U.S. to relinquish remaining control over the Internet | Hacker News Reader

U.S. to relinquish remaining control over the Internet

washingtonpost.com

110 pointsselamattidur22 comments

More likely: U.S. agencies are confident enough in their other means to control the internet that they're willing to gain back a little good will by appearing to give up some control over ICANN.

Let's not forget that the FBI/etc reserve the right to shut down any website for any reason, whether via a letter to a service provider, or simply showing up and confiscating hardware in the name of "national security". And you can bet they're not going to stop pushing SOPA clones either.

The Great Satan strikes again.

However most insiders feel that the suggested proposal for ICANN's HQ to move to Switzerland will probably come to pass in the medium term. Obviously US will still heavily influence ICANN but it's influence will definitely be diluted by this; the GAC will obviously still have a large influence via the Affirmation of Commitments (AoC).

Not at all. Much more likely is the desire of governments everywhere to ... how did the EU commission put it :

"A review of conflicts between national laws or jurisdictions that will suggest possible remedies" [1]

In case anyone doubts what this means : it means that they're angry their laws currently effectively do not apply to the internet (because the site owner is not within their jurisdiction) and they intend to use DNS assignments as the enforcement arm of their governments.

Also, from this article :

"Major corporations have complained, however, that con artists already swarm the Internet with phony Web sites designed to look like the authentic offerings of respected brands."

We all know what they're complaining about and it's not "con artists. It's the fact that holding a trademark on the word "and" is southeast uzbaledongenirestan doesn't give them full veto rights over any dns name that matches ".and.", in any tld.

Expect takedowns to get much, much worse very quickly. This move makes ICANN dependant on organisations that want to use DNS to make legal threats and force any internet site to operate in every jurisdiction their customers may be located in instead of just the one they're located.

And remember : VPNs only help if the thing you're trying to reach is still on the internet. This is about moving enforcement from local ISPs to remote ISPs.

[1] http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-14-142_en.htm

I'm not sure this works so well for websites hosted outside of the US... LOTS of websites really are hosted outside the US. They resort to confiscating the domain names in these cases, and releasing ICANN is a small step towards revoking this ability.

Personally, I don't really care if the US can shutdown a US hosted (both server and domain) website - that's for Americans to get their laws fixed.

I do however have a problem with the US having global control over the internet. This release of ICANN is a step in that direction.

In December 2012, I did something utterly stupid. I found a leaked email list of all attendees of the World Conference on International Telecommunications and gave them my uncensored thoughts on the dangers of a closed and censored internet.

Received back like 30 non-deliveries, same amount of vacation replies confirming to me that they would be at the attendance (good social engineer hack, I suppose), and zero substantive replies.

I assume I'm definitely on a list for several govts since it went out to US/European, Middle East, and Asian govt officials as well as the heads of several private companies.

But now I see I won them all over...I did this.

Certainly. This explains it all.

But more seriously, don't worry. If you are on any list, it's one for activists and the like. At least, whenever you have problems crossing a border or experience "curious behavior" of your computer in the future, you have an explanation.

It might console you that there are a lot of people out there that are on lists and don't have the slightest clue. I'm thinking of IT-employees in European/Asian infrastructure companies whose personal access will be attacked should an interested player want to hijack/scrape something running on that infrastructure (as happened in the Belgacom hack).

The Post's headline seems a big optimistic, since the news report is about whether the U.S. government will claim to be the core authority administering the DNS root (and other IANA functions). The article says the government will now relinquish this claim. But it seems like there are certain other ways in which the U.S. government exercises "control over the Internet".

This is actually a pretty big deal. I was around at the formation of ICANN. At the time I remember saying "the fix is in" as a result of the interactions between Network Solutions (the sole contractor prior to ICANN) and government connections with SAIC corp a big contractor with ties to the government security community.

http://www.saic.com/markets/national-security/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Solutions

It's a big deal because given the security connections I never thought this type of thing would happen.

The argument about US "control" of ICANN has always seemed a little surreal to me. I took this photo on the roof-top deck at ICANN (they know how to throw a good party!) : http://www.flickr.com/photos/90065267@N00/10056736345/ . That's the Whitehouse, and the US Capitol in the distance, that proximity of influence isn't going away.

I can see my window in that pic, yet had no idea ICANN is over there on 17th.

You're right about proximity. Within that radius chances are you're a government employee, lobbyist or lawyer.

As long as most of the internet's infrastructure is controlled/maintained by US based companies (Verisign comes to mind), such relinquishing of control is a meaningless gesture, since the government can force any US based company to bend to its will.

Doesn't NameCoin (a blockchain to store name/values, i.e. decentralized DNS) solve this problem without the need for DNS servers (browsers hold a copy of blockchain), registrars, governments, etc?

Distributed consensus algorithms in general, including all blockchain systems, could solve the registrar issue. Then you just need to solve the squatting problem.

Governments have never been required, they are just what grows out of a geographically delimited, naturally re-occuring monopoly on violence in human societies.

> Governments have never been required, they are just what grows out of a geographically delimited, naturally re-occuring monopoly on violence in human societies.

Governments aren't what "grows out of that", governments are that. You are presenting the definition of government as if it was an explanation of the source of government.

Squatting is not a problem: you just cannot use a registered brand name w/out permission. Period. Now, let's look at it the other way around: using the new TLDs I tried to register iloveto.run but my registrar explained that I now need additional paperwork in order to first register the brand name (or prove that I already own it) and then request ICANN for the domain registration (not granted that I will get it even then). Who has the money and time for this bs process? Big corp. So I presume that Nike, Adidas et al will fight (legally) each other to register every imaginable combination of words plus .run?

Fuck it, squatting or not we need to decentralize the DNS. It will be like the gold rush: who ever gets there first deserves it.

Title is misleading. Seems to me opening control of the ICANN will mostly address concerns regarding trade marks.

I wonder if it's not a way to prevent a fragmentation of the internet.

I still don't understand how ICANN can justify what they charge per domain name? They need to lower their prices. It really adds up if you own a few domains.

Maybe you should stop being a domain squatter.

It's both great news and horrible news, like some kind of quantum event.

This was going to happen years ago and the real announcement about this was made back then, too. This is not new news based on the NSA or anything else.

Ommited from the headline: ... contingent on having a backdoor hardcoded into everything it is giving up control of

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