18 Comments

1. Hellbilly:

Roger,

I agree wholeheartedly with you, myself (follow homelink) and another have posted on this at Redstate, I include a couple of additional links, such as the WSIS’s Declarartion of Principles, and the State Dept.’s David Gross’s comments on the subject. I hope you’ll give it a read and I also hope that we can begin a “porkbuster’s” type e-mail campaign on this matter.

Oct 9, 2005 - 10:38 am 2. Hellbilly:

Roger,

I agree wholeheartedly with you, myself (follow homelink) and another have posted on this at Redstate, I include a couple of additional links, such as the WSIS’s Declarartion of Principles, and the State Dept.’s David Gross’s comments on the subject. I hope you’ll give it a read and I also hope that we can begin a “porkbuster’s” type e-mail campaign on this matter.

Oct 9, 2005 - 10:39 am 3. Victor Eremita:

If you really want steam to come out your ears, you should read the Guardian’s account of this little attempted UN-EU coup: the article stinks of the usual anti-US, anti-capitalist bias which wants badly to see the Net safely ensconced in soft, thick, plushy layers of transnational bureaucracy. At the same time, the author mentions without comment–seemingly without noticing–the major players pushing for this new governing body: China, Iran, Cuba, Brazil, several African countries (anyone want to bet Zimbabwe’s one of them?). A veritable rogues’ gallery of the world’s worst tyrants. And the EU and UN, predictably, follow along behind licking the floor.

Oct 9, 2005 - 12:44 pm 4. Darleen:

The WSJ article doesn’t quite give one the same sense of urgency on this matter that this one does — IE the EU is announcing its just going to pull a coup d’etat on the US/ICANN:

Old allies in world politics, representatives from the UK and US sat just feet away from each other, but all looked straight ahead as Hendon explained the EU had decided to end the US government’s unilateral control of the internet and put in place a new body that would now run this revolutionary communications medium.

The only way this can happen is if the US rolls over and takes it, wrongly believing dipolomatic expediency plus crossing one’s fingers will stave off mischief from the likes of China, Iran and the EU.

The root servers are HERE. The routers to those servers are HERE. Maybe we ought to just shutdown for a couple of hours all traffic into/out of the US and see where it leaves them. Then they can shut up about the Internet as a “global resource” that demands “global authority”. Yeah, right…get back to us when y’all stick the world’s “oil” under that rubric.

:::grumble:::

Oct 9, 2005 - 12:51 pm 5. photoncourier.blogspot.com:

Can you imagine if we had Al Gore as President? Given his internationalist beliefs and his proprietary feelings toward the Internet, he would probably have enthusiastically gone along with handing control over the UN. I would guess the same would have been true for Kerry.

Oct 9, 2005 - 3:25 pm 6. photoncourier.blogspot.com:

Can you imagine if we had Al Gore as President? Given his internationalist beliefs and his proprietary feelings toward the Internet, he would probably have enthusiastically gone along with handing control over the UN. I would guess the same would have been true for Kerry.

Oct 9, 2005 - 3:25 pm 7. djpr:

Funny how I just started my blog last night – (strategyunit.blogsome.com) partly because I felt news like this was underreported.

First off to Roger L. Simon:

I am not sure if youre argument is a libertarian one. A libertarian solution would be a decentralized root server system – one that is not controlled by any government, which it is right now. But, I agree with your overall opinion entirely.

Second to Darleen:

Yes, the rootservers are HERE (in the US), I dont believe that technically stops any other country from setting up their own DNS root servers. In this scenerio, what would we have a is a fractured Internet – where some each country/region sets-up their own rootserver, controlling what can be accessed or not.

Oct 9, 2005 - 4:11 pm 8. Andy Freeman:

Anyone can set up a root server, the questions/issues are

(1) Who will use it

(2) What will it contain

A country might force all of the resident ISPs to use the “national” root server, but that doesn’t stop individuals from getting their DNS from somewhere else. If they take technical means to stop that, folks will start using hosts.txt (a local file to satisfy dns requests). At some point, they’ll have to block/reroute packets from going to the “wrong” IP addresses, and there are a lot of “wrong” addresses (including folks that do packet forwarding) and they’re constantly changing.

Note that a “corrupt” root server (resolving “free-tibet.org” as “police.”) would provoke much the same response.

Oct 9, 2005 - 4:25 pm 9. lindenen:

Somebody in the Pentagon needs to make a note that retaining control of the internet should be a key national security objective. And this needs to be widely circulated in the government. Congress should adopt a resolution telling the autocrats to shove it.

Also, maybe we need to finally ding the UN when it comes to financing? Just once? Pretty please. Chop the budget in half and tell them the topic is not up for discussion.

Oct 9, 2005 - 4:25 pm 10. Andrew X:

Maybe Andy Freeman up there or someone else can help me here, and please do try to keep the jargon to a minimum

Oct 9, 2005 - 4:48 pm 11. Pamela aka "Atlas":

This has been going on since February will little attention being paid………I’ve been all over like a cheap suit

Go here for the 411

UN, World Body to Silence the Internet and Blogs; Information Control

Oct 9, 2005 - 4:51 pm 12. OrangeEnt:

Agreed. I also blogged this subject more than once.

http://ahshoot.blogspot.com/2005/09/un-confiscates-americans-registered.html

http://ahshoot.blogspot.com/2005/09/america-must-control-internet.html

http://ahshoot.blogspot.com/2005/10/un-tries-to-strong-arm-us-over.html

The fact of the matter is, not just that someone else wants to control the internet, but that the ones pushing for it are evildoers. The illegitimate governments of China, Cuba, Zimbabwe and the like have no intention of making the internet more free, they want to use it to stamp in the face of freedom. We have to do something about it.

Oct 9, 2005 - 5:07 pm 13. Patrick Tyson:

Gage didn’t contribute to the code in Berkeley Unix, but he spent plenty of time hanging around the computer rooms in Evans Hall, gabbing with Joy and pondering the political implications of the computer revolution. Gage, a mathematical statistics graduate student at Berkeley, was also a hippie radical from way back — involved in both the Free Speech Movement and the antiwar protests. He was a delegate for Bobby Kennedy at the Democratic Convention in 1968 and deputy press secretary for presidential candidate George McGovern in 1972.

After three hours in Gage’s favorite Berkeley coffee shop exploring what the Internet means for individual liberty and what role Berkeley Unix played in catalyzing the Internet’s growth, Gage rolls his memories back to perhaps the single most-famous moment in Berkeley’s history of activism.

He starts quoting the speech Mario Savio gave on the steps of the administration building overlooking Sproul Plaza. He hunches over the table, his eyes blazing with a sudden visceral intensity:

“‘There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious,’” declaims Gage, “‘makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!’”

Gage grins. Berkeley Unix, he proposes, offered a different way forward from the painful agony of hurling oneself into the operation of a demonic crankshaft. Berkeley Unix, with its source code available to all who wanted it, was the “gears and levers” of the machine. By promoting access to the source code, to the inner workings of that machine, the free-software/open-source movement empowered people to place their hands on the gears and levers, to take control of their computers, their Internet, their entire technological infrastructure.

“The open-source movement is a free speech movement,” says Gage. “Source code looks like poetry, but it’s also a machine — words that do. Unix opens up the discourse in the machinery because the words in Unix literally cause action, and those actions will cause other actions.”

Savio is dead. The Free Speech Movement is half-forgotten. Few, if any, of its participants would have predicted at the time that a network of computers might prove to be free speech’s greatest friend and best weapon. Indeed, Savio’s “machine” was in part a metaphor for what he saw as the dehumanization inherent in information technology: The University of California was IBM, the students were punch cards, both literally and figuratively, fed into the machine, not to be folded, spindled or mutilated.

The Berkeley Unix hackers, by helping to unleash the power of the Internet, rehumanized the “machine.” Those “words that do” instigated connectivity and provoked communication. Somewhere, Savio is smiling.

—Andrew Leonard, Salon, May 16, 2000

http://www.salon.com/tech/fsp/2000/05/16/chapter_2_part_one/print.html

My association with computing began in those computer rooms in Evans Hall in 1977 and I’d already begun to walk away from that association when (what a surprise) nothing happened on 1/1/00 and when (what a surprise) something did on 3/10/00. When I read the above article that May I was reminded of the great good done by people I’d occaisionally seen and listened to to make so much information available to anyone and everyone with access to an IP address.

Now, perhaps, that great good is threatened. I write perhaps because the folks headquartered even further up the road (El Segundo is on more-or-less the same road)in Marina Del Rey (ICANN) were, in my view, a possible threat to that great good back in May 2000 and not much regarding them seems to have changed since so I’m not sure that this challenge might not, in the end, result in a more open, democratic and independent single custodian of the assigned names and numbers. Stranger things have happened.

ICANN in May 2000…

http://www.cookreport.com/isoccontrol.shtml

There’s something happening here…

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/kirkmck.html

Does paranoia strike deep?

Oct 9, 2005 - 10:30 pm 14. David Thomson:

Oct 10, 2005 - 4:51 am 15. Jamie Irons:

I think we should go them one better, and invite the Arab League to take over the ‘Net.

Those fellows have demonstrated a talent for mismanagement, corruption, malevolence and fraud that surely rivals that of the UN.

Sometimes the reductio ad absurdum is the boldest and best strategy.*

Jamie Irons

*G.H. Hardy: “…reductio ad absurdum is one of a mathematician’s finest weapons. It is a far finer gambit than any chess gambit: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but the mathematician offers the game.”

Oct 10, 2005 - 7:30 am 16. submandave:

Roger, I’d consent to UN control over the Internet with three conditions:All current rules/policies to be initially accepted as-is.

ICANN empowered to decide relevent matters unless given specific guidance from the UN.

UN guidance to ICANN subject to veto by any member.

Oct 10, 2005 - 2:07 pm 17. LC Mamapajamas:

Andrew X: “Yes, the idea of the UN running the Internet gives one the shudders, but how can they do it? ”

Good question. I’ve been rolling on the floor laughing hysterically since I heard about this. How can the UN actually believe that they can somehow “control” the Internet? Garden variety hackers would be ten steps ahead of them from day one, never mind the pros! Sure, if they have the servers they could shut it down (and what good would it be to them shut down?), but “control” what’s happening when its up? LOL!

Oct 10, 2005 - 3:56 pm 18. rosignol:

Why should I be concerned here? Yes, the idea of the UN running the Internet gives one the shudders, but how can they do it? The only threat I have heard against US control is that other nations may decide to form

Oct 11, 2005 - 12:08 am

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