Internet Control Stays in the US (I should think so)
Surely The UN jests (bold is mine, and is commented on below):
U.S. Insists on Keeping Control of Web
GENEVA (AP) - The United States refuses to relinquish its role as the Internet’s principal traffic policeman, rejecting calls in a United Nations meeting for a U.N. body to take over, a top U.S. official said Thursday.
“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.”
Speaking on the sidelines of the last preparatory meeting before November’s World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia, Gross said that progress was being made on a number of issues, but not on the question of Internet governance.
The stalemate over who should serve as the principal traffic cops for Internet routing and addressing could derail the summit - which aims to ensure a fair sharing of the Internet for the benefit of the whole world.
Internet governance has historically been the role of the United States, because it created the original system and funded much of the its early development.
While this arrangement satisfies some, developing countries have been frustrated that Western countries that got on the Internet first gobbled up most of the available addresses required for computers to connect, leaving developing nations to share a limited supply.
One proposal that countries have been discussing would wrest control of domain names from the U.S.-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, and place it with an intergovernmental group, possibly under the United Nations.
“We think that that’s inappropriate,” Gross told reporters at U.N. offices in Geneva. “The genius of the Internet is that it has been flexible (and) private sector led.”
It is my belief that the bolded paragraph above is patently untrue, and that developing countries have no externally-imposed limitations on Internet access. The universe of unused IP addresses is still very, very large. I have traced the origins of spam e-mails, and found that the in-reality unused IP addresses that the spammers have pretended to own fall within huge blocks of unused IPs in countries all over the world.
If anyone could further enlighten me on the truth or falsity of this item, e-mail me.
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BizzyBlog Flashback: “US Retains Control of Internet Directory: AP Has Hissy Fit”
Money paragraph at Flashback post (with slight modifications; links that no longer work were removed):
(A UN-controlled Internet) will have:
- the financial accountability of African dictators,
- combined with the incorruptbility of The United Nations bureaucrats,
- along with the respect for human rights, online freedom, personal privacy, intellectual property, and global brand names mainland China is so noted for,
- with a dash of the sanctity and great love of human life found in American radicals and Islamic terrorists.
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UPDATE, Oct. 1: The “address-gobbling” issue is answered at this new post.
