Senator Wants to Keep U.N. Away From the Internet 1149
Martin Boleman writes "ZDNet reports that Sen. Norm Coleman, a Republican from Minnesota, said his nonbinding resolution would protect the Internet from a takeover by the United Nations that's scheduled to be discussed at a summit in Tunisia next month. "The Internet is likely to face a grave threat, If we fail to respond appropriately, we risk the freedom and enterprise fostered by this informational marvel and end up sacrificing access to information, privacy and protection of intellectual property we have all depended on." he said in a statement."
Norm Coleman? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:freedom? (Score:3, Informative)
I guess you missed the bit of the UN being a global [often waste of breath] effort.
You'd be surprised to learn that while the US started the net it's other nations that carry it to where it is today.
You think all that routing, networking and software you use was invented in the US? Oh, ok.
Tom
Re:Statist Musical Chairs (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Statist Musical Chairs (Score:4, Informative)
Are you kidding?
- Most BT torrents reference trackers by domain name. Of course this could change, but existing torrents would break instantly if DNS went down.
- Google links pages by domain names when they have them. They might be able to reindex everything by IP address, but it would certianly be nontrivial. Also, I'll bet you load Google via its google.com domain name and not by its IP address.
- I'd also wager that over 95% of your bookmarks link domain names instead of IP addresses. Expect every one of them to break if DNS were to suddenly disappear.
DNS will never go away simply because business don't want to put raw, hard to remember IP addresses on advertisements when they can put www.mcdonalds.com instead.
There seems tobe a misconception... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Statist Musical Chairs (Score:4, Informative)
DNS is also use full for other stuff (Score:5, Informative)
- providing load balancing.
By the fact they can point to different IP each time.
You can have a single domain name like "wikipedia.org" or "google.*" or "pool.ntp.org" pointing to numerous servers accross the globe and thus distibute the load.
Old way (providing a list of mirrors) requires the server the contains the mirror list to be able to sustain connextion from ALL users. And adds a cumbersome step to the process.
- server co-sharing.
A server is usually referred by a single IP addresse.
Assigning multiple name to the same server enables you to have different websites depending on used servername.
Most of the cheap server solution uses this.
- dynamic IP
dynip.org and such. (see problems with load-balancing vs. on-line lists above)
- DNS used for everything else, including kitchen sink.
DNS are also used for listing Spammers,
listing botnets and other black-lists,
listing E164 number to VoIP maps,
what ever else.
DNS are often used as convenient lists, with standart interface.
doublespeak is not in full effizzect. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Can someone explain this to me? (Score:3, Informative)
To have an organization that is so allergic to the public be in charge of a public resource is absurd.
Re:freedom? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:freedom? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Statist Musical Chairs (Score:4, Informative)
DNS makes the Internet easy to use. How many external IP addresses can you recite from memory? When we moveto IPV6 addresses, will you remember an address like "2001:0db8:85a3:08d3:1319:8a2e:0370:7334/64"?
Google DOES make use of DNS names-- it's in the search result. If you rely too much on Google to browse the web, you are giving up some control to rely on a centralized power. I'd be willing to bet that all of your bookmarks use DNS names as well.
In the time before DNS, people STILL didn't want to remember all those long IP addresses, and usually stored a name/IP map as a host file on the local machine. And there was much confusion when the host files fell out of sync, and thus a centralized name service was created to deal with this confusion.
Re:freedom? (Score:2, Informative)
One thing about this Senator (Score:1, Informative)
Re:freedom? (Score:2, Informative)
Concider MPAA censoring 2600 magazine for posting links to DeCSS.
How about the use of the DMCA to pull down information off the net because it is "Copyrighted"
Perhpas I am mistaken but I seem to rember many articles here about of censorship occuring in the US on the internet.
I don't belive our record is clean.
Re:Norm Coleman? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:But who forced the ratings system onto the game (Score:5, Informative)
And banning children from certain innapropriate content, while consenting adults can freely play that content (and companies can freely publish that content) hardly constitutes censorship. That would be like saying that laws stating a 14 year old cant have sex with a 30 year old violate the 14 year old's rights (whereas most developed countries have statutory rape laws, and consider them a good thing).
Re:freedom? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Can someone explain this to me? (Score:3, Informative)
You're absolutly right, countries don't liek being told what to do by other countries. Sort of like what other countries are trying to do to the US over DNS.
As for ICANN, you don't know any of that. All you know is that they dropped the community voters. You don't know how they're structured internally, or whether they are playing favorites, or much of anything else.
All things considered, if people want it fixed, then we should be working to fix ICANN, rather than pissing between national governments.
Re:No, the UN doesn't want to take over the Intern (Score:5, Informative)
You give it away for free.
Protocols maybe, but the US did NOT give 'the Internet' away for free to other countries. On the contrary, other countries have all paid huge amounts of money to install their own network infrastructure in their own countries (and in fact the US charges money for connecting to the US's portions of the Internet - it's a purely for profit enterprise not a charity). I'm sorry, but if I paid to create a network, I damn well have the right to say how it's run and who controls it. Same goes for any country.
Re:freedom? (Score:3, Informative)
Celebrate a regime? We're talking about a game where your whole mission is to kill nazis and their mythical secret weapons of war. If that's a celebration it explains why people intentionally go out on holidays and drink alcohol to "get trashed".
Let's face it, the Nazi thing is something that happened. Germany had no choice after WWII but to impose a kind of self-revulsion any time the Nazi thing ever came up. The only way to not have the whole world hate them forever was to hate themselves even more. This kind of self-loathing may have been diplomatically necessary at some point (though clearly every world power has at some point gotten carried away with war) but I am of the opinion that it is intrinsically harmful in that it is a sincere self-effacement and if you tell yourself something for long enough, you will believe it.
You may have missed the whole "U.N." thing. While united nations is something of an oxymoron, the UN likes to make usually toothless mandates that define things supposedly equally for all countries. How would you like ending up not being able to buy Nazi shit on ebay in Amerikkka because Germany ended up too powerful on the U.N. Internet Council?
Ultimately, there is no reason whatsoever why the U.N. needs to be involved with the internet at all. The whole idea of the internet is that it is peer to peer, so there is no need for a central worldwide governing body, and frankly there is little need for any governing body aside from for doling out IPs. The internet may have started in government but it is privatized today and for the most part, working fine.
If there is a problem it is that there are a few organizations which are entirely too powerful in the system. The continuing proliferation of internet-connected devices and the ongoing uptake of the internet by basically everyone on the planet (some places far more slowly than others of course) will lead us to a world in which it is practical to use alternate name resolution systems and so on. The larger the market, the more niches are created... So the 'net can become a far more abuse-resistant organism than it is today, and the need for [probably corrupt] overseers will decrease with time, not increase.
The more bureaucracies you involve in a system, the more inefficient it will become. Handing the 'net to the U.N. is a bad idea.
Re:Pot, Kettle (Score:3, Informative)
Sadly, that is about the extent of his "good guy" behavior. He is a political opportunist of the worst kind, and it makes me sad for the Republican party if this type of guy represents the new generation (Not that the current one has done much for the party).
Re:freedom? (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-
Also note that the article indicates that the soldiers didn't ask the questions - they answered them. The "coaching" was so that the soldiers knew which other soldier was best suited to answer particular questions. The soldiers would then know whom to hand the microphone to next, based on the question that was asked. They weren't told how to answer.
http://www.armytimes.com/story.php?f=1-292925-117
Nevertheless, the Democrats and Jon Stewart spout kneejerk nonsense as to what was going on, and all the Bush haters out there take it as gospel truth.
Re:freedom? (Score:3, Informative)
They are also not allowed to be displayed in places where kids could see them, they can only be sold to adults, this also eliminates any mail order.
That is not censorship. Censorship would remove those games from the market entirely. This just restricts access to minors, similar to your AO rating.
Besides, do you have any idea how LONG it takes for this "censorship" to kick in? It can be months, because they only look at these things once someone complains to them, then they have to look at it. They don't just go out on their own to find and get rid of those games.
Re:Screw them (Score:2, Informative)
From wikipedia on Tim Berners-Lee:
"After leaving CERN in 1980 to work at John Poole's Image Computer Systems Ltd, he returned in 1984 as a fellow. By 1989, CERN's internet site was the largest in Europe, and Berners-Lee saw an opportunity to marry hypertext and internet. In his words, "I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the TCP and DNS ideas and -- ta-da! -- the World Wide Web" [1]. He used similar ideas to those underlying the Enquire system to create the World Wide Web, for which he designed and built the first browser (called WorldWideWeb and developed on NeXTSTEP) and the first web server simply called httpd (which was short for HyperText Transfer Protocol daemon)."
From wikipedia on web-browsers:
"Tim Berners-Lee, who pioneered the use of hypertext for sharing information, created the first web browser, named WorldWideWeb, in 1990 and introduced it to colleagues at CERN in March 1991. Since then the development of web browsers has been inseparably intertwined with the development of the web itself."
Hypertext and the hyertext to tcp/dns connection was made at cern, that he later made the w3c in massachussets is a totally different story.
Of course, trolling AC's don't care about facts....
Incorrect. (Score:3, Informative)
For example. In the second meeting of this body that wants to govern the Internet, Brazil had this to say; http://www.wgig.org/docs/Brazil.pdf [wgig.org]
Madame Chair,
Allow me to focus our discussion on internet governance beyond Principles and towards practical matters that our citizens are in need. Our citizens are demanding cheaper access. This could be translated here by:
a) lower internet interconnection costs;
b) affordable hardware;
c) free and open source software;
c) regional administration of the root server system;
d) national administration of courty code top level domains (ccTLSs);
I'm sure there's a joke in there regarding reasons c & c but the whole flavor of the language is interesting. What even half of that has to do with a hands off administrative control I have no idea. This governing body is somehow going to make all this happen?
The EU reps had this to say; http://www.wgig.org/docs/EU-PrepCom.doc [wgig.org]
As we have had the opportunity to state before, the EU believes that the WGIG should concentrate on the stable and secure functioning of the Internet, by addressing issues related to:
The organisation and administration of naming and numbering, including the operation of the root server system;
The internationalisation of Internet Governance, taking into account public interest concerns and participation of developing countries in the governance structures;
The stability, dependability and robustness of the Internet, including the impact of spam.
Spam? Well, that sounds to me like this new governing body wants to control content (which is evidenced elsewhere by UN reps, this is really no revelation but few people seem to see it or wish to look for the motivations behind this move). If all they want to do is sing Kumbaya and peacefully administer some DNS server then why, pray tell would they have anything to do with spam control? What's spam to Brazil, yet information to another? The great thing about the Internet is what makes the Internet a bad place at the same time, freedom. The examples of UN reps citing issues OTHER than DNS administration are numerous and distrubing. They want to actively participate in governing a rich and wonderfully free form of communication and trade. It's time that some government officials here in US started asking themselves why. We need more libitarian thinkers like Coleman and I don't care which side of the political isle they come from.