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.

RE: EU Tries to Unblock Internet Impasse