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.
Bingo.
I was in the computer center at UC Santa Barbara in 1969 when the first turned the ARPANET on. Al Gore was nowhere to be seen.
Sort of like the United Nations Human Rights Commission with Libya, Iran, and China as voting members??
gosh, what an unjimmuh thing to do...
So was giving up the Panama Canal and declaring a one China policy. Never underestimate the liberals in this country.
Just be very, very grateful that Jimmah Carter is not president. He'd surrender the Internet in a heartbeat, just like he did the Canal.
Why don't we just turn over control of all of our military satellites and the keys to the nuclear stockpile while we're at it.
;^)
Thank God we've got a businessman in the White House and not a peanut farmer or a grifter.
Carter gave up control of the canal. Any libRAT president we have in the future might relenquish control of the root servers.
LOL! Brilliant minds think alike! Ol' Jimmah is the very idiot who came to mind when I read this article.
"the US giving up control of the Panama Canal, and we know how that ended."
Thanks for the reminder. Anytime the rest of the world begins yipping and yapping about cooperation from the US we all need to be reminded of the horror years of the Carter administration.....or as I like to remember them....the "no balls" era.
Also some of the root servers are already based abroad: http://www.root-servers.org/
Basically this issue is just over-hyped. Control of the root servers is an issue of administration rather than strategic. I see no real problem with most of them remaining under US control. Works so why fix it?
Have you ever seen this 1980 Ted Kennedy presidential campaign brochure? Kennedy couldn't get the nomination even though he pointed out, and quite well I might add, Carter's profound failures as president.
Poor Kofi and his UN buddies just can't seem to get their hands on a new source of revenue since the Oil For Food deal dried up. They really should have saved some of their money
"YES you can."
You said "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"
Yes my mistake you are correct. I misread it as a claim that the root server would keep the copy, as if the email was passing through the root server. Silly me.
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