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U.S. Insists on Keeping Control of Web
By The Associated Press
posted: 29 September 2005
01:30 pm ET
GENEVA (AP) -- A senior U.S. official rejected calls on Thursday for a U.N. body to take over control of the main computers that direct traffic on the Internet, reiterating U.S. intentions to keep its historical role as the medium's principal overseer.
"We will not agree to the U.N. taking over the management of the Internet,'' said Ambassador David Gross, the U.S. coordinator for international communications and information policy at the State Department. "Some countries want that. We think that's unacceptable.''
Many countries, particularly developing ones, have become increasingly concerned about the U.S. control, which stems from the country's role in creating the Internet as a Pentagon project and funding much of its early development.
Originally posted by Djarums
And if China controlled it? Or Cuba? Or Russia (Putin's background considered).
Websites criticizing the government wouldn't even make it to production let alone get attacked.
The UN would be any better?
I want to know where the websites discussing the Oil For Food Scandal would end up if the UN controlled the Internet.
Say what you will about the US, but there is no shortage of Anti-American stuff on the Web, and it flourishes quite well unrestricted.
Tell me which other bodies would allow that?
During the 1950s, several communications researchers realized that there was a need to allow general communication between users of various computers and communications networks. This led to research into decentralized networks, queuing theory, and packet switching. The subsequent creation of ARPANET in the United States in turn catalyzed a wave of technical developments that made it the basis for the development of the Internet.
The first TCP/IP wide area network was operational in 1984 when the United States' National Science Foundation (NSF) constructed a university network backbone that would later become the NSFNet. It was then followed by the opening of the network to commercial interests in 1995. Important seperate networks that have successfully entered the Internet include Usenet, Bitnet and the various commercial and educational X.25 networks such as Compuserve and JANET.
The collective network gained a public face in the 1990s. In August 1991 Tim Berners-Lee publicized his new World Wide Web project, two years after he had begun creating HTML, HTTP and the first few web pages at CERN in Switzerland. In 1993 the Mosaic web browser version 1.0 was released, and by late 1994 there was growing public interest in the previously academic/technical Internet. By 1996 the word "Internet" was common public currency, but it referred almost entirely to the World Wide Web.
Meanwhile, over the course of the decade, the Internet successfully accommodated the majority of previously existing public computer networks (although some networks such as FidoNet have remained separate). This growth is often attributed to the lack of central administration, which allows organic growth of the network, as well as the non-proprietary nature of the Internet protocols, which encourages vendor interoperability and prevents any one company from exerting too much control over the network.
en.wikipedia.org...
Originally posted by Amorymeltzer
It's ours, stu, because the main servers/routers/big ass machines are here. We maintain them, and keep them running.
Djarums, your first post was spot on, couldn't have said it better myself.
Not only is there NO reason other than a desired degredation in quality to change things, but there are plenty of reasons (stability, working pretty damn well) to NOT move it.
Again I repeat. CERN in switzerland invented the WWW. Not USA.
Originally posted by Shroomery
The UN is an international body the US is not, nuff said. Have you forgotten that the US is part of the UN too perhaps? The oil for food schandal is as much the US' as any other UN-member's problem. But I guess you/the US wont settle for anything less then total control.
I don't have to explain the problem of one country controlling an information network of this size do I? I wish for once this was about money but it's pure control of information. Something they're getting quite good at at home, do we really want this to be the case on the internet?