SCI/TECH: U.S. to Retain Oversight of Web Traffic

The United States has recently announced that it will retain oversight of the 13 primary root servers on the Internet. This was in response to an increase in security threats and the Internet's global reliance for both commerce and communication. This decision was met with some concern from foreign officials who would like to see an international entity oversee web traffic as opposed to the U.S. Commerce Department.



The article caught my attention for several reasons. For one, it's another example of the U.S. taking control of an international interest without the consultation of other nations. It's actions like these that are making the U.S. increasingly unpopular among other countries, in my opinion.
Another disturbing part is the worst-case scenario. The thought of two users typing the same domain name reaching entirely different Web sites would make us more isolated. One of the things I love most about the Internet is the ability to reach people of all nationalities for both commerce and communication.

Related News Links:
www.ntia.doc.gov

[edit on 1-7-2005 by FreeThinking1]

[edit on 1-7-2005 by FreeThinking1]

That's typical of the USA - I would be deeply concerned by such an act aimed solely at direct control. They would be able to further censor and feed selective, directed infomation. Also, its another noticeable move towards isolationism it seems, which may be a good idea actually. I have a theory that one day the USA is simply going to be consumed and eroded from within by its own intensely driven paranoia and finally, implode, all without a single foreign power ever having to invade it haha!
Also, I can't believe nobody else has picked up on this thread yet...

personaly i think that since the internet IS a worldwide systom it should be governed (if at all) by an international commitee. there is no reason that the states should have so much power over something that realy does not belong to any spacific country but is utilized by all.

Let it fracture. The United States is 1 country out of 193 and if two separate internets develop you can guarantee it will be US internet and World internet.

No country will willingly succumb to unilateral governance and potential censorship from the United States.

If the goal of this is to isolate the American citizenry from the rest of the World, they are going the right way of achieving it.

Originally posted by FreeThinking1
The article caught my attention for several reasons. For one, it's another example of the U.S. taking control of an international interest without the consultation of other nations.

Ummm, excuse me? Taking control? I don't think so.

The US controls the major root servers for one reason and one reason alone, they built the internet from scratch. Its not a question of them taking control, its a question of giving up something that they built and is rightfully theirs.

If they US decides to relinquish control, that is their choice to make, if they decide not to, thats also their choice to make.

Wupy

They (Americans) built the internet from scratch? Thats revisionism at its more arrogant.

The World Wide Web that we all use, and is the extent of our internet activities, was made by CERN in 1991. CERN is a European research centre.

CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the world's largest particle physics laboratory, situated on the border between France and Switzerland, just west of Geneva. It is the world's largest research centre for particle physics and the birthplace of the World Wide Web. The convention establishing it was signed on September 29, 1954. From the original 12 signatories of the CERN convention, membership has grown to the present 20 Member States.

Wiki on CERN

Before you explode because some non-American's are claiming partial credit for the internet that we use today, I know that ARPA pioneered the internet, but they did not do it all by themselves. The internet, as its name implies, is an international enterprise and is not the sole property of any one country. The 13 servers this article relates to does not equate to the "internet", it merely represents a large portion of it.

If the Americans want to renege on their promise to internationalize the equipment I think we have a right to voice our dismay. We can replace this hardware if need be and none of us non-Americans will care.

[edit on 6/7/05 by subz]

That is not revisionism.

Names and numbers are pure Internet, not the worldwide web and HTML and HTTP.

DNS was developed entirely in the United States.

so build your own servers-- we won't ask for a share in controlling them.

And what part of the internet do we all use? The ARPA concieved section? Or the WWW?

The part of the "internet" that the world uses is the world wide web. The term internet is used incorrectly.

Originally posted by djohnsto77
That is not revisionism.

Names and numbers are pure Internet, not the worldwide web and HTML and HTTP.

DNS was developed entirely in the United States.

100 % Correct. Here is a short history of the inventor.

en.wikipedia.org...

Dr. Paul V. Mockapetris proposed a Domain Name System (DNS) architecture in 1983 in RFCs 882 and 883 while at the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) of the University of Southern California.

He had recognised the problem in the early Internet (then ARPAnet) of holding name to address translations in a single table on a single host, and instead proposed a distributed and dynamic DNS database: essentially DNS as we have it today. Together with Jon Postel, he is acknowledged as the inventor of DNS.

Mockapetris received two bachelor's degrees (in Physics and in Electrical Engineering) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1971, and his PhD in Information and Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine in 1982.

Subz the Internet still works on the principals of DNS. Under every address name there is a number that looks like this 127.1.1.0:666 or something like that the WWW would not be possible without such an indexing system.

[edit on 6-7-2005 by sardion2000]

[edit on 6-7-2005 by sardion2000]

For once I agree with the moves of the US, but from a practical standpoint. Under guard in the US the primary DNS servers have been well taken care of, probably better so than our nuclear research facilities. So far the stewards of the 13 primary servers have managed to fend off directed attacks at taking them down, so having a track record like that I think its just fine for the servers to stay here in the US.

Secondly if you frequent the Internet Traffic Report website, you will notice a trend of packet loss across Europe, Australia, and Europe, where as North and South america maintain a relatively high and stable rating. Now I'm not directly slagging the other countries IT staff (I'd never want that many fellow geeks pissed off at me) but quite frankly if a handful of those servers were hosted in say Asia (which has a rather naff rating on ITF right now, it would affect not only them but everyone who used the servers.

Quite frankly as long as the decision making process remains distributed among the various countries I don't see where theres any problem with the servers remaining in the US, they have been safe here so far, so no point trying to fix a system thats not broken.

No country will willingly succumb to unilateral governance and potential censorship from the United States.

I would just like to point out that controlling the DNS servers is not censorship, its just some management. Hosting providers, ISPs, and other such entities will be responsible for content, the DNS servers just provide a way for microsoft.com to resolve to the IP address 207.46.250.119. Quite frankly without DNS or something like it the Internet as we know it would cease to exist as the average home user would have no interest in remembering dozens and dozens of IP addresses.

Originally posted by subz
Before you explode because some non-American's are claiming partial credit for the internet that we use today, I know that ARPA pioneered the internet, but they did not do it all by themselves. The internet, as its name implies, is an international enterprise and is not the sole property of any one country. The 13 servers this article relates to does not equate to the "internet", it merely represents a large portion of it.

If the Americans want to renege on their promise to internationalize the equipment I think we have a right to voice our dismay. We can replace this hardware if need be and none of us non-Americans will care.

*sigh* I knew this conversation would arise. I even said that ARPA pioneered the internet. How is that incorrect??

To 99.9% of us, the WWW IS the internet. Although it technically isnt the "internet" it is what we all use and refer to as such. The United States cannot prevent us all from using the DNS system. We also cannot unlearn the DNS system. Also there are other DNS servers and the United States does not own them all.

As such its the WWW that is important to us. Its this segment of the internet that we are concerned with, and what this article relates to. You know, the segment that was developed by CERN

I'd rather the "who has internet bragging rights" argument didnt get rehashed again. Its SO boring.

[edit on 6/7/05 by subz]

Originally posted by mrwupy
The US controls the major root servers for one reason and one reason alone, they built the internet from scratch. Its not a question of them taking control, its a question of giving up something that they built and is rightfully theirs.

If they US decides to relinquish control, that is their choice to make, if they decide not to, thats also their choice to make.

Sorry to say, but although the US can take credit for developing the original network that has now become the Internet, they can take as much credit to making the internet as some 2 man factory would be able to take credit for making the spaceshuttle because they created 1 bolt in the entire thing. Or like a programmer that wrote 1 header file for linux claiming he owns and made all programs that eventualy used that header file.

And thats an understatement imho.

The internet is built, developed and brought to its current state by the people of the entire world. The Internet belongs to the people, not to the US who built the original network that was only a shadow compared to internet is in its current form.

[edit on 6-7-2005 by thematrix]

Well said Thematrix, my point exactly

OK, to be honest the conversation seemed to be smoldering when I lucked onto it, so I decided to toss a little gasoline into the mix. You gotta admit it livened things up quite a bit.

As long as my service keeps chugging along as it does I frankly don't care where the root servers are or what super geek is maintaining them. The Internet, WWW or whatever you want to call it has been the best thing that has came along in my lifetime. (Not counting my children, beer, my night with the runner up in the miss westark pagent, etc, etc, etc)

Wupy

Http was designed after the gopher protocol designed by Paul Linder of the university of Minnesota. Berners-Lee's of CERN’s proposal was an extension of the gopher idea and Ted Nelson’s software framework he named Xanadu in 1988 or also called hypertext. So Tim Berners-Lee may be credited with www but it comes on the back of Nelson and Linder.

en.wikipedia.org...
www.iath.virginia.edu...

The US designed the infrastructure of the internet and and the associated protocols so we the US will keep it in our control. If you would like to connect to the internet we will let you but do not asl for any control over our creation. You have benifited from our creation isn't that enough?

[edit on 6-7-2005 by cryptorsa1001]

If a "government" controls the DNS Root Servers, they control whether or not a member of the public can FIND a site on the web.

The web is now the main source of "alternative" information from what is supplied by the (often) government-controlled media.

If the ship of state begins to sink, and they panic, and the media decides to side with the government, the INTERNET will be our only trustable source of information. If I type in www.abovetopsecret.com and get "page not found" because some stooge of the Republicans has "altered" the database, then I have a problem. Now, maybe I've already visited www.dnsstuff.com and put abovetopsecret.com into the "dnslookup" (first row, 3rd item) and gotten back 70.86.59.150, so at least __I__ know that I can type 70.86.59.150... and get to the site. But everybody else will think that it's GONE and not know why.

Doesn't THAT idea -- the the government can SELECTIVELY disable websites -- scare ANYBODY? It scares the HELL out of me.

And I say that because at this point, the internet is SOOOO ingrained into the operations of our economy and corporate business, that a government could only "take it down" as a final and last resort. That means, that they can't stop us using it to communicate with each other UNLESS they can do so selectively.

Am I missing something?

Charlie L
cyberchas
Portland, OR
[email protected]

Here's a good read if you really want to know how it all currently works.

www.internic.net...

Internic is the company that formerly (and historically) controlled all top level domain registrations (.com, .net, and .org - before the creation of the country extenstions and other non-specific extensions such as .biz) since the creation of the commercial Internet - and is an American company, based in the Northern Virginia area. Currently control and maintenence of these 13 TLD (top level domain) servers is in the care of ICANN (which is an international non-profit organization, serving the interests of every user of the Internet, regarless of country of origin) and these 13 servers are distributed across the globe, and regularly synch with each other, in order to keep the data consistent worldwide. These 13 TLD servers handle a WHOLE lot less traffic than you may think. With the distribution of registrars among several thousand companies worldwide - each of whom have their own DNS servers, and all the ISPs across the world - who ALSO have all of their own DNS servers, the job of the TLD servers is fairly simple - simply to allow propogation of new domains and the associated IP addresses.

When you type in the address for Google, your computer first asks your ISP if it has the address. If it doesn't have the address, then it asks its host (often a backbone provider) for the address. If the backbone provider doesn't have the address, only then will it go to one of the TLD servers. The TLD servers simply tell the requesting machine which DNS server hosts the IP information for the requested domain. Once the information has been retrieved, it is passed to the asking servers, who record it in their own DNS cache - thus propogation occurs.

As it sits now, maintaining these 13 TLD servers has historically been with a US organization, but the servers are distributed world wide. The ONLY control that the US can really take of overseas servers, is requesting to retain maintenence control of these servers, and even then, would require foreign workers to maintain the physical hardware and Internet connectivity.

If the plan is to move all of the servers onto US soil, and thereby enabling the US to gain complete control (software and hardware) of these servers, we can expect a catastrophic failure of the Internet/WWW pretty much everywhere outside of North America. That would be a BAD IDEA, and I'm quite sure that the "geeks" that currently maintain these servers, whatever country they hail from, have informed the US Government of such. If the US were responsible for a global collapse of the Internet, we'd end up a WHOLE lot less popular than we are now, and would probably start the first world war waged over computers.

The system works as it sits (though IPv4 will be necessary in the very near future - but that's a different story for a different thread), and as such, we really shouldn't screw with it.

I highly doubt there's talk about moving all 13 of the TLD servers onto US soil, and as previously stated, there's nothing that can give the US government complete control over servers located in other nations, short of an agreement with the government of said nation.

In addition, in a statement by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), they don't plan on changing anything, and plan to leave administration in the hands of ICANN.

As is, I really don't think there's any cause for alarm, though there may be reason to keep a closer watch on NTIA to see what they're planning in the future.

[edit on 6-9-2005 by obsidian468]