jefflundberg.com/blog

via Guardian

Representatives of the EU have coalesced with the mission of stripping the United States of its solitary control on the internet. This comes as a result from the global acceptance of the net as the largest and most widespread economic operating and networking tool of the present and future.

I hope the U.S. retains control over the 13 root servers. Why? There are several reasons.

• The Internet formed from a U.S. government project ARPANET.
• Given the importance of the Internet to the world’s economy, it is in the best interest of the U.S. government to keep it stable and secure.
• The Internet must remain free from influence of countries like China & Iran, who block a considerable portion of the Internet to their own citizens.
• The U.S. doesn’t even control all the root servers. Technically, it only controls 3 out of 13. The rest are controlled by universities, non-profit organizations, forums, or consortiums across the globe.
• The EU has already created 13 of their own root servers, called ORSN, or Open Root Server Network. Currently, it simply synchronizes it’s database with ICANN’s. The ORSN servers could be set to run independently from the U.S. root servers. Ironically, the reasons they give for creating ORSN are the same reasons the U.S. gives for maintaining control over it’s own root servers. I see no problem with this. The more redundancy built onto the Internet, the more secure it becomes.

Besides these reasons, what reason does the EU or UN have for taking over the Internet root servers? Are they being mismanaged by the U.S? Is the U.S. abusing this power? There’s no evidence of this.

Another common reason the UN & the EU give for wanting control is that the U.S. has reserved too many IP addresses for itself, and hasn’t left enough for the rest of the world. IPv6 solves this problem, increasing the number of available addresses from 4.2 billion to 340 undecillion (3.4 × 10³⁸). That’s about 430 quintillion addresses (6.7 x 10¹⁷) per square inch of the Earth’s surface! The U.S. Government has mandated that all federal agencies must deploy IPv6 by 2008. Five out of thirteen root servers are already using IPv6. That’s more than the European Open Root Server Network.

Also, the argument that “so many countries rely on the Internet” doesn’t make sense. If Brazil wanted to protect itself from the U.S’s control over the root servers, wouldn’t it clone them (much like ORSN) in case of emergency?

The U.S. relies on the Internet, too, and therefore has every right to retain control over it’s own root servers. The fact is, the first root servers were in the U.S. Today, only 3 are in direct control by the U.S. Government. Two of them are in Europe, one is in Japan, and the rest are run by universities, nonprofits, consortiums, as well as public and private companies.

The United States created the Global Positioning System, originally for millitary purposes (much like the original Internet). Since the early 1980’s, the GPS system has been available for civilian use. The U.S. Department of Defence still maintains control, costing roughly $400 million per year. Should the U.S. give up control simply because other countries from around the world use GPS? I don’t think so.

Some background: The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) was created in 1998 to take over a number of Internet-related tasks previously performed on the behalf of the U.S. Government. They’re in charge of managing domain names and IP addresses. The 13 root servers (the main DNS servers) are maintained by several entities, including VeriSign, the University of Southern California, Cogent, the University of Maryland, NASA, Internet Systems Consortium (nonprofit), U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Army Research Lab, Autonomica (Sweden), RIPE (forum for Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia — located in Amsterdam), ICANN, and WIDE (Japan).

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 6th, 2005 at 7:57 pm and is filed under opinion, security, tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.