Forum Moderators: phranque
"What we are looking at is the future management of the Internet. It's not about who owns it or who will be regulating the laws, but what is best way to manage what has become a natural resource for all of humanity," a summit official said.
Scary reading
jb
snip
[edited by: DaveAtIFG at 8:32 pm (utc) on Dec. 8, 2003]
I'm sure Leno and Letterman will be able to do something useful with that Reuters report tonight ;)
How is this scary? They are discussing the allocation of IP addresses, the assignment of country code top level domains, and similar things. Right now, large parts of those inherently international activities are governed exclusively by US law, which looks much scarier to most people than the UN setting up the rules.
jb
for example, currently, all ICANN disputes
that go beyond arbitration MUST be dealt with
in Virginia courts under Virginia laws. it is
part of the registrar agreement, even if you it
involves a European Union based registrar like
Gandi.
the Canadian government used to be responsible
for ip allocations in Canada. then someone had
the brilliant idea to delegate this to ARIN. now,
Canadian network admins have to get ip's from ARIN,
who have no accountability to Canadian legislators.
"We do see a role for governments, as is recognised in ICANN's structure. However, we are concerned with any efforts to increase governmental involvement at the expense of private sector leadership,"
It was only a matter of time before something like that was said. No matter what happens, I hope it happens for everyone's best interest.
China and Cuba will be among its strongest supporters.
Umm... no offense, but China and Cuba don't exactly have the most freedom loving governments out there. What's up with that?
If they get out of line, we can pretend they have a big cache of unallocated IP addresses - they we can invade and liberate them.
Yup, yup. Let's politicize the Internet and see if we can't break it that way, since other efforts haven't managed to destroy it.
*************************
That cynical interlude was brought to you by my realization that the office coffee machine is broken. ^.^
but China and Cuba don't exactly have the most freedom loving governments out there
Ahem... that could be said of many governments, including ones in North America.
All in all, imho, it's best to keep politics out of discussions in WW threads...
Yeah, I guess you're right. *turns off computer and backs away in an attempt to resist*
All in all, imho, it's best to keep politics out of discussions in WW threads...
It usually makes the threads get REAL ugly.
