2 cents.

if other nations want it they can sink billions of dollars in to it themselves.

an internationally shared commodity may be its saving grace. The US is already falling behind in broadband development and we've got corporate sharks heading Comcast, AT&T, et al., salivating at the chance to "control" the Internet. Our capitalistic tendencies may want to hold some notion of "ownership", but communication is International. The need to share ideas knows no borders. Generally, control by a small set of entities who seek to profit by that control has the sad consequence of making the commodity scarce and expensive. The human race is being transformed by the Internet. There are people out there very afraid of that, especially if it doesn't make them a huge profit. But spreading it out globally and keeping it from depending on any type of centralization will keep it alive for as much of a future as we've got.

I'm hopeful for this. The Internet throughout the developed Asian Pacific countries is prolific. Europe as well. They are innovative and resourceful. And don't think for a second they aren't grateful to the US for the initial development or have a deep respect for this aspect of our culture. But our propensity towards war and cannibalistic capitalism will always keep others at least arms length from us and will serve as motivation to be independent of US influence.

The Internet is global, after all: do you think the US government funded the huge infrastructure investment involved in building networks worldwide? And then there's the intellectual development, which has been international too: to name an obvious example, there wouldn't be a web if it weren't for Tim Berners-Lee, a Brit then working at CERN, a European institution.

Let's be clear: what this article is talking about is control of domain namespace, rather than stuff costing "billions of dollars". When you type a name like www.democraticunderground.com into your browser, that needs to be converted to an IP address with the aid of DNS servers. Parts of the namespace can be delegated: for example, country-specific top-level domains are generally controlled by name registries in the appropriate countries. But the hierarchical nature of the namespace means that the name resolution process ultimately depends on a small number of "root nameservers" at the top, and whoever controls those nameservers effectively controls the namespace globally. What many people (including Americans) are saying is that it's not good for this global network for the root to be in partisan hands.

There have in the past been various attempts to set up alternate root nameservers. In terms of hardware, it can be done without must cost. But it's a doomed enterprise, because unless everyone updates their configuration to use your root servers instead of the official ones, yours won't be used. And anyway, having competing namespaces would be a disaster: imagine if a name worked on your office computer but not your home one, or if www.somecompany.com pointed at two entirely different companies depending on which computer you used. No, the root is a natural monopoly, but is it good for it to be in the hands of a widely distrusted government, rather than a genuinely international body?

from what I remember ownership has been transfered over to ICANN from internic in the late 90s. This is a non-profit organization not directly controlled by the US government. In fact many of their board members aren't from the US.

It is a collection of technologies far more advanced than a simple packet network of yesteryear, heck you can keep that rinky dink. It is like claiming that Africa invented the car because they invented the wheel.

The world has no technological or industrial limitations in creating a parallel and democratic internet, just that it wishes to avoid a facture.

There is no such problem with GPS, and that is why there is a Glonnass and soon Galileo.

Flame away. But, as with any technology, there have to be standards in order for the technology to work.

And someone has to develop and enforce those standards. If not, you'd have an Internet that only worked on Windows computers, and another one that only worked on Macs, and so on.

Trust me on this one. There are still some things that America does right, and this is one of them.

Redstone

it is itself an international body, however, all changes to the root zone file have to be approved by the U.S. government. We also have the W3C and several other organizations, and networks, worldwide, that develop standards that my be incorporated into W3C or standards of communication.

I'm not usually a person to tell other countries to piss off, but this is one where I have no problem telling them to "deal with it". Go invent your own. There's no technical reason you can't have two Internets, as long as you pick one or the other.

JK.

I'm quite unnerved by the abuse of power in our country and can see both points but
Redstone I do trust what you're saying and thanks for an informative discussion.