US Relinquishes Control of Internet

After complaints about American dominance of the internet and growing disquiet in some parts of the world, Washington has said it will relinquish some control over the way the network is run and allow foreign governments more of a say in the future of the system. Icann – the official body that ultimately controls the development of the internet thanks to its oversight of web addresses such as .com, .net and .org – said today that it was ending its agreement with the US government. The deal, part of a contract negotiated with the US department of commerce, effectively pushes California-based Icann towards a new status as an international body with greater representation from companies and governments around the globe. Icann had previously been operating under the auspices of the American government, which had control of the net thanks to its initial role in developing the underlying technologies used for connecting computers together. But the fresh focus will give other countries a more prominent role in determining what takes place online, and even the way in which it happens – opening the door for a virtual United Nations, where many officials gather to discuss potential changes to the internet. Icann chief Rod Beckstrom, a former Silicon Valley entrepreneur and Washington insider who took over running the organisation in July, said there had been legitimate concerns that some countries were developing alternative internets as a way of routing around American control. "It's rumoured that there are multiple experiments going on with countries forking the internet, various countries have discussed this," he said. "...He added that the changes would prove powerful when combined with upcoming plans to allow web users to use addresses with names in Chinese, Arabic or other alphabets other than Latin...

You might not want to reference a protocol (WWW) developed by a british citizen in switzerland when we argue for continued U.S. control of ICANN. ICANN is not the world wide web, and www is not the internet.

ICANN’s role is to handle addresses (IP’s, domains, the root servers). The majority of the root servers are outside the United States. This really has no effect on our internet infrastructure domestically.

This is not “US Giving up control of the Internet”. That is a headline being used all over the place to attract attention.

Simply, ICANN is getting more autonomy to manage its own affairs. Does this mean foreign governments get any additional authority over ICANN. Nope. They get to sit on oversight panels. Does ICANN have to do what they say? Nope.

When it comes down to it, is it practical to NOT let ICANN do this?

“ICANN gains independence from US”:
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/0,1000000097,39780163,00.htm?tag=mncol;txt
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old article year 2000, but good read “ICANN vs. ICANNwatch”:
http://www.inc.com/articles/2000/05/19216.html
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“master of my own free internet domain”:
http://my.opera.com/slackwrdave/blog/2009/06/21/master-of-my-own-free-internet-domain
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And completely unrelated but awfully interesting(LOL)—
“NASA watching perfect storm...”:
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/1001-nasa-cosmic-ray.html?hpg1=bn

And now a word about verifying before one shares...sorry for posting crappy info in the heat of the moment. I’ll try real hard not to do it again.

A some have suggested a satellite based mega server free of government control would be ideal. With roaming severs that would change daily so that the man could not get control of them similar to pirate servers for porn and software downloads. would work. Other wise the free and open exchange of ideas will die under international control of the web. Use China or Iran as examples the have an iron fist on the net and will not let any free exchange if ideology to flow. I wold be like the under ground free presses of the 60’s.

Where in the constitution does it say that the federal government is to run the Internet? Do you want a small federal government or not?

IANA was established informally as a reference to various technical functions for the ARPANET, that the Information Sciences Institute performed for the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) of the United States Department of Defense.

The earliest reference to a registry function is probably RFC 322, published on March 26, 1972, in which Vint Cerf and Jon Postel established a "socket registry". This registry was published as RFC 433 in December 1972.

The first reference to the name "IANA" in the RFC series is in RFC 1060, published in 1990, but the function, and the term, was well established long before that; RFC 1174 says that "Throughout its entire history, the Internet system has employed a central Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA)...", and RFC 1060 lists a long series of earlier editions of itself, starting with RFC 349.

In 1996 the "DNS Wars" began as the FNAC ordered the NSF to instruct its contractor, Network Solutions who ran the Internic project, to begin charging for com/net/org domain names. There was widespread dissatisfaction with this concentration of power (and money) in one company and people looked to IANA for a solution. Postel wrote up a draft on the creation of new top level domains.

USC/ISI would not back Postel in the legal sense and IANA, which was a part time "task" had no legal personality - it could not sign contracts - and there was some resentment in the community at paying IANA large sums of money to add one or two lines to the legacy root zone. Jon was trying to institutionalize IANA.

Jon Postel managed the IANA function from its inception until his death in October 1998. Postel had been given defacto authority to perform the IANA function, as he had always done it in his position at the Information Sciences Institute, under its Department of Defense contract. After his death, Joyce Reynolds, who had worked with him at IANA for many years, managed the transition of the IANA function to ICANN.

Starting in 1988, IANA was funded by the U.S. government under a contract between the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Information Sciences Institute (ISI). This contract expired in April 1997, but was extended to preserve IANA's function.

On December 24, 1998, USC entered into a transition agreement with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers ICANN, transferring the IANA function to ICANN, effective January 1, 1999, thus making IANA an operating unit of ICANN.

On February 8, 2000, the Department of Commerce entered into an agreement with ICANN to perform the IANA functions.

GP, I think you’re right.

However, I think . . . mostly . . . human efforts will fail . . . the oligarchy plus the fallen angels are more than prepared for human efforts.

They are not prepared for God Almighty’s surprises.

I don’t think God is going to leave HIS KIDS in the dark.

He may not tell us all we’d like to know in our natural humanness. He will tell us all we need to know in time to use it, imho.

Your view is so typical of a techie: thinking out very carefully all the details and not noticing that the very framing of the problem and the initial axioms may be faulty.

"Up links and down links would be carefully controlled so that no government involvement is permitted."

One can say this only as a joke. You have only those rights that you can defend. If the Chinese government decides to "get involved" in your scheme, who is going to stop it and how?

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