bucy wrote:

The United States and Europe clashed here Thursday in one of their sharpest public disagreements in months, after European Union negotiators proposed stripping the Americans of their effective control of the Internet.

This is so fucking retarded.

Right now the stability of the Internet is basically protected by the inertia of a seriously entrenched bureaucracy. This is pretty much the only thing I can ever think of that's gained added protection from the ponderous machinations of a lot of change-resistant paper-pushers, but there it is...

The EU folks are acting (or attempting to act) based on the assumption that Icann has any interest in politics outside of their own little world. They're proposing that the operation of the TLD structure instead be turned over to a bunch of career politicians who are going to do what's best for their own political interests as opposed to what's best for the stability of the internet.

What a load of ignorant fertilizer.

Decius wrote:

The United States and Europe clashed here Thursday in one of their sharpest public disagreements in months, after European Union negotiators proposed stripping the Americans of their effective control of the Internet.

These people are silly. Threatening to leave the DNS system just because you don't think you have enough influence? What do you want them to do differently? Have you made reasonable proposals that have been ignored? Don't you realize that if you can leave the DNS system so can I, and so your influence cannot be coercive?

It is inevitable that the DNS system is going to fragment... I'm all for it. We ought to start talking about what kinds of tools we need to support multiple roots on one computer, and put an end to this government puffery as well as vile sitefinder once and for all.

Imagine if Barnes and Noble kept all of the books in the store ordered by ISBN. Then there would be a big fight over how ISBNs are assigned, who controls the registry, etc, which is presently AFAIK uncontroversial. I think the situation with DNS is similarly assinine. Just as end users never think about ISBNs, they shouldn't think about hostnames either.

Rattle wrote:

The United States and Europe clashed here Thursday in one of their sharpest public disagreements in months, after European Union negotiators proposed stripping the Americans of their effective control of the Internet.

These people are silly. Threatening to leave the DNS system just because you don't think you have enough influence? What do you want them to do differently? Have you made reasonable proposals that have been ignored? Don't you realize that if you can leave the DNS system so can I, and so your influence cannot be coercive?

It is inevitable that the DNS system is going to fragment... I'm all for it. We ought to start talking about what kinds of tools we need to support multiple roots on one computer, and put an end to this government puffery as well as vile sitefinder once and for all.

No doubt, the naming situation is going to get more complex. I think we are going to see innovation that stretches beyond the DNS system as it is today. Think AOL keywords. Google Names?

But will it be better? It will probably get worse before it gets better...

Wasn't it our government who invented the Internet? I say screw the EU - let them leave.

Wasn't it our government who invented the Internet? I say screw the EU - let them leave.

Its not quite that simple. We don't want the net to fragment more than it already is. There are already chunks that filter content, such as China. Splitting up the naming system makes it all that much easier to get away with cutting off their populous from the outside world. We want a unified Internet, not a bunch of internets.

The US government did invent the Internet, but it was private enterprise that built it as we know it today. If it wasn't for telecomm deregulation, we would not have the Internet we have today. We don't want the Internet under any government's control, but we do want it unified.