Simon Butcher

'Net-Neutrality and the U-S-of-A

Posted
Comments 2

Internet Neutrality is a nasty subject, and something I have strong feelings about. So much so, I support Save the Internet. However, there's something else that really rubs me the wrong way.

I'm referring to the ongoing control of the Internet by the USA. While I understand the yanks have a long history with the network, but the time came many years ago for them to relinquish their grasp over the network and allow it to become more autonomous and internationally unbiased.

This is not to say that the Internet should be ruled by a chaotic political structure, in fact quite the opposite. Organisations such as ICANN need to exist for organisation purposes, but if they must be affiliated to a higher power then it most certainly should be the United Nations rather than the USA.

Many years ago, the root servers of DNS have become more dispersed, and in the process more redundant too. Beyond this, major backbones now have less reliance on the USA physically, and fortunately the commercial dominance of the USA in this arena is waning.

Despite these positive steps forwards, the constant discussions of moving Americans over to the “.us” ccTLD and leaving the existing gTLD's for global use continue to fall apart. It's at this point that most Americans I know would interject and present me with a lame excuse as to why the USA requires different rules to the rest of the world.

The recent “.xxx” gTLD proposal, which was fortunately rejected (again), has once again highlighted how the USA has their own set of rules, with some senators attempting to pass new legislation that would enforce the creation of the gTLD. I wouldn't have a problem with this if we were talking about “.xxx.us”!

Nobody should own the Internet, nor should any country have exceptional rights above other countries. Move over America, and learn how to play fairly with the rest of the world, at least once in your country's history.


Categories Geek

Comments

  1. I agree completely. Fortunately every country on the planet EXCEPT for the United Seclusion of Americans ( global name ;) , considers the gTLD's for global use. This is a good thing. Every time I hear debates about the USA, .us and gTLD's it always boils down to the funny map of just USA, a missed placed Alaska and 'dragons be there' everywhere else. The real issue here can be summed up by the case e360 insight vs spamhaus.org where US spammer ( e360 ) sued spamhaus ( uk based ) in the US court system. The district court ruled in the favour of the spammer because spamhaus did not present it's self at court with an 11 million dollar payout and to remove the spammer from the block list. Although the US spammer was informed by the company was UK based, and the US has no jurisdiction over the company. The court then ordered that the spamhaus.org domain be suspended due to non-payment of the penalty. ICANN cleverly responded with it has no jurisdiction to remove the domain, and that domain registration is delegated to the registrar. Unfortunately the spamhaus.org domain is delegated to the tucows registrar, and e360 is trying to raise a case in Mississippi to seize the domain. e360 continually complains that 'spamhaus is an internet vigilantly and thinks they are above US law'. The fact is, they ARE above US law. They are under UK law, where spamming is ILLEGAL. In a way I hope they win, because it will mean a massive loss of faith and force the internationalisation of ICANN.

  2. (Author)

    I've loved that map since I first saw it so many years ago: http://neil.franklin.ch/Jokes_and_Fun/The_World_According_to_America.gif Spam is such a problem for bloggers too. Most of my traffic comes from so-called professional facilities trying to automatically submit comments. I think I get more of these than email spam these days. Internationalisation (I like long words) of ICANN has to happen. The USA need to take their finger out of the pie, to use one of their expressions, and ICANN needs to have more balls than the UN currently does to stand up to the UnSrupulous Americans. To the yanks reading this: I'm referring to your "government". One more rant about ICANN: They need to stop polluting the gTLD with crap like .mobi, .travel, .museum, .sco, .cat, .biz (businesses aren't commercial?).. All this crap can be collected under appropriate places elsewhere and should not be on the root level. Since it's becoming so easy to get a gTLD passed through ICANN, maybe I should propose .butcher to ICANN for the community of humans with Butcher as a surname and for the specific commercial operations involving meat.

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