Moving Net Control From ICANN to Governments? 468
a whoabot writes "The BBC has a piece by Bill Thompson suggesting that "control" of the internet should move away from corporate groups(ICANN and the Web Consortium) and to governments. We previously had an article on ICANN and the UN World Summit on the Information Society. One quote: "We allow images of consensual sex in our cinemas, but not images of bestiality or child abuse. Why should the net be any different?" My personal answer: because the internet should not be another TV or cinema, it should be a free, user-as-peer and user-controllable media; a "reversible" media, as Baudrillard would put it; not user-as-consumer."
No, because... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:No, because... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No, because... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No, because... (Score:3, Insightful)
If porn corrupts your mind and soul, then why don't you just not watch it?
Re:No, because... (Score:5, Insightful)
Gotta love simplistic views, but murder has a 3rd person as victim involved. This may be the case with porn (enough known cases where porn is produced in a not so friendly way regarding the 'actors', but the majority of porn is produced in legitimate ways without creating more victoms)
Also, murder being bad is something you will not find disputed in many places, porn being bad is something you will find being disputed by many.
So, your reasoning fails.
> I think I just read in Time magazine that something like 80% of divorce lawyers these days cite internet porn as a major factor in the divorce cases they handle.
It never occured to you that anything that adds to the case will be used when justifying a divorce and tryign to create the impression that its purely someone elses fault? (you also don't realize that if you dont take that approach that you will pay the rest of your life?)
This seems to be no proof or even a suggestion of it, the simple fact that it exists is enough to get it mentioned.
Re:No, because... (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if porn were as harmful as you propose, I am not a child and you are not my father.
"I think I just read in Time magazine that something like 80% of divorce lawyers these days cite internet porn as a major factor in the divorce cases they handle."
They're divorce lawyers. They'll cite whatever they think will work for them to win their case.
And if internet porn is such a big factor in breaking up the marriage, the couple had problems long before the offending person discovered pornography. Couples with such a weak and fickle relationship shouldn't be married to begin with.
"Society is composed of families."
Then I guess I, being unmarried and not a father, don't count. And since I'm not part of your precious society I can do whatever I damn well please without any detriment to anybody else.
Society is made of individuals. Families are simply where individuals are made.
"Break down in families like this means break down in society."
Define "break down in society." Society happens when people interact with one another, whether there's family or porn involved or none of the above. Society may change in some fashion, but it certainly doesn't go away short of everybody dying off.
"There IS such a thing as the common good,"
But no two people agree totally on what that common good is. That's why government in this country was designed to do only what is absolutely necessary and no more.
"belive it or not, one persons actions have a huge rippling effect on the rest of society's members."
Butterfly beating its wings, blah blah blah. I don't care if my actions have the "rippling effect" you describe, that still does not give you the right to dictate what I do with my own free time unless and until my actions directly infringe on the liberty of another. The individual must come before the majority.
Re:No, because... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why? Consenting adults are very different from children. This is why we have statutory rape laws on the books, as well as minimum ages for driving, smoking, voting, drinking, etc.
"Further, you couldn't say that the government could make things like drug use illegal"
Which I don't. Other than validating the customer's adulthood or parental consent the only drugs I think should be controlled are antibiotics, where misuse of them (allowing bacteria to mutate instead of killing them all off) can do very real harm to other people.
"Like, YES you really DO need to educate your kids."
However the government seems to have very flawed ideas about how those children should be educated, with the lessons being biased towards whichever direction the political winds at the time are blowing. And society has the pesky habit of thinking that the government knows what is good for the child more than the parents.
"Illegal drugs ARE bad for you,"
That doesn't explain why I shouldn't be able to use them anyway. Freedom means having the ability to make poor choices. Having the majority (i. e. government) decide what is right or wrong for a person sets a very dangerous precedent that is all too easy to abuse, far more harmful to the individual than the availability of heroin might be.
"Hence, weak families make for a weak society."
What's wrong with a weak society? I doubt I'm the only person on Slashdot that, given the choice, would rather spend my time alone than with members of my extended family. Ever notice how Christmas and Thanksgiving are often more stressful and even violent than New Year's?
Another aspect of freedom is not having interpersonal ties forced upon you.
"Oh, you know, rampant drug and alchohol abuse,"
Freedom isn't meant to be pretty.
"millions in jails,"
Only if things like drug abuse continue to be crimes.
"I think porn, by its nature views women as object."
How much of it have you watched before making this judgment? And how was your sample chosen? Any sort of statistical precision in your viewing pool?
"Then women begin to think all they ARE are objects."
How many women have you talked to before coming to this judgment and how were they chosen?
"Hence you have 8 year girls dressing like Britney Spears."
This is more a problem that comes from bad parenting than anything else. And these bad parents can often be taced back to poor access to contraception and a personal belief that being married automatically makes one a good parent*. These can be traced back to the family/society you seem to hold in such high esteem.
*(While it is true that happy childhoods can be associated with parents that remain married to each other, it's folly to assume a cause-and-effect relationship. Good parents are married because they love each other, not the other way around.)
Re:No, because... (Score:4, Insightful)
Not at all. Children are not adults, as has already been discussed.
Furthermore, I think it's entirely appropriate for an individual (not a government) to try and convince another adult that a particular behaviour should be undertaken or avoided. If a friend of mine wanted to commit suicide, I might try to talk him or her out of it. That doesn't mean I have the right to kidnap him to stop it from happening, and it certainly doesn't mean the government has the right to intervene.
Illegal drugs ARE bad for you, etc.
Name me some activity that doesn't have a measure of risk. At least some illegal drugs are less dangerous than many societally sanctioned behaviours. And regardless of how dangerous a given drug may be, I see no compelling reason to prevent a free adult from taking it (excepting antimicrobials). We don't outlaw bungee jumping, hang gliding, or scuba diving; why should we outlaw cannabis, for example?
My bad, I should say that society is a macrocosm of the family, and that all its members are formed within a family. Hence, weak families make for a weak society.
I'm sorry, but that's not convincing. I don't accept that society is a macrocosm of "the" family (whose family?). Nor do I think it would follow that, even if society is a macrocosm of the family, the rules for families apply to society. Things change when you change scale; ask any quantum physicist.
Oh, you know, rampant drug and alchohol abuse
which occur regardless of the presence of laws (although I can't imagine how being an addict is worse than being an addict and in jail)
millions in jails
who wouldn't be there without vice laws. Even if society should intervene, rehab is a lot cheaper.
etc. etc.
Two examples and "etc". Nice handwaving. "Society" is very large, very complex, and full of subcultures with wildly different values and beliefs. Where you see "breakdown" I see the inevitable consequences of growth and complexity, compounded many times over by vice laws that shouldn't exist.
I think porn, by its nature views women as object.
I'll remember that the next time I'm looking at gay porn. Or female-dominant BDSM porn. Or lesbian porn intended for women. Or straight porn that emphasizes eroticism over exploitation (mind you, exploitation is in the mind of the exploited). Maybe you need to broaden your sample size.
Oh, and is it any worse (or better) to be treated as a sexual object than any other kind? At least two women I know who worked in the adult industry found those jobs far less demeaning than some minimum wage service jobs (and not because of sexual harassment).
Hence you have 8 year girls dressing like Britney Spears.
No, you have 8 year old girls dressing like Britney Spears because we have a consumer culture with a pathological fetishization of youth, and we have parents who yield responsibility for parenting to the teevee and then buy their kids whatever they want. I know plenty of families whose children do not currently, nor are ever likely to, dress like Britney Spears. I know others whose kids did dress like Britney, and grew out of it, no worse for the experience than a closet full of tacky clothes.
Re:No, because... (Score:3, Insightful)
You should be careful with your quotes. Amongst your whitebread, Rush Limbaugh-loving types these things are fine. Anywhere else though, you're going to get laughed at.
Unless, of course, there has been an 80% increase in divorces since the popularizatio
Re:No, because... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Use a little common sense (and Google). (Score:3, Funny)
Is it any wonder that Slashdot's bid for the ICANN contract was rejected?
Give control to Switzerland (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Give control to Switzerland (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Give control to Switzerland (Score:3, Informative)
Actually the UK did annex Sealand. The UN had a general law of the sea treaty under which every country could extend its territorial limit. The UK did this and sealand has been in the UK for over a decade.
The sealand loonies dispute
What a load of crap. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What a load of crap. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What a load of crap. (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh yeah, he's a prize idiot. His position is, basically, "governments should keep their hands off everything I do, and regulate everything that I'm not interested in anyway" and also "all corporations are evil, except the ones that make toys I like". I remember he also wrote an article calling on programmers to more more "professional", with his picture in the article, long unbrushed hair,
Re:What a load of crap. (Score:2)
Re:What a load of crap. (Score:5, Insightful)
Since when did 'debate' become a bad thing? What is Slashdot, after all?
It's worth pointing out the line from the top of the article (I've not seen anyone quote it yet:
This whole story seems to have sparked a "I don't trust the US government, the Chinese government or any other government" reaction from most people. But how many Internet users trust an American corporation? At least with politics, and debate, we have the opportunity to get involved.
Bah: -1, Angry!
Re:What a load of crap. (Score:4, Insightful)
No offense to slashdotters out there, but I would not want the slashdot consensus to decide anything that would remotely affect me in any real way. For the things that matter (like who runs DNS, who runs the phone network, who verifies my credit card charges), I want either a unix longbeard who knows what's best, or a greedy corporation with everything to lose. The longbeard will do the smart thing by default, and a greedy corporation will do the right thing because they won't have a business model without a working product.
Re:What a load of crap. (Score:5, Insightful)
"The system works", as you put it, only in the short term. The problem is that power brings more power: over time, unregulated capitalism tends to concentrate more and more power in the hands of fewer and fewer people, because those with money are able to buy political influence and change the rules in their favour, thus attracting more money and more influence. Unless you are the single richest individual, you will sooner or later be in a position where the people above you are rigging the rules against you and forcing you down. This is the simple fact that free market libertarians fail to grasp: unregulated capitalism is not in anybody's long-term self-interest, except the single richest individual in the world. Everyone else eventually loses what they've won so far. In order to prevent a spiral towards tyranny, money and political power must be separated. That means not relying on the market as a mechanism to distribute social justice.
The only system that benefits more than one human being in the long run is a system based on universal suffrage and equality before the law. The market is not such a system. People who oppose unregulated capitalism are not necessarily whining parasites or tree-hugging utopian idiots. They just realise that a game of five billion players in which the winner gets to change the rules is not a game you want to play. The free market is a useful mechanism, but to treat it as a substitute for democratic government is a recipe for disaster.
Re:What a load of crap. (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps you should amend "governments" to "representative governments".
The problem is that power brings more power: over time, unregulated capitalism tends to concentrate more and more power in the hands of fewer and fewer people, because those with money are able to buy political influence and change the rules in their favour
I'm afraid you misunderstand the nature of a libertarian socio-economic organizati
Re:What a load of crap. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm talking about a completely decentralized network with no central body allocating addresses, with strong encryption at the link level and end-to-end, guaranteeing privacy and freedom of speech to anyone who can connect to it.
Freenet [freenetproject.org] and the Freehaven project's second-generation onion router [freehaven.net] have laid a lot of the groundwork, but they're designed to be internet overlays. What we need is a truly decentralized packet-switching network, independent of the internet, capable of operating over an ad hoc collection of wireless, leased line, modem and (for the moment) internet connections. The internet can function as scaffolding but nothing in the new network's design should be internet-specific.
It's already possible to build small networks of this kind - see Mute [sourceforge.net], for example. Each machine's address is derived from its public key, and you find routes by broadcasting. But broadcasting every query isn't scalable, so in my PhD research I'm looking for scalable ways to route packets across a large, untrusted network with no address aggregation. If you have any ideas, please reply and I'll send you my email address. :-)
Re:What a load of crap. (Score:4, Insightful)
Good point. And we might note that there is an unstated presupposition at work here: The idea that the Internet should be controlled by some organization.
We should be pointing out an alternative: Freedom of the Internet's users from control of their speech (with the qualification that we need ways of preventing people like marketers and politiciant from imposing their "free speech" on unwilling listeners).
If we must have a single organization controlling the Internet, in much of the world that organization probably should be the government. In some parts of the world (the US, Canada, most of Europe, etc.), there are laws in place that protect people from the government. These laws include the right to speak and publish, the right to due process if charged with a crime, etc. Such laws aren't always recognized by the current ruling gang, true, but the courts generally do recognize and enforce them, when they can.
At present, such protections don't apply in areas controlled by corporations. If you say something that offends a manager, you're out. You have no right to call home during work hours. You have no right to keep personal items in your desk. If charged with an offense, you have no right to a fair trial. You have no rights at all, except maybe the right to walk out.
A year or so back, we saw reported here the case of an ISP in Arizona that was bought out by msn.com, and one of the things they did was to cut off email to anyone not running Microsoft software. And if you read Microsoft EULAs, you often find a clause stating that you can't publish anything critical of them or their software. These are the sorts of things that corporations have the legal right to do. Many governments don't have such rights, and you can challenge them in court if they try to force you to kowtow to a chosen corporation.
I suppose we all understand that most governments can't be trusted very far, either. Even the best are not exactly known to be supportive of citizens who publicly criticise the government. But if we're on government property, at least we have some rights, and we can fight their attempts to control us. On corporate property, we have no rights whatsoever.
Still, the best situation would be to prevent total control by any organization, government or corporate.
Re:What a load of crap. (Score:3, Insightful)
Ah, but the Internet is not under the control of any one private corporation. There are many corporations, which do things such as running parts of the backbone, name registration, ISP services to businesses and individuals, search engines, etc. If any particular corporation was slack in its duty to
mtnehbknstodhidhin-t,.d (Score:2)
government control (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:government control (Score:2)
Re:government control (Score:2)
Re:government control (Score:3, Insightful)
My internet is not [mozilla.org].
cheers,
pol
Re:government control (Score:3, Informative)
Re:government control (Score:5, Insightful)
The internet for the most part is a *world* resource.
Eventually I expect each culture will end up cowering behind its firewalls.
*sigh*
Internet is not a world resource (Score:3, Insightful)
It is absolutely not.
What it is is a network of networks. We all agree, implicitly by our use of a specific protocol suite, to interchage packets. But each piece is privatly owned. I own mine, you own yours, and every bit in the middle is owned by somebody else.
None of it is publically owned or a public resource. It is a network of p
Moving net control back to your own server (Score:5, Informative)
Wake up, it's already happened. At the end of one meeting 4 years ago the head trademark lawyer for IBM bragged they'd spend 2 years of their $30M a year Washington lobbying budget to make sure no new top level domains had been created to protect their intellectual property interests. Dave Farber was at that meeting (as was Vint "Darth" Cerf).
Roger Cochetti, then a VP of IBM, helped Ira Magazier pick the "interim" ICANN board in secret - when that was supposed to have been done by the internet community. Cochetti is now an NSI VP and figures prominently behind the scenes of ICANN.
The IFWP [ifwp.org] effort, started in Becky Burr's (US Department of Commerce who have oversight over ICANN) office at the suggestion of Kathy Kleinman and Mikki Barry and had 3 meetings worldwide - Reston Va, Geneva, Singapore to determins consensus points [harvard.edu] to use as guidelines to create bylaws and elect a board for the organization that would replace IANA. While this was going on Cochetti and Magaziner were running around in secret getting the likes of Ether Dysan and Mike Roberts on board. Mike Single handedly tanked [mail-archive.com] the IFWP effort [interesting-people.org] (notice he has Farbers ear) and became the first president of ICANN and his organization was the recipeint [sdnpk.org] of the "intellectual infrastructure fund" [nsf.gov] - the domain tax fund that we all paid into back then, and and
(" Esther Dyson says that she was approached by Roger Cochetti of IBM and Ira Magaziner in Aspen, Colorado and asked if she would be interested in joining the ICANN Board. The IFWP wrap up was finally completely derailed by ICANN's refusal to participate in the meeting." [democracy.org.nz]
ICANN was created to do one thing: make new tlds at a time when it seemed (at least to the US government) the US government had to step in to solve the war between the IAHC camp (who had just been shut down) and the alt root camp (who seemed to be making progress). Magaziner met with us all and created the "white paper" [doc.gov] that was going to create 7 new tlds immediatly. Trademark lawyers and the EU freaked and when it was revised as the "green paper" [doc.gov] it had punted to "ICANN will create a method to elect a board and a process to create new tlds". Instead they spent 3 years futzing around with the UDRP and other things trademaek laywrs wanted and didn't get round to new tlds till the fall of 2000 and it must have had all of ten minutes thought put into it and was intentinally lame as hell. To this day the new tlds that were picked are still viewed by ICANN as a "feasability study" to deteremine the effect of net stability when adding new tlds. Never mind in that period 100 new cctlds were added almost all of which were commmercial in nature.
Then you have the "Government Advisory Committe" the well named GAC of ICANN. Governments of the world get to meet in secret and "advise" ICANN.
Govrernments and the Tradmark Lobby have already coopted ICANN. It's foolish to worry that the ITU/UN will let this happen if they're in control, it's already happened.
So, don't move control of the internet to ineffective treaty organizations, move it to you
adam smith (Score:4, Interesting)
If it were up to me, i'd give it to a UN body. The last people i'd want to give it to is the US government, not because i'm anti US, but because i don't think one country should have control of such a multi-national object. The arguement that "we made it" doesn't hold any water.
Re:adam smith (Score:2, Flamebait)
This whole concept of a world government holds no water with American people. It never will. If people from other areas aren't content with the internet...implement your own. It's as simple as that.
Re:adam smith (Score:3, Interesting)
To suggest that we'd hand over control of the internet to a body that allowed Libya to head a commission on human rights violations or lets China prevent Taiwan to gain representation...it's sheer lunacy.
Again, Europe and S. America and others may worship the UN. Americans do not. If you want the UN to control something, then you invent it and hand it over to them. We would have no problem with that.
Re:adam smith (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually yes, Americans (myself included) do think that. Read some of the writings of our founding fathers. They were terrified of the idea of the Centralized Government. Central Governments combine power at the expense of the individual. They created a Republican system of Government that kept the Federal Government as weak as possible -- yet still strong and effective enough to accomplish it's main goals (insuring the security and survival of the individual states being number one on the list).
that is like saying "I will not sign away the rights of my state to the federal government"
Americans also say that all that time. Read the 10th Amendment to our Constitution. If you fail to understand where we are coming from then you fail to understand a basic fact about Americans. It'll be a cold day in hell before we surrender our sovereignty to the UN, World Court or any other institution that allows the likes of Libya and Syria to chair Human Rights commissions.
And for all of Europe's support of the EU and the UN I question how long the EU will survive. How long do you think before the union becomes oppressive and little states like Belgium or Denmark (or states that aren't economic powerhouses like Poland or Norway) start to feel oppressed by the Germans and the French? You've already got the Brits refusing to adopt your currency. At least the British still have some amount of self-pride and the backbone not to surrender to the bureaucrats in Brussels.
You'd probably be much better off with some sort of Republican system of Government as opposed to your bureaucratic mandates from Brussels, rotating presidencies and page after page of dictations from Paris and Berlin about "How things are going to be". Not that any of you will listen to that suggestion.
Ever hear of the oppression of the majority? I say the EU is dead in 15-20 years tops.
Re:adam smith (Score:3, Informative)
A clue: We don't. People disagree with the government's policies, sometimes very vehemently. Sometimes things get changed because of it, sometimes they don't. Assuming that 100% of America's citizens totally support our government at all times is complete lunacy.
You don't seem to care about that, though, especially when you see a
Re:adam smith (Score:5, Insightful)
And why do you think the UN body would do better?
Its a bad opinion to say that a Gov. of any type or description should control the web. Look at china, where the Gov. tries to control what is read and seen on the net. What has it done? Its only created the need to bypass what prevents them from doing so.
If you give the control to a Gov. body, weather it be from any of the offical 192 countries (192? i think its about that many...) in the world, you destroy the point of the web, which is what it is now, its avaiable to all those who can find it.
Its not restricted, confied, censored, or banned to the masses of users (unless you happen to be under control of a admin or netnanny style software). And it should stay that way.
NeoThermic
Re:adam smith (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:adam smith (Score:4, Insightful)
UN Organizations != The General Assembly (Score:4, Informative)
While I agree with you that the UN General Assembly suffers from a lack of moral clarity, I think you are confusing the GA with the entire UN System of Organizations.
It is highly unlikely that if the UN were given administrative control of the Internet that the General Assembly would be dealing with day-to-day policy. Instead, the GA would draft a charter for a UN organization, which would then be given somewhat free reign to manage and implement those policies. UN organizations are frequently endowed with very strongly pro-human-rights-and-democracy charters and are not obviously controlled by any particular country.
So while I agree with you that the UN is an imperfect organization, its track record is largely positive (which, of course, isn't newsworthy) and therefore I would be more comfortable giving control of the Internet to them than any other body proposed so far.
Re:adam smith (Score:3, Interesting)
Being anti-US may not be your primary reason but it would automaticly blind you to the flaws in your argument.
The United Nations is there to resolve disputes and prevent wars. Obveously the current anti-US sentament is due in large part to the recent tendency to go to war instead of
Who is the UN truly accountable too? (Score:5, Insightful)
The UN is the last place you want with any control over the internet. Why you ask? Simple, outside of the Security Council the UN is proof of what is wrong with a pure democracy. Piss-ant countries have votes of equal strength of large countries. This allows them to band together to punish countries which adopt ideals they don't like, have flourishing economies, complain about the piss-ant countries human rights violations, and etc.
Look at the crap that goes on in the GA concerning Israel. No one takes the GA seriously anymore. Armnament comittees and Human Rights committees are routinely stacked with the worst abusers if not directly chaired by them. The Iraq Oil for Food program was a cash cow for the UN. The admin fees were exhorbinant and when some countries complained they got bought off.
If anything the net should be controlled by a publically controlled body. Something that people can get a hand on. Governments and world governments make businesses look like saints.
Re:adam smith (Score:2, Funny)
Duh! They have, its called the Internet.
One person's vice is another persons virtue (Score:5, Insightful)
If a government wants to impose restrictions on servers in their own countries, fine, but not outside.
Re:One person's vice is another persons virtue (Score:4, Interesting)
IANANE (network engineer) but from what I can see the internet is already partially decentralized. The important gateways are scattered around the world. What I don't understand is how they decede who gets the ip adresses. Class A B C. And how they force all the gateways and routers to point a the right networks.
Is it just a general agreement between the owners of the gateway that they will follow a certain rules set by a group??
What if an owner of a lot of important high level gateways decided it wanted to redirect traffic to the wrong adresses. That is give some adresses to a group that was not agreed to by everyone. Would your connection depend on the fact that you go through these gateways or not? Would there be like a conflicting internet were there would be two adresses for one computer??? And since packets can take different routes, would some packets go to one machine and some to the other? Is the internet vulnerable to such an attack by owners of high level gateways? Or does the internet protocol contain something that prevent that kind of chaos by one organization? Is there something in the protocol itself that makes sure that 1 ip asdress = 1 computer??
Just wondering how robust the internet is to an organisation that would try to take it over.
Re:One person's vice is another persons virtue (Score:3, Interesting)
Which is why we need a constitution. (Score:3, Interesting)
The question then becomes: who will write this constitu
No. Just no. (Score:4, Interesting)
This takes a clue, and a willingness to cooperate.
Look at how usenet is managed. Without the central point of capture DNS suffers from (the root zone) usenet cannot be controlled and it's administration is a boring technical fact, not an object of a power grab by bored Swiss political wonks.
Great Idea (Score:2)
VERY presumptious... (Score:5, Insightful)
Then, he goes on to give an example of a woman who was killed by "someone whose fantasies of killing were nurtured, if not engendered, by the pornographic images he found so easily on the web". I find it difficult to believe that someone went from being a perfectly normal person to a killer sjust he viewed some internet porn. (If that were true, half of Slashdot readership could turn into killers!
Then, his solution to all this is to let the government control the internet, and to "change" it to support that control. There are two problems with that:
1) The government is not some giant parental figure who's supposed to protect us from harm, no matter how much liberalism would like us to believe that.
2) Since he suggests "changing" the internet, but provides no plan on doing that, I have to question whether he has any idea of what would be involved. Market-driven forces are the only thing that really make significant changes now, and giving control the the government would completely undermine that. It would have to be in the interest of the market to have changes made to the internet, and until that happens, change won't.
Re:VERY presumptious... (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.eff.org/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow
It was written in 1996, but it's still pretty much a valid point.
Re:VERY presumptious... (Score:2, Insightful)
You misspelt "conservative."
Well, conservative as in these "neoconservatives" these days - they seem to want more government control and interference with our personal lives than any liberal I've ever come across.
Re:VERY presumptious... (Score:4, Insightful)
This is a splendid definition of liberalism.
KFG
I love these lame justifications for regulation (Score:2, Insightful)
There is no aspect of anybodies life that the government does not seek to control. They will attempt to control the net. There will always be some whining class of people victimized by something they see as evil. Government now switches between liberal/conservative politicians each with their own sets of victim classes expecting special treatment. I don't expect the future to b
Bill Thompson is a moron (Score:5, Insightful)
Besides which, he'll need to do a lot more to convince me that the internet is better in the hands of governments than bodies like ICANN than just say "because I say so". He glosses over issues like repressive regimes with little more than "well if the people don't like their government they can always kick them out".
If this was a one-off piece I'd be prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt but you can read for yourselves his previous pieces on the BBC website - they're almost without exception inane, badly-researched drivel.
Stupid Stupid Stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Heh (Score:2)
Impossible (Score:4, Insightful)
Not only should the internet "...not be another TV or cinema, it should be a free, user-as-peer and user-controllable media an essential (perhaps the most) tenet of "hacker metaphysics" is that "whatever one mind can achieve, another can duplicate and surpass". Control the content of the Internet? Impossible. Just ask the Chinese [slashdot.org].
Governments are worse, not better! (Score:5, Insightful)
Government control is worse, not better!
On the whole, government control of these resources is a bad thing. The best thing is to engineer it so that is no need for a single governing body at all. That way there is no lock-in to any governing body.
Aren't there already several alternate roots for DNS we could all be supprting? That's the way to keep DNS free--have many competing providers. Some can be corporate, some volunteer.
As for ridding the system of assigned numbers (IANA), that's tougher.
Re:Governments are worse, not better! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Governments are worse, not better! (Score:3, Insightful)
Apartheid was overturned in South Africa by a consumer boycott.
If a company makes terrible decisions, we can set up an alternative system. Companies can try to make your life harder, but governments can actually use force in outlawing another system.
If your government is using force to stay in power, having ICANN control the internet isn't going to help you very much.
Gah, I'm disgusted (Score:2, Interesting)
Why should anyone... (Score:2, Insightful)
There can also be standards bodies, who are a community of users who recommend standards for the rest of the community to follow, but they should not have control either.
Disagree? R
Insane (Score:3, Interesting)
btw, Baudrillard's audience is rapidly shrinking to lit-crit departments, and those who find the Matrix to be philosophical. His chief use to scholarship is to provide the muddle-headed with clever sounding catchphrases that can be bandied about with abandon.
Re:Insane (Score:5, Interesting)
"Idiotic" is a bit strong. The Constitution of the United States says that there is no 'criminal content'. Images of child abuse would be evidence of criminal behavior. Let's not confuse the issue by muddying the waters with emotion. I believe child molesters should be shot; send 'em back, they're defective. But let's examine another 'crime', any crime... like, say, defacement of public property. Does the fact that it's illegal to deface public property mean we should remove all pictures of graffiti from the internet as 'criminal content'?
I have no objection to an investigation into the handles used on graffiti websites; but banning the content is the wrong way to go about it. That's why our constitution opposes censorship.
And I don't care what Baudrillard says; the Internet was the first taste of true expression available to everyone who can get into a public Library.
In the end, that last sentence is what will doom the Internet. Big Business and the Government cannot condone a situation where some geek with a webserver is equal in venue to say, Ford, or Wal-Mart, or CNN... They cannot tolerate a truly free forum, and will do their best to convince you that you cannot, either. In your case, it appears that they have been successful.
Re:Insane (Score:2)
And it is not emotional to point out the obvious: if you sell the web as a place where such criminal acts are tolerated, then you are begging for some sort of greater regulation, whatever tha
The Wrong Approach (Score:5, Insightful)
And if we give it to 'a' country - like the US government, who already seems to think they own it - we'll all be more subject to their insanities.
In addition, the whole concept of 'excluding content' is simply the wrong way to go about it. Censorship never accomplishes its goals, nor does it elevate content. Any step in that direction is a 'foot in the door', and excluding things because we find them objectionable is poor practice; I can probably find someone (or even a 'category' of someones) who dislikes what any given post on /. says.
The way to deal with child pornography is not "banning" it; it's prosecuting people who create and purchase it. It's working to fix the economic problems that create situations where parents will submit their children to such indignities; it's finding the sick bastards that molest and photograph children in the more affluent parts of the world. It's not giving some entity a mandate to protect us from viewing something we find offensive - because it's only a short step to protecting us from viewing something they find offensive. Like, say, open source software that doesn't honor DRM legislation.
The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.
Damn Government (Score:3, Insightful)
Nothing to see here--this article is a troll (Score:5, Insightful)
Note the excessively arrogant language, and the prevailing assumption that the author is already right, and the implication all that remains is to hammer out the implementation details of his perfectly reasonable proposal. This is pure flamebait. Thompson might as well have called this "A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Internet from being a Burden to the Children and Despotic Governments of the World, and for making it Beneficial to Media Conglomorates." [art-bin.com]
I'm tempted to guess that he wrote it with the intention of raising the ire of slashdot readers, and getting the expected bazillion comments that every idiotic net-reform proposal gets.
Of course, there's always the chance that he really did think the proposal reasonable, and didn't intend to be trolling. If you believe that, check out his closing paragraphs:
Lumping the United States with China on a list of countries that "[deny] human rights"? News flash, Thompson! Can you guess what would have happened to Dan Ellsberg [wikipedia.org] if he'd stolen the Pentagon Papers from the British government and published them in the NY Times? He'd STILL be in jail under the Offical Secrets Act [hmso.gov.uk]! (Of course, the real irony is that Thompson is complaing about the U.S.-controlled internet because it's too free.) Your flamebait counter should be redlined about now.
It's a troll. Nothing to see here, move along.
Nobody should "control" it. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think these people have quite the right idea of what exactly the Internet is. It isn't just another distributor/consumer medium, like radio or television. The Internet is an interactive environment in which information is distributed on an on-demand basis; that is, the user chooses what content is delivered to him. Because the medium is "ask and ye shall receive," rather than "we're stuffing this junk down your throat whether you like it or not," such stringent control of content as that found on radio or television is really unnecessary. On the Internet, any user who knows what he's doing will be quite capable of protecting himself.
Unless, of course, your goal is to stifle the free exchange of information...
controlling the net (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems to me that this piece conflates two issues:
- Should the net be controlled by large corporations?
- Should the content of the net be regulated?
and that it gets the priorities backwards. It only briefly addresses the problem of having a network controlled by large corporations and focusses on regulation. In my view, corporate control is dangerous, as is regulation.The primary problem with corporate control is that the corporations will act in their own business interests rather than in the interests of users and people in general. So far things haven't been too bad, but it is easy to see what could happen. We could get lockin to particular proprietary technologies, e.g. MS Windows and IE, including things like DRM and spyware. Furthermore, precisely because corporations are not governments, they are exempt from constraints on censorship such as the First Amendment in the United States. They could censor content in their own interests. So I would like to see control of the net taken away from the big corporations.
However, transferring control to governments is also a bad idea, precisely because that will facilitate regulation. The fact is, most countries in the world are not open and democratic. Many, probably most governments engage in censorship and would do what they could to censor the net. There is a long-standing movement in the United Nations for a "New International Communication Order". Some of the arguments for this reflect the legitiamte desire of less developed countries not to be dominated by rich, developed countries, but the actual proposals that have been made periodically in the UN, particularly by UNESCO, have clearly had censorship as their primary objective. The current political movement to transfer control of the net to governments is just the latest incarnation of this movement.
The argument for regulation made in the BBC piece is weak. It merely repeats tired old arguments that violent publications (whether on the net or on paper) foster violence and that there is too much porn. The evidence for this is incredibly weak. And in view of the very limited harm that certain kinds of content can be argued to do, as opposed to the very great harm that censorship would do, it seems clear to me that facilitating censorship is a bad idea.
Don't forget... (Score:3, Informative)
See What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else. [worldofends.com]
One of the top countries pushing for gubmint control over the Internet is China. You know the country that has it's own firewall to help them government sniff out subversives.
Finally there are a few EU countries (France) that really like the idea as well. They want to protect their innocent youngsters from "American Culture which is so pervasive on the Internet".
I'd am VERY suspicious of such gubmints, the motives behind them dont seem very "egalitarian". They are self serving, and mostly trying to prevent the free exchange of ideas IMHO.
Silence the critics! (Score:5, Interesting)
For months they were running one of his articles every week or so, and most times the feedback section would fill up with comments from people disagreeing with him, pointing out the flaws in his arguments, explaining how/what he had misunderstood, detailing factual errors, etc. In my mind, and I'm sure in the minds of others, his articles were becoming a joke and must have been causing some embarrassment at the BBC.
So how did the BBC react?
Did they insist on him doing better research and presenting more sensible arguments? Did they cut back on the number of ill-conceived, subjective crusades he was allowed to go on? Did they decide to drop him entirely?
No.
They dropped the comments section.
Re:Silence the critics! (Score:3, Funny)
ICANN or the government? (Score:2)
Bestiality is cruelty to animals (Score:4, Funny)
Jesus Christ people, if you hang your free speech arguments on the right to show videos of daddy fucking a dog, you will lose those rights.
Open Letter to Bill Thompson (Score:2, Interesting)
Gov't control? I saw it, I hated it. (Score:4, Interesting)
So, normal folks do not have the option to get a
So you see, this system is much more biased against the citizen and in favor of corporations.
So, what I did was, I found a cheap registrar in the US (godaddy.com seems to be rock bottom cheapest) and registered my own
Yeah, my money went to the US, because the fscking government wants to keep control of
The Microsoft Department of Motor Vehicles...? (Score:4, Interesting)
Who is 'we' (Score:2)
Who is defined as 'we'? Do we just take everything to the lowest common denominator, and censor the rest? ( once its government control it qualifies as censorship )
Oh yeah, this is a good idea (Score:3)
I love the quote "It will be a network on which freedom of speech is guaranteed by law, not simply allowed because of technical decisions on network architecture made 30 years ago by a bunch of academic computer scientists." Yeah, I see China hopping right on board with this.
And let's face it, rebuilding the internet from scratch, as he proposes, poses no real technical challenge. All we have to do is come up with a new set of standards and a new set of hardware and software that supports those standards. That'll only take a week or two, right? At a cost of maybe a few hundred dollars, right?
This guy is clearly brilliant and sees things much clearer than "a bunch of academic computer scientists."
Global democracy (Score:2)
Let the French run it? (Score:2)
Chip H.
Who's Network? (Score:5, Insightful)
GIve it not to ICANN nor any government (Score:5, Interesting)
No government would have the power to change its policies, other than by passing laws on its own citizens.
We don't? Maybe not the Brits. (Score:3, Insightful)
"Freddy Got Fingered" contained images of bestiality. I know there are tons of movies with images of child abuse.
As for real-life bestiality or child abuse, there are already laws for that.
My feedback to the BBC (Score:5, Insightful)
------------------
A poor article with several serious flaws.
Firstly, it accepts without discussion the proposition that people are simply influenced by what they see on the Internet. This is far from obvious.
Secondly, it pretends that the Internet is simple to change. This is hubris. The Internet has grown, not been built. There is a fundamental difference.
Thirdly, it pretends that the Internet is a channel like cinema. It is not. It is fundamentally about individuals choosing protocols and applications with which to exchange ideas. The sheer force behind individual's desire to choose and control their personal communications with other individuals means that censoring the Internet is not just a bad idea, it is impossible.
Responsible authors should not pretend that this is a simple matter of social and technical engineering. If the 20th century taught us one thing, it is that such projects fail, miserably, and often at great cost.
Evils and evil people are a product of human nature and its many faces, not of the Internet. It would be more constructive to analyse how violent and dangerous individuals can be identified and isolated from the general population than to pretend that a simple tweaking of our communications infrastructure can eliminate this kind of tragedy.
consumers (Score:3, Interesting)
Which is exactly why don't want it in the hands of corporations or corporate bodies such as ICANN. By their very nature, they view everyone as one of
* competitor
* supplier
* customer
(sometimes more than one at a time)
who gets to vote (Score:3, Interesting)
There's a lot of ways you can set each of them up, but the only fundamental difference is who those bodies are accountable to. Corporations are accountable to their shareholders. Governments are accountable to their citizens. The latter is based on the principle of one person, one vote; the former is based on the principle of one dollar*, one vote.
I don't trust either kind of body, but I distrust governments less.
*or equivalent in local currency
Internet Corp for _Assigned Names and Numbers_ (Score:3, Insightful)
ICANN has _nothing_ to do with what particular machines are able to serve. It's jurisdiction ends at what IP addresses a machine has, and the DNS.
Seems we're once again dealing with political forces who simply don't understand that by design, that level of control over the internet simply does not exist.
Re:Fallacy? (Score:2)
Re:Fallacy? (Score:2, Insightful)
Leda Lights Up [zhurnal.ru]
The internet is publishing. It is no different from any other kind of publishing, other than the difficulty of effectively censoring it.
KFG
Re:Well as suggested (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Well as suggested (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyway, at present the biggest part of the internet is outside the US so control by the US government would be ridiculous.
Another bad property of the US is that it has too much political power in the world, and is thus hated passionately by some, and is untrustworthy at best to many other countries. This should be enough of an argument in itself to keep the US
Re:Well as suggested (Score:3, Insightful)
Why don't you, and everyone reading this who doesn't understand this simple point, just repeat to themselves 30 times every night before they go to bed:
A republic and a democracy are not two mutually exclusive things.
A republic and a democracy are not two mutually exclusive things.
A republic and a democracy are not two mutually exclusive things.
A republic and a democracy are not two mutually exclusive things.
A republic and a democracy a
Re:Welcome to communism. Pass the bread? (Score:2)
There are no links in this post. (Score:3, Interesting)
We must fight this before the internet becomes as regulated as television. We need to form