In Montevideo, Uruguay this week, the Directors of all the major Internet organizations - ICANN, the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Architecture Board, the World Wide Web Consortium, the Internet Society, all five of the regional Internet address registries - turned their back on the US government. With striking unanimity, the organizations that actually develop and administer Internet standards and resources initiated a break with 3 decades of U.S. dominance of Internet governance.
A statement released by this group called for "accelerating the globalization of ICANN and IANA functions, towards an environment in which all stakeholders, including all governments, participate on an equal footing." That part of the statement constituted an explicit rejection of the US Commerce Department's unilateral oversight of ICANN through the IANA contract. It also indirectly attacks the US unilateral approach to the Affirmation of Commitments, the pact between the US and ICANN which provides for periodic reviews of its activities by the GAC and other members of the ICANN community. (The Affirmation was conceived as an agreement between ICANN and the US exclusively - it would not have been difficult to allow other states to sign on as well.)
Underscoring the global significance and the determination of the group to have a global impact, the Montevideo statement was released in English, Spanish, French, Arabic, Russian and Chinese. In conversations with some of the participants of the Montevideo meeting, it became clear that they were thinking of new forms of multistakeholder oversight as a substitute for US oversight, although no detailed blueprint exists.
h/t Michael Geist
The US is the worst country in the world to run the Internet, except for all the others. You think the NSA spying scandal is bad? Wait until all the freaks in the UN get their fingers on the intertubes. I can hardly wait until North Korea co-chairs with China...
The internet protocols used today and the underlying IP belongs entirely to the American Taxpayer. It's ours we own it. We invented it and we hold the patents on it.
We have graciously allowed other nations to use our IP and this is what you get.
Develop and maintain your own internet if you do not like ours.
KPD, yes I agree the US military through DARPA did fund the invention of much of the underpinnings of the internet in order to ensure logistics among NATO members in case of a war in Europe would be possible. However, patents do expire and the limit is I believe 17 years, so there is that. Using your logic should all television broadcasts be controlled and monitored by the Germans? They used it first to televise the '36 Olympics to TV sets in town squares throughout the Reich. Your phone company owns the cellular towers and fiber-optic lines that you use so it must be kosher for them to record and store your private calls and texts, right?
If the RCMP want to tap my phone and read my email they have to get a court order by demonstrating to a judge that there is a compelling need to do so. I have legal recourse in that the court order can be appealed if it was inappropriately granted and any evidence so gathered will be disallowed. The RCMP cannot do the same to a US citizen, he is outside of their jurisdiction. In comparison the NSA is willfully violating the privacy of hundreds of millions of people without regard to the sovereignty of other nations or the rights of the individuals. Every free country's government has an obligation to protect the privacy of it's citizens from unwarranted observation both from domestic police forces and from foreign governments.
The revelations that the NSA is eavesdropping on the internet and storing all the data transferred is at the heart of the recent upheaval. The world has learned that NSA representatives are directing policy on Internet security to ensure they can decode everything that is transmitted on the internet without judicial oversight. Good fences make good neighbours. Your governments alphabet agencies are making a habit of violating the electronic fences of the world.
A far as I know, the "Internet" is a military asset, much like the Interstate Highway System, or the Intracoastal Waterway. Sure the public domain is free to borrow and use the technology, but when push comes to shove, the United States Government, and it's Citizen Sovereign Taxpayers through the military will exercise domain.
The USA also possesses the legal and operational mechanisms to enforce this domain if necessary.
Whether this is good or bad depends on where you sit.
Al, makes sense and the U.S. government is being run like Animal Farm. Still, one suspects this will not end well. As a U.S. taxpayer, suspect the other governments will want to make changes, won't have the resources or the skillsets, so I'll end up paying for their BS rather than our own. Frankly, I much prefer our own, even with BO running the show.
KPD, I must disagree with your statement that the USA possesses the 'legal and operational mechanisms' to control the internet. Do you honestly believe that the nations of the world and the telecom companies will shutdown their servers, fiberoptic networks and satellite transponders if the USA says so? I'm pretty sure Putin would say 'Nyet'. I'm pretty the Chinese would say no too.
The internet was originally intended to be a military logistics system, hence the term 'Universal Resource Locator' or URL. When the inventors were devising it they asked themselves 'what if the Russkies nuke our communications nodes?'. As a result they made the internet self-repairing; if a server goes down, a satellite is downed or an undersea cable is cut the system reroutes traffic around the damaged section. Many internet companies have mirror sites in other countries. If all the servers in the USA were shutdown the internet would continue to function by bypassing the blocked part.
Also consider how much business now depends upon electronic transactions. For one thing there are 47 million Americans who now have EBT cards to buy groceries. How would one-sixth of the US population react if suddenly they couldn't buy food or smokes? There would be mass rioting and looting. Could everyone in the USA function without functioning ATMs, computerized billing, banking, and purchase orders? I don't even know where my cheque book is anymore. What would be the economic costs in an already slumping economy if all the stock exchanges were shut down in New York, Chicago, Dallas et al?
Who owns the root servers,again?
Oh, right.
Larry Ellison owns Java, Uncle Sam owns HTML etal....
Absolutely.
Or just wait until France seizes control and levies a new tax on every transmitted byte. Wait until Muslim nations seize control and declare the internet an insult to Islam and decide to restrict internet usage to males. Then wait for China's censorship regime to get their hands on it.
Uruguay or Chile are not bad places to base a crypto-libertarian server that secure encrypted comms could run through. Traffic related to drug smuggling alone would make a mint.
I see it differently
I think all is going according to plan - liberal/leftist plan
the plan is to make the USA a smaller player -in every field, on every level - kind of like about a 100 years ago when the USA forced Standard oil to "downsize"
I am not one bit anti USA but I usually can see both sides, and it seems white liberals feel guilty for living in such abundance, Europe is jealous because they can not compete, Muslim hate the USA for their own dark reasons and blacks just want some kind of revenge on the most powerfull "white man" nation, even feminists get some pleasure in watching the USA - the biggest "patriarchy" success - crumble to a fraction of what it used to be
pretty much everyone except white conservatives want the USA to be a smaller player,
I can understand what motivates them - kind of like I understand small store owners wish Walmart was a smaller player - but I also understand that the day the USA becomes a player no bigger than France or Germany, we will pay more for everything and it will hurt badly in many ways
Pretty much everything Obama does contributes to making the USA a smaller player, and don't forget as a young man he was a anti-USA radical ( friends with terrorist Bill Ayers)
Yes everything is going according to plan - to anti-USA leftists plan.
The NSA must be crying into their champagne glasses.
Working overtime to spy on the World must have been exciting.
Now they will have to do it alone.
More diminution of America, at the hands of Obama.
The NSA spy revelations are giving other people cover for their agendas. They have always wanted to do it, but perceived US impartiality and leadership prevented it. One example next door to Uruguay:
Argentina's Peronists want to control the information the peons in Argentina receive. Honest economic data that contradicts the official Argentinian economic data is a CRIME (as in Go To Jail) in Argentina. If Britain or the US publish the real information and it is read in Argentina, who can they arrest? But if Argentina can keep the information out of their internet, the government can keep lying to their peons. (And maintain their control of the government and the country right up to the inevitable economic collapse {again, after 1999-2002 collapse}).
Multiply this by China, North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Burma, Cuba, Russia, most of the 'stans, Zimbabwe (do they still have internet?), Venezuela and others. Yep, the NSA spying and paranoia opened the door and governments across the world will shove it into their citizens rights...
The US may not be the best country to run the internet, but will you trust ANYONE ELSE?
One thing I know for sure and that is that I feel a heck of a lot more comfortable with the USA in charge than I would with Russia,China,Saudia Arabia or almost any other country at the helm.Anyone that can read and think beyond CNN,NBC,CBS and ABCs obvious political agenda has to realize that the internet is too important to turn over to the above mentioned ax-grinders,every one of them is totally about controlling the people.
Al, Your comment on everything being shut down is interesting, but who do you believe is most capable of keeping that system running, the US or China/Russia/France/pickyourpoison. Frankly given the history of "international" cooperation in virtually every area (Syria as chair of the Human Rights Commission?) I wouldn't trust an agency run by a large group of countries to walk my dog, let alone oversee the operation of the internet.
Surprisingly, the characteristic overblown sense of self importance common to Governance is also exhibited by Internet Governance people. Nothing to see here, internet will continue as scheduled and despite their efforts.