U.S. Insists on Keeping Control of Web: "U.S. Insists on Keeping Control of Web
By BRADLEY S. KLAPPER
The Associated Press
Thursday, September 29, 2005; 10:35 AM
GENEVA -- A senior U.S. official rejected calls on Thursday for a U.N. body to take over control of the main computers that direct traffic on the Internet, reiterating U.S. intentions to keep its historical role as the medium's principal overseer.
'We will not agree to the U.N. taking over the management of the Internet,' said Ambassador David Gross, the U.S. coordinator for international communications and information policy at the State Department. 'Some countries want that. We think that's unacceptable.'
Many countries, particularly developing ones, have become increasingly concerned about the U.S. control, which stems from the country's role in creating the Internet as a Pentagon project and funding much of its early development."
I know i sound like a nationalist pig but the Untited States is the only reason the internet exists. The US military started it, funded it and designed it with some help from universities like Stamford and a few others. NO! Al Gore had not a damned thing to do with it. Just like many other programs the world likes it and now they want to take it over. I think that they can buy it from us if they want to. Otherwise sorry, no giving away the internet.
2 comments:
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The one thing that I don't really get, is that if you understand how it all works, this doesn't really make sense. I mean this isn't something that really matters, for the most part.
A little brush up on teh Intarweb
ARPNET was the origins of the "Intarwebs", it was replaced by the U.S. built and controlled NSFNET [wikipedia.org] [wikipedia.org] (full transion in 1989, Military went to MILNET). All ISPs had to sign an agreement with NSFNET (1987-1995) to connect to the backbone. NSFNET was not federally controlled, it was controlled by "Merit Network, Inc" which was run by public universities. True, a good bit of funding came from taxes, but it was up to academics as to how it was used. In 1995, NSFNET was transitioned to NAP architecture, which provided much faster routing and the capabilites for more growth. Today the "backbone" [wikipedia.org] [wikipedia.org] is a collection of commercial ISPs, a few private, and a few University controlled networks. There is little to no direct federal intervention.
DNS [wikipedia.org] [wikipedia.org] servers are, of course, chained in the sense that one DNS references another DNS, and DNS entries spread like viruses (lookups are forwarded). The root [wikipedia.org] [wikipedia.org] level DNS servers (serving requests from the root). Some of them are DoD owned, and some are privately owned.
But not all traffic is routed through the root level DNS servers. In fact you local DNS might not need to hit the next guy in the chain if he still has a valid lookup entry for your request (check the TTL, not all BIND [wikipedia.org] [wikipedia.org] implementations do this correctly). So the traffic on the internet does not go through one space, and you probably dont hit the root level DNS servers that often. Not only that but the way DNS works, unless you hit the root server yourself, it never knows that you were making the request, all it knows is that DNS server at 217.88.99.42 (or what have you) hit it.
Basically this whole argument is kind of silly. No one really controls net traffic, perse. The root DNS servers (i.e. ICANN) do for the most part reside in the US, but because of the recursive nature of a DNS lookup, it does not really tell you what is going on (put a packet sniffer on your own BIND server and see what comes up).
The Internet is still largely, "grass roots". It is largely peer-to-peer. The only centralized items are the root DNS servers.
Since the U.S. gov does not really control "the Internet", why should we change that? It sounds good in a meeting to say "you control the Internet and that isn't right", but that is gross over-simplification. Nobody really "controls" the internet. If their argument is just about moving or adding new root DNS servers, that wouldn't really matter, but instead it sounds like "politics as usual", that is to say FUD./p
It looks alarmingly like you are trying to explain to me how the internet and DNS works. Having personally worked in DMRD924 I have a little insight to it you may say. The "internet" is not a single entity as you said but whether we techies like it or not DNS rules the web now because people are too damned dumb to remember numbers.
No matter what you have your DNS set to it is influenced by root level DNS because of updates. With a decent DNS you can tell it to only accept updates from certain sources. But... you would also have to control what sites those selcted sources accept updates from.
He who controls root level DNS controls the commercial infrastructure of the internet.
If i am incorrect on this then as you said, "this isn't something that really matters." So if it is meaningless why does the UN want control over it? I'm not sure and it really does make me curious because I do agree with most of what you said.
As always thanks for your input. Now i am even more curious about this than i was before the post.
Thanks,
Tonyh
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