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!

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

UN guidance to ICANN subject to veto by any member.

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.”

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?

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.

Go here for the 411

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

(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.