Posted on 07/05/2005 11:15:17 AM PDT by ImaGraftedBranch
U.S. Won't Cede Control Of Internet's Root Servers
The United States has changed course and is now ignoring calls by some countries to turn root-server oversight over to an international body.
By Anick Jesdanun, The Associated Press
June 30, 2005
URL: http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=164904465
NEW YORK (AP)--The U.S. government will indefinitely retain oversight of the main computers that control traffic on the Internet, ignoring calls by some countries to turn the function over to an international body, a senior official said Thursday.
The announcement marked a departure from previously stated U.S. policy.
Michael D. Gallagher, assistant secretary for communications and information at the Commerce Department, shied away from terming the declaration a reversal, calling it instead "the foundation of U.S. policy going forward."
"The signals and words and intentions and policies need to be clear so all of us benefiting in the world from the Internet and in the U.S. economy can have confidence there will be continued stewardship," Gallagher said in an interview with The Associated Press.
He said the declaration, officially made in a four-paragraph statement posted online, was in response to growing security threats and increased reliance on the Internet globally for communications and commerce.
The computers in question serve as the Internet's master directories and tell Web browsers and e-mail programs how to direct traffic. Internet users around the world interact with them every day, likely without knowing it. Policy decisions could at a stroke make all Web sites ending in a specific suffix essentially unreachable.
Though the computers themselves--13 in all, known as "root" servers--are in private hands, they contain government-approved lists of the 260 or so Internet suffixes, such as ".com."
In 1998, the Commerce Department selected a private organization with international board members, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, to decide what goes on those lists. Commerce kept veto power, but indicated it would let go once ICANN met a number of conditions.
Thursday's declaration means Commerce would keep that control, regardless of whether and when those conditions are met.
"It's completely an about-face if you consider the original commitment made when ICANN was created," said Milton Mueller, a Syracuse University professor who has written about policies surrounding the Internet's root servers.
ICANN officials said they were still reviewing Commerce's statement, which also expressed continued support of ICANN for day-to-day operations.
The declaration won't immediately affect Internet users, but it could have political ramifications by putting in writing what some critics had already feared.
Michael Froomkin, a University of Miami professor who helps run an independent ICANN watchdog site, said the date for relinquishing control has continually slipped.
Some countries, he said, might withdraw support they had for ICANN on the premise it would one day take over the root servers.
In a worst-case scenario, countries refusing to accept U.S. control could establish their own separate Domain Name System and thus fracture the Internet into more than one network. That means two users typing the same domain name could reach entirely different Web sites, depending on where they are.
The announcement comes just weeks before a U.N. panel is to release a report on Internet governance, addressing such issues as oversight of the root servers, ahead of November's U.N. World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia.
Some countries have pressed to move oversight to an international body, such as the U.N. International Telecommunication Union, although the U.S. government has historically had that role because it funded much of the Internet's early development.
Ambassador David Gross, the U.S. coordinator for international communications and information policy at the State Department, insisted that Thursday's announcement was unrelated to those discussions.
But he said other countries should see the move as positive because "uncertainty is not something that we think is in the United States' interest or the world's interest.' "
Gallagher noted that Commerce endorses having foreign governments manage their own country-code suffixes, such as ".fr" for France.
Good idea. "International Bodies" can screw up anything. Imagine an Internet with the PRC and Saudi Arabia as the supervisors...
We invented the internet. It was called the ARPANET for an agency of the FedGov we now call DARPA. Typical UN/one worlder nonsense. Give up something of value for nothing. IXNAY.
What does Al Gore say?
Notice that once again, the college professors live on a different planet than the rest of us. They think turning the internet over the likes of Kofi Annan would be a great idea. If those penny-ante Third World countries want to control an internet, let them invent their own and pay for it.
The US funded it. The US should not under any circumstances relinquish control over it to some "international body".
Look at the UN. Does I need to go any deeper than that??
If the USA doesn't do it, then the UN will, and I for one don't want Kofi Annan's son making a fortune controlling this.
Some critics can go to hell.
We already know that the internet can be referred to as the terrorist planning network, albeit inadvertently.
If there is any hope of ever inhibiting use of the internet by terrorists, killers, extortionists and scammers, we certainly wnat the UN to controlling it. Right?
Right?
Yep, kind of like Carter giving up the Panama Canal. Then the GOP lacks the backbone to correct such a dufus move. Of course, the web is much more important to everyday commerce then the Canal, so having it in the hands of responsible people is vital.
I don't think there's anything wrong with ICANN running the show themselves. I think the problem arises when the UN and its minions get pushy and demand that ICANN cede control to a UN agency. Then you've got an issue.
A lot of us talk to people around the world about problematic things like freedom and UN corruption. I think theres a growing anti UN sentiment in the world and I don't think they can afford it.
That's probably very similar to what people said when theyt first heard the idea of the US giving up control of the Panama Canal, and we know how that ended.
"Think of it like this. Imagine being able to send e-mail destined for whitehouse.gov anywhere you wanted. Then, keep a copy and forward it on to it's intended destination. This is the sort of thing that could happen."
All the DNS servers provide is a look up service mapping hostnames to IPs. You cannot do what you describe above. The best you can do is take a peak at what hostnames people want resolved (and I am not even sure if that is possible considering that these roots are probably dealing with requests from DNS servers of ISP's and not directly those of individuals)
Owning the DNS roots is nothing near ownership of the internet. As the article points out, anyone could set up an alternative set of DNS servers.
Sort of like the United Nations Human Rights Commission with Libya, Iran, and China as voting members??
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