U.S flat out rejects calls for it to give up control of the internet

This issue is really very simple to resolve. The United States controls the Route Servers (13 to be exact) which clients (your computer) connect to for guidance. Basically, when you type in an Internet address into your browsers address bar then click "Go" you're asking your Internet Service Providers' DNS server where you can find the server which goes by let's say AboveTopSecret.Com. Your ISPs DNS will report back that AboveTopSecret.Com can be found at 70.86.59.150. So, this means the United States currently controls the machines which interact with your ISPs machines which interact with your machine. In other words, The US Route Servers know every Internet websites nickname, and so they're important to the foundation of the Internet.

If other nations, we'll use Switzerland as an example, wish to "control" the Internet, then Switzerland can build it's own network seperate from the true Internet, and call it SwissNet if they like. Then, they will have their own Route Server(s) and can direct all the traffic they wish on their own little network. If that'll make them feel special, then I see no problem with that. However, the United States will not surrender control of the Internet as it's their own creation and they are being nice in letting the citizens of other nations take part in this service the USgov is providing us.

Anyhow, I don't see why this is a big deal to them. The International community is basically getting a handout, and isn't having to finacially support the maitenace and staffing necessary to run those Route Servers. If we gave them control, they'd have to fork up cash needed for other things just to do it. This may be an instance where it's logical to say "be careful what you wish for."

As I understand this particular controversy, the U.N. is unhappy with ICANN because of their imposed charges and secretiveness. I might add that many other groups are also unhappy with ICANN for the same reasons. If you recall, VeriSign even sued them and although the suit was eventually dropped/dismissed, VeriSign essentially got what they wanted. ICANN works for the U.S. Department Of Commerce under contract (a sole source contract too, I might add).

What really happened to bring all this about was the NSF decided they didn't want to continue managing/developing the Internet and they just handed it off to the Dept. Of Commerce. The Dept. Of Commerce, not being a technical/engineering body, and having no prior experience with anything like the Internet, farmed the work out to a private group via contract. Thus ICANN was born. Originally a non-profit corporate group centered at Stanford University and doing all the work on little more than a volunteer basis, ICANN evolved into something quite different.

ICANN has control of domain names and similar things and exercises that control for the Dept. Of Commerce; however, the Dept. Of Commerce is really just a front as the real control comes from DCA, NSA, CIA and the Dept. of Defense, whose various working groups and steering committees provide the expertise missing at the Dept. Of Commerce. And no, they are not going to give up that control voluntarily. What they might do is try to be a little more open with some of their meetings and a little more responsive to some of the desires within the U.N.

[edit on 30-9-2005 by Astronomer68]

Originally posted by SkyFox2
Anyhow, I don't see why this is a big deal to them. The International community is basically getting a handout, and isn't having to finacially support the maitenace and staffing necessary to run those Route Servers. If we gave them control, they'd have to fork up cash needed for other things just to do it. This may be an instance where it's logical to say "be careful what you wish for."

The US provided the core DNS servers for the internet from the outset. They don't "control" the internet. Anyone can set up a DNS server for nothing. A handout!

If a company decides to aggregate all the telphone directories in the world into one directory, would they control all the phones?

I wasn't claiming the US actually "controls" the Internet, Glastonaut. In fact, I thought I made it relatively clear that I didn't view it in that light. You're insinuating I believe something when I indirectly stated I do not.

Anyhow, one can't set up a DNS server for “nothing." To do that, you would have to pay administrators and technicians money to create and maintain the server and its connections. Also, you'd have to pay for the equipment (server, cabling, crimpers, OS license, other program licenses, and such). It would be VERY expensive do get those Route Servers up and running, and maintained. The United States of America is in fact doing the other nations of the world, and the citizens there of, a favor. I don’t see how you can argue against that, or why you would feel the need to.

Originally posted by NWguy83

It's our's, not yours. Would you give us your home if we begged for it? No you wouldn't.

Erm, I'm sorry. Wasn't this toy of yours invented by an Englishman?

Tim Berners-Lee. Look Him up...

Like wowsers* its yours. Such a smug assumption, so typically American...

*Profanity edit*

[edit on 30-9-2005 by dbates]

Wasn't this one of Wolfowitz's goals in the Project For The New American Century, for the US to control the internet...along with everything else? And they are not talking about the American people, they are talking about a privileged few who are taking it upon themselves to control the planet.
Sure doesn't seem like a good plan to me, but then what do I know?

I think that this site would clarify many wrong thoughts and ideas on how the DNS works and where the servers are actually located, and what is their actual number.

Most, if not all, countries DO have their own "internet" already, if that is defined by them having their own TLD (top level domain). The com/net/org/mil/edu domains are under US jurisdiction, the rest are not. The root servers contain information about the top level domains, nothing more, nothing less. And due to the nature of DNS, the root servers almost never agree fully on anything due to propagation delays when new domains are added or old domains are expired.

The internet address space has already been divided up to different NICs in different parts of the world, and it would be well night impossible to take them back. However, effort has been made to distribute the addresses better, and with the advent of CIDR it was rather straightforward to implement.
Also NAT (Network Address Translation) has lessened the need on having a large address space even when there are a large amount of users connected.

The article mentioned in the first post also makes the all-too-common (and very frustrating) mistake by equating "internet" with "web", which is very far from the truth.

And while I don't agree with much what ICANN has done, I also understand that US can't be forced to part with the control of the address space they originated. It would be just plain stupid and unnecessary. ICANN also can't force control upon the address spaces they don't control - if there is a huge disagreement on something, nothing prevents the UN or EU or whatever nation from implementing their own root servers and distributing that information.

Of course there are also other issues but I won't go to them in this post, since they would perhaps be off-topic.

Originally posted by AnAbsoluteCreation
Again I repeat. CERN in switzerland invented the WWW. Not USA. The Pentagon if I am again remember correctly had set up a networking device in the event that a nuclear war erupted. They were under the impression that the coutry that could communicate the quickest afterwards would rise to the top. It was only an inner computer networking device that they invented. The world wide web was invented by scientists in Switzerland. And yes, we are trying to monopolize the policing for our own desires. Obviously a good tactic if you're a greedy, paranoid nation as we are.

The www is just a protocol that runs on the Internet, like http, ftp and so forth. The Internet was developed years before Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, while at CERN. Since the Internet was created in the US, it makes sense that they want to retain a majority share of the control over it. Already the root DNS servers are located throughout the world, the company I work for runs two of them... =)

Just to reclarify, the U.N. isn't trying to take over the internet; they're wanting to manage the machines that do the processing--the DNS servers I'm assuming. You can't "take over the internet." It's intangible; it's like saying "I own algebra now."

Regardless of where the internet was invented (although jetsetter quoted an excellent source detailing that) and who invented it, the U.N. is asking to control the U.S.'s physical property, the DNS servers. What problem is there in the U.S. denying that, especially when there haven't been any major problems with access from other countries. As other posters have pointed out, there's no reason other countries can't do the same; maybe they could get a setup going that's much better than what the US has.

One thing I'm extremely confused about is the talk of information control due to one nation "controlling" the internet. When has the U.S. done much in lieu of this? Child porn, privacy invasion, and intellectual property infringement are pretty much the only times I've heard of the internet being censored at all by the US, and even then only when the offenders and the servers hosting the material are on US soil. If the U.S. was truly trying to actively censor material, then I highly doubt any of us would be posting anything on a board that harbors a very large anti-US Government sentiment.

How many posts on here are there talking poorly about Bush or Congress? How many times do people criticize Supreme Court decisions on here? And you're thinking the U.S. is going to try and control the information being spread? What am I missing?

Originally posted by stumason
As I said, it is merely de facto control you guys have because the large international carriers, such as MCI and Sprint, plus the big vendors such as Nortel and Cisco are all based in N. America. there is no reason, however, why our network here would not continue to function if the US vanished overnight.

Wrong! The reason everyone says that the US controls and owns the internet is because we have all 13 of the root servers. The root servers control the address' of just what goes where. You could type in web pages all day but without the root servers you could not find them.

The only reason the US owns the internet is because we own the root servers.

You could get your own root servers and start your own internet, but you can't take the one that exists today. If the US shut down the root servers you couldn't even get a squack out of your modem. There would be nothing to hear it.

Wupy

DNS servers are not important yeah they making find pages easier by name instead of ip but you can still type the ip directly into the browser and bypass dns alltogether and if you made a program to interact with your host file it would be simple enough to just forget dns and name the sites yourself. DNS is a time saver but it is not the internet and while it's true US owns the main 13 servers dns would actually function fine without them for a long time easily long enough for another country to set one up if they wished to thus making the US's supposed control kinda useless to all intensive purposes.
just my thoughts

Originally posted by SkyFox2
I wasn't claiming the US actually "controls" the Internet, Glastonaut. In fact, I thought I made it relatively clear that I didn't view it in that light. You're insinuating I believe something when I indirectly stated I do not.

Apologies if the point was misunderstood, SkyFox. However your use of English along the lines of

Originally posted by SkyFox2
However, the United States will not surrender control of the Internet as it's their own creation

and

Originally posted by SkyFox2
If we gave them control, they'd have to fork up cash needed for other things

it isn't an unreasonable assumption to make!

Originally posted by SkyFox2
The United States of America is in fact doing the other nations of the world, and the citizens there of, a favor. I don’t see how you can argue against that, or why you would feel the need to.

One could also argue that the rest of the world has agreed to keep the US DNS servers supplied with their local DNS info. So the rest of the world is doing the US a favour by keeping their directories up to date on a global scale. I have set up a DNS server before and it is a piece of cake. I appreciate the "favour" being supplied, but without global info its just a national directory.

But as we agree the US doesn't control the internet this is nit-picking!

Originally posted by Teknikal
DNS servers are not important yeah they making find pages easier by name instead of ip but you can still type the ip directly into the browser and bypass dns alltogether

Yes you can but that IP address doesn't necessarily take you to the web site you were expecting to get. I'd hazard a guess that it more often doesn't work as expected. That's because of virtual www hosting where the browser tells the web server what site it's trying to get to, and the server then serves the appropriate page. Using virtual hosting one can have hundreds or even thousands of sites at one IP address, and still everything works as expected. Provided that DNS works, that is.

Here is the latest news on this topic from UPI:

While U.S. dominance of the Internet is clear, and the use of English prevails in cyberspace, there is increasing pressure from both industrialized and developing nations alike to break up at least some of the world's sole superpower's hold over the World Wide Web. The question remains, however, whether U.S. predominance can indeed be scaled back in a systematic way or whether indeed U.S. agencies and corporations will be willing and able to cooperate with a global consensus, if there is indeed one.

That was certainly the single-biggest issue that came to light after two weeks of debate in Geneva at the world summit on the information society hosted by the International Telecommunications Union, which concluded Friday.

The U.N. agency's head, Yoshio Utsumi, said at a news briefing to conclude the latest round of talks that the ITU could handle the responsibility and have the technological capability to take control of the Internet "if we were asked to," adding that the international organization would be the most appropriate body to have such a role.

The problem is, however, that there is already a deep divide on whether or not the United States can or even should relinquish the dominance it currently has, while there is also fierce debate on whether or not the United Nations would be up to the challenge of taking on the task.

The Geneva talks was the one last time ITU member nations officially gathered before the final information society conference in Tunisia, which will take place from Nov. 16 for three days.

Under the existing system the Internet is managed by the U.S. government as the private California-based Internet Cooperation for Assigned Names, or ICANN, is ultimately responsible for the system and is in turn ruled by regulations drawn up by the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Specifically, there has been increased criticism over the fact that ICANN has the final say in how domain names are assigned worldwide. Some international critics argue that in order for a country to be assigned an Internet domain name such as .jp for Japan or .fr for France, governments must effectively go to the U.S. Commerce Department for approval.

So while member nations of the ITU including the United States have broadly agreed that there is greater scope for using the Internet to help developing countries prosper and meet the goals to reduce poverty by 2015, the rift over how that objective can best be met appears to be widening with time.

The politicization of Internet control has intensified as the European Union made clear at the latest meeting on the one hand of its backing of the ITU and the United Nations, as it argued that other governments and international agencies must work together with ICANN when it comes to assigning domain names.

In part given the fact that the head of the ITU is a Japanese national, the Japanese government too has made clear its support for the U.N.-led initiative, thereby siding its support for the EU proposal. Given that Japan is the world's second-largest Internet user following the United States and the EU and Japan combined make up a significant part of global Web use, their joint opposition to continued U.S. dominance could well be the single-biggest source of friction at the upcoming Tunis conference. At the same time, while there are 13 principal routing servers that ICANN is connected to worldwide, only three are based in Japan and Europe, while the remaining 10 are located across the United States alone.

The Japanese media has pointed out that the existing domain-naming system has reached its limit, especially as many point out the need to come up with new names such as .asia to meet the ever-changing needs of Internet users worldwide without having to resort to the United States as the final arbiter of whether or not such names are appropriate.

In addition, the financial daily Nihon Keizai Shimbun pointed out that a U.S.-led Internet naming system inevitably becomes focused on the English language, whereas much of the growth seen in the World Wide Web these days comes from non-English-speaking developing countries. Certainly, objection to the dominance of the English language on the Web, particularly in assigning domain names, is a common complaint from both developing and industrialized countries alike where English is not the native tongue.

For its part, the United States has made clear its opposition to changing ICANN's role in naming domains as it continues to argue that now is not the time to change the system as it could lead to confusion while arguing that the United Nations would simply not be able to handle the responsibility.

Meanwhile, the ITU's Utsumi stressed the need to reach a consensus at the upcoming conference, stating that "if we wish to build a just and equitable information society, this summit cannot be allowed to fail."

Anyone who fears U.N. control of the internet need only look at the long history of advancement by and success of U.N. based programs.



It's all good...don't pay any attention at all to the man behind the curtain...



No one demanded control of radio, television, and telephony for the good of the world when they were invented. But, of course, the U.N. did not yet exist, or they may have...

[edit on 10/6/2005 by soulforge]