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.
GO GAUCHOS! I also am a UCSB alum (class of '78) and worked with the net using Gopher and Wais before HTML was invented. UCSB was in the first 4 sites connected to the ARPANET. Good to hear from you. I still live in SB.
He says he invented it. WRONG. I was there pretty early - used ARPANET in the mid 1970s at UC Santa Barbara (the predecessor to the Internet).
But thinking about it more, this is a different issue. Intercepting data is something you can do with control of a DNS server, but not really a root server as noone directly connects to one to resolve hostnames.
Also doing this with a DNS server is detectable. If the DNS server says the address of hotmail.com is something you know it isn't then surely you know that someone may be attempting to redirect your data.
Yeah. :-) It's LOT of power to give away. I'm HOPING that "somebody" is advising our people in power.
If it happens, (God forbid it does =( ) We should give the internet to the swiss, because above anyone else, I'd trust the swiss rather than the mexicans french germans italians, russians, chinese etc.
Damn straight....let them get their own internet!
Besides, have they consulted Al Gore....he invented it!
Madoka Ozawa would question that assertion.
Thanks for posting Blowhard Kennedy's campaign rhetoric from 1980. How interesting it is to see that the Democrat message and warchants really haven't changed much in 25 years.
"If it happens, (God forbid it does =( ) We should give the internet to the swiss, because above anyone else, I'd trust the swiss rather than the mexicans french germans italians, russians, chinese etc."
*Trying to think of a joke about clocks*
Hell's bells, the UN can't organise lunch and now they want to control the 'net? With their abundant ability for mismanagement, people with return to snail mail and ham radio because they would be a helluva lot more efficient than UN-Net.
Telephone tin cans, smoke signals, bongo drums...the future if the UN gets their hands on the Internet. FROM MY COLD DEAD HANDS!!! ;-)
you're lucky to be living in SB, what a wonderful place! Hard to do any work, though, especially in the '60s and early '70s with the riots.
One of them was John Wayne, who was a conservative. He was behind the deal 100%.
Here is some info...
More recently, he found himself the target of much hate mail from the right wing, whose political idol he had been, after he supported President Carter's espousal of the Panama Canal treaties. He did not mind. Although his basic views had not moderated, his tolerance, it seemed, had.
He had even shown up at a function to congratulate Jane Fonda, who was to the left what he was to the right, on winning a screen award.
Here is the link to the source.
http://www.jwayne.com/biography.shtml
Of course at one time nobody thought we would have given up the Panama Canal either.
Hey "some critics" is Katie Couric's source too! She also uses "some people."
Agreed hired. But what about the great potential for reducing America to a sniveling socialist state like the liberals want? Wouldn't they see some value in that? On the one hand, they want their power, but hey, if a great opportunity comes along that pushes our country into socialism I would think they could overlook a little thing like control of the 'net. My $.02.
control of root servers is not control of the net.
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