News U.S. Wants To Keep Web

ok, simple answer.

make me the one in charge! death penalties for spammers! pardons for pr0n merchants! and free hosting and bandwidth for Bit-tech.net for life!

vote early, vote now, vote `Zidane!

on a more serious note...... smaller countries are whining because america and the uk have most of the addresses? wait for ipv6, technology moves on to overcome problems, and whilst the polititians are arguing and voting, some Geek in a back room will find a way to solve the problem.

 

ignoring all the US bashing/who invented the internet stuffs and coming back to something someone said.

That would be SO cool. Im so going to live there .

 

IPV6 will solve the problem of a lack of IP addresses. But I'd like to ensure that in 50 years the US doesn't cut everyone out of the internet if it benefits the US and the US is feeling vulnerable enough to go through with it. I would love to see the net fully distributed so that its not possible to shut it down, but this would require everyone to hold a piece of the pie, and therefore less likely and more complicated, unfortunately.

Oh and my soverign state idea wasn't really intending to have people in it. More embassy style. Each foreign embassy sits on sovereign territory. So the French embassy in the UK is on French territory. It could probably be done on less then 1 square mile, but it would just be like that to stop one country taking complete autonamous control, or at least with the aim to making that more difficult.

Sorry for misspellings, I'm knackered

 

Why don't we give it to China and then they won't have to block news and other access, they will just restrict it's publishment altogether.

I personally don't really see the problem with "whatever" being based/run in the US. I thought the internet was supposed to be decentralised anyway. Surely everything wouldn't grind to a complete halt if the US was wiped out (not that im suggesting!!!) Surely it would slow, but router IP tables, alternative data paths and other countries massive networks would still be ok??!!

The UK contibute to the fund?? im sure other countries do too??!! Sure the hoarding of IP addresses is a bit bad, but as already stated, bring on IPv6, we will be hard pushed to think of unique names to map to the addresses www.&*&)(£$££~"£!)_£"!"£.com+.supernet lol

Of course if its purely funded byt the US and controlled by the US, perhaps something else should change.


KT


(if you haddent of guessed im not really sure where i stand lol)

 

Thank you for that, I was about to go postal



Also, just so everyone knows, there are a few articles here on Bit about this:

Plan for UN to run internet 'will be shelved' -- Started by me Nov 27, 2003

Go ahead for UN internet summit -- By GOO Dec 8, 2003

UN Takeover of Internet? Some Are 'Not Amused' -- By me Dec 10, 2003

 

Quite curious that the mod should choose there to put that statement, since i'm pretty sure what Nexxo was saying would please most americans, but fair enough to the statement.

I don't think anyone in bit-tech would want the UN to be in control of the internet, its a body setup with the purpose of stopping war and genocide, stuff like that, not a controlling body of massive infrastructure.

That doesn't mean the net has to stay in chinese hands, and to suggest that as a response to people not liking it being in US hands is a very simple viewpoint.

There is no reason why an independant body with the single aim of the continuation and well being of the internet for people not governments or ideoligies couldn't exist. Funded by world governments where they're willing to pay(and lets face it, theyd pretty much have the power to stop the ones that didn't accessing the world net, a big deal) a set percentage of their GDP towards this body. It could work.

 

Cool idea at first, but flawed. One word: funding. Right now, as stated above (somewhere) the US and the UK foot a good bit of the bill. Besides, you'd end up having to set up a UN type managment system because everyone will want a word in how its run. When you have 'equal' representation like that, it doesn't really work. The general solution in the past was to base things on population. That doesn't work either.

This is pretty much why the UN is so slow. It takes forever for enough representatives to agree on something. Imagine if you worked in an office with 2000 people. Your boss was going to throw a party of some sort but budget only allowed for one bulk order of a single kind of cookie. He's asked you to go around and figure out what everyone wants and order so that everyone is happy. No matter what, someone won't like the cookies that get ordered.

This is the sort of flaw that has been in every system of government. You can't make everbody happy. No has come up with a perfect system thats fair to everyone. In all likelyhood, never will.

Here's another thing to consider. The internet is an extremely complex structure of systems built on systems built on systems and so on. Imagine if the control and infostructure was given to the UN to manage and maintain. What happens when the bill comes and on a few countries can pony up the cash to make thier end? What if part of the infostructure goes down because one group couldn't maintain thier end? How about when new standards roll out? What if some countries want to adopt them, others don't, or no one can agree on the financial issues?

Keeping the system in control of a select few doesn't get rid of the problem that some won't disagree. But at least the system will still function and conform to a standard that works.

 

Perhaps I am being naive, but I thought that the internet was pretty distributed. There are servers all over the world, if the US were just to dissapear, I would think that the internet would still be functioning as a whole and just the content sitting on only the physical servers in the US would go bye bye.

Either way, I really don't think that the Internet should be controlled/owned/whatever by any one organisation, political body, etc.

 

Thats the therory, but this is the scary fact:

Code:

A 	ns.internic.net 	VeriSign 	Dulles, Virginia, USA
B 	ns1.isi.edu 	ISI 	Marina Del Rey, California, USA
C 	c.psi.net 	Cogent 	distributed using anycast
D 	terp.umd.edu 	University of Maryland 	College Park, Maryland, USA
E 	ns.nasa.gov 	NASA 	Mountain View, California, USA
F 	ns.isc.org 	ISC 	distributed using anycast
G 	ns.nic.ddn.mil 	U.S. DoD NIC 	Vienna, Virginia, USA
H 	aos.arl.army.mil 	U.S. Army Research Lab 	Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, USA
I 	nic.nordu.net 	Autonomica 	distributed using anycast
J 		VeriSign 	distributed using anycast
K 		RIPE NCC 	distributed using anycast
L 		ICANN 	Los Angeles, California, USA
M 		WIDE Project 	Tokyo, Japan

7 of the 12 servers are on US soil, and most of the anycast server's have US bounds too...

Now, thats only for DNS servers. So, the intarw3b could still run, just bit-tech.net wouldn't work, 70.84.186.131 would though.

**Edit: nm, it wouldn't, the BiT server is hosted in Dallas, TX. ^_^
**DoubleEdit: VeriSign is all in the US, which covers the COM NET Registry, so almost any US based domain...

 

Um yes they did. ARPANET was invented for the US Military and over the years it slowly became adapted by other fields as well.

Go here for a history lesson:

http://www.dei.isep.ipp.pt/docs/arpa.html

Very informative, lots can be learned from this

 

This may seem a bit stupid, but i really havnt done any research on how the internet is run. I thought that webservers were owned by various webhosts who give out space to websites, and then ISP's give out IP addresses and web bandwith to access said content.

So what is exactly on these United States servers and what exactly are they used for? Like i said, i've never really looked into it, but i'm sure i cant be the ONLY person wondering this.

 

Pretty much everything. A lot is hosted in other parts of the world, but most of the web's content is hosted on servers in the US.

 

Once again, this all depends on whether he meant the internet/web.

 

I vote the Internet get's given to Microsoft. I'm sure they could give it a funky naming structure... Internet 2003 anyone? MS Internet Vista? To install this service pack you must be running genuine Microsoft Internet...

Oh dear, this is rather silly... sorry for lowering the tone.

 

This is not about pleasing anybody; it is about maintaining a mature and sensible level of conversation. As a Mod, Dad voiced his appreciation of my attempt to do so.

I reasonably assume that he meant the Internet: as in the whole infrastructure that protocols such as the WWW run on. there is much, much more to the internet than the web pages you stare at now. A lot of it we never see, don't even realise is there. If he meant the web specifically, his argument would be even more pointless.

There is nothing wrong with voicing your opinion. It is unsubstantiated bashing we have a problem with.

I sort of really like that idea. But rather than having a cluster of servers in a bank vault-type building in, say Switzerland, I would propose it to be a virtual country: a sovereign entity with its own laws, rules and controlling body, but located in cyberspace rather than a specific physical location.

However in practice I think it will follow the trend of privatisation. Everything, these days, is run by commercial companies: public transport, utilities, and increasingly healthcare, education, security (social and law enforcement), pension schemes. It makes you wonder why we still pay taxes, if we have to buy services and resource access privately anyway. A sci-fi writer, Neal Stephenson predicted a point at which there would be no more countries but commercially run "enclaves", where you would pay a montly/yearly fee to register as a "citizen", so you could buy/rent a house and live on their land, access their health care and education, enjoy their security etc. It would be like paying taxes but you'd pick the "enclave" who offers a commercial package that suits your philosophy and lifestyle best. You don't like it, you move to another enclave, no sweat.

But I digress. My point (and I do have one) is that the Internet may work best as a decentralised commercial venture. Any company could buy shares in a joint venture called the internet. Shares would finance the infrastructure of servers needed to run it, but companies could also contribute their own servers and technology (phone companies could contribute phone networks, for instance, and ISPs servers). The more shares a company owns, and/or technology it contributes, the more say it gets in the running of it, although by setup no single company could ever own a controlling interest, and there would be rules to allow for a relatively hands-off management. The payoff for companies would be ISP provision, site hosting and service provision to net based commerce, but more importantly, it would allow them to partly develop the internet as a suitable backbone or framework for their on-line entertainment/resource technology.

 

I don't feel that the UN would be the right arena for controlling the DNS servers for the internet, a thousand voices all disagreeing, all wanting control, and two years to agree on what they want for lunch.
As to whether the US should remain in control, well as one on the internets founding countries, they certainly have a good claim as would the UK, but as the system has been in place for years and appears to be working pretty well I don't see a need to remove it from US control.

At least with something this important it is better to be run by a stable country with democratic roots, I therefore opt for the US to remain in control.
.

 

I like that, but I was under the impression that the internet does need some centralised "master" servers. Beyond just the fact that most hosting is in the US, I'm pretty sure there are some basic function computers in the US that, if shut down, would really cripple the internet, if not just outright break it. So surely some phyiscal space would be needed. Having it in an impartial country would be fine by me though. Switzerland, as you point out, would be a very good place. I just think the most important thing is that its run for the benefit of mankind(yes its cheesey, but this is a big deal), not the benefit of governments or comercial intrests, so it has to be run from somewhere where external powerbases cant effect it, and by people who also cannot be affected by external powers.

Sounds very Deus Ex II, but I don't see Stephensons idea as impossible. Western governments are weak and malleable to comercial influences. Multinationals allready have more power then government, so how can the governments stop them taking control of the internet. In this China might almost be a safer bet then the US, China keeps the comercial world in its place by being a strong government that doesn't mess around with any of that civil liberties crap. In that they maintain what they believe is a state of play in which the Chinese people and nation will be bettered, not chinese corporations at the expensve of people. Of course that is all debatable.

I'm not so sure this is a good idea. In the world today we see people losing their jobs, asset stripping, and lowering of standards all to please shareholders, any venture with shareholders has a primary goal of pleasing those shareholders. Everything else is secondary. Plus it also quantifies and divides the internet using money, which instantly puts your average person at a disadvantage and you're average large corporation at an advantage. Better to have the internet payed for by everyone in the form of a taxes. A large number of countries allready belong to and fund the UN, so I think most would be willing to pay a small ammount of their GDP to managing maintaining and improving the internet.

As for the UN being in control, I don't think anyone here wants that, and I doubt that many worldwide want it, so I think we can safely stop discussing it

 

Although I can offer no suitable suggestion as an alternative, I don't like the idea of the internet being controlled by a single country. Say in years to come some power hungry fascist manages to get into power and decides that either other countries pay up or he cuts off their access to the internet? (extreme but not impossible)

 

What if we do it embassy style, as suggested, treating the 'net as a foreign country on each person's soil. Nobody gets "rights" to it, DNS and addressing is handed out by population entities (this would include corporations, so that they don't panic), and we put some servers on everyone's soil as embassies.

Agreements/Disagreements?

 

That would work. Ans as specofdust suggests, we could have (partly) tax funding. The creation of a virtual nation would allow for servers to be decentralised and located in every country that wants to add to the pie. this would also allow for a decentralised management, in which each country manages its own chunk of the internet. Countries would have to adhere to a common standard and co-operate, otherwise they would not be able to maintain compatibility with the rest of the net.