Sunday, November 11, 2007

International politics infects the Internet Governance Forum?

It seems the latest UN Internet Governance Forum appears to be about to descend into classical United Nations farce as China, Russia and Iran push for the control over the Internet to be taken away from the US Government, especially in terms of name space management. Whilst ICANN, a non-profit organisation, notionally controls the Internet space, technically the US Government has ultimate veto over them. This make perfect sense of course given that IP(v0) was their invention and the network was a military project out of the Pentagon when it originally began.

However, countries like China, Iran and Russia - all bastions of Internet freedom - think it is wrong that the the US can effectively control the naming convention. Specifically they want to be able to have TLDs like .com .net etc that are not in English - or more correctly TLDs that are not reliant on a Latin derived alphabet and can accommodate script based symbols like Arabic.

The thing is, they already can do this anyway. Domains name resolution starts at the ROOT servers. There is nothing to stop a country setting up its own ROOT servers and then having its internal network providers use them as an authoritative source for address translation of non-Latin based addresses.

The fact that their argument is about something that can do already, suggests to me that their motivation is probably politically driven rather than being an honest technical discussion. It's worth saying as well that the USA - as it happens - does a brilliant job in maintaining an open network and managing the namespace effectively. The idea that it would or should cede that control to China or Iran is nuts.

3 comments:

Shug Niggurath said...

It's like Iran wanting Nukes, certain left wing elements see it as inherently unfair that they don't have them while (The Terrorist Entity that is) Israel does. I don't doubt that there will be pressure for the USA to cede control because there is a madness infecting Western society which says that we are all evil, corrupt or thieves and the rest of the poor, downtrodden world should have more of a say.

Anonymous said...

God bless America.

For all its faults still the land of the free and home of the brave.

Anonymous said...

Dizzy, your geekiness is truly astounding. I salute you.