OT - US giving up remaining oversight of ICANN?

[Taro T]

I posted about this on SDS's PPP board.

 

I'd read an article in WSJ a couple of days ago about Commerce announcing last Friday that it plans on letting its contract w/ ICANN lapse next year which would effectively remove the last oversight of the US over ICANN.

 

Related article found here: http://www.lawfareblog.com/2014/03/who-controls-the-internet-address-book-icann-ntia-and-iana/

 

Surprised I hadn't read/seen anything else about it since.

 

Thoughts?

[SwampD]

Is that Apple's new garbage disposal system?

[Taro T]

Is that Apple's new garbage disposal system?

:huh:

[Sabres Fan in NS]

Interesting, but bottom line for me ...

 

... just a different department of "big brother" will be watching us.

 

No joke. Seriously.

[rakish]

Good article Taro, thanks

 

As for it being talked about, Metafilter doesn't have a recent post on ICANN, which surprises me.

 

As far as thoughts, my politics say it's a good thing, but I don't have a strong argument behind that. I think the blog writer's point that it was inevitable is true.

[LastPommerFan]

I really think this move delays the inevitable global takeover, and will result in American management of the system longer than if Commerce had attempted to maintain control.

 

On the otherhand, who types a web address into the browser anymore? The domain name is quickly becoming an outdated irrelevance. Everyone is connected by IP Address anyway, the text over top that link could easily be coded out of the internet with minimal impact.

[Campy]

Is that Apple's new garbage disposal system?

 

No, it's this:

 

[Taro T]

I really think this move delays the inevitable global takeover, and will result in American management of the system longer than if Commerce had attempted to maintain control.

 

On the otherhand, who types a web address into the browser anymore? The domain name is quickly becoming an outdated irrelevance. Everyone is connected by IP Address anyway, the text over top that link could easily be coded out of the internet with minimal impact.

Your 1st comment is very interesting. Could you please expand on it?

[LastPommerFan]

Your 1st comment is very interesting. Could you please expand on it?

 

Even if it's not directly responsible to the US Government, ICANN is still an American institution.

 

With tens of millions of non-Americans connecting for the first time every year, it's only a matter of time before the US becomes a minority of the Web.

 

At that point, I expect the rest of the world to push for more input on it's mechanics. Cutting ties with Washington will allow ICANN to slow that process (as indicated in the article).

 

Two other points:

 

ICANN also controls the IPv6 numbers, which is far more important, but there isn't really a registration system like DNS. They just divide up the numbers regional by number of users and allow regional authorities to assign the specific server-IP links. So as far as functionality, it really is global already.

 

The W3C, who write the content standards for the web (HTML, CSS, etc.) is already a global partnership, and it functions ok (large firms with big lobby$ still have undo influence, but that's gonna happen whether it's a US Gov't body or a global NGO) so I really don't see a huge downside to any of this. But I understand the concerns from a Lawfare blog of the US relinquishing a potential regulatory "weapon".

 

If any of the above isn't clear, I can go deeper, I typed this out in a hurry. sorry.

[Taro T]

Even if it's not directly responsible to the US Government, ICANN is still an American institution.

 

With tens of millions of non-Americans connecting for the first time every year, it's only a matter of time before the US becomes a minority of the Web.

 

At that point, I expect the rest of the world to push for more input on it's mechanics. Cutting ties with Washington will allow ICANN to slow that process (as indicated in the article).

 

Two other points:

 

ICANN also controls the IPv6 numbers, which is far more important, but there isn't really a registration system like DNS. They just divide up the numbers regional by number of users and allow regional authorities to assign the specific server-IP links. So as far as functionality, it really is global already.

 

The W3C, who write the content standards for the web (HTML, CSS, etc.) is already a global partnership, and it functions ok (large firms with big lobby$ still have undo influence, but that's gonna happen whether it's a US Gov't body or a global NGO) so I really don't see a huge downside to any of this. But I understand the concerns from a Lawfare blog of the US relinquishing a potential regulatory "weapon".

 

If any of the above isn't clear, I can go deeper, I typed this out in a hurry. sorry.

Thanks for the reply. After I recover from this last weekend of the youth hockey, I'll let you know if I have additional q's about it. Not sure why, but I'm mentally fried after this one.

[MattPie]

Even if it's not directly responsible to the US Government, ICANN is still an American institution.

 

With tens of millions of non-Americans connecting for the first time every year, it's only a matter of time before the US becomes a minority of the Web.

 

At that point, I expect the rest of the world to push for more input on it's mechanics. Cutting ties with Washington will allow ICANN to slow that process (as indicated in the article).

 

Two other points:

 

ICANN also controls the IPv6 numbers, which is far more important, but there isn't really a registration system like DNS. They just divide up the numbers regional by number of users and allow regional authorities to assign the specific server-IP links. So as far as functionality, it really is global already.

 

To the first part: agreed. It's a lot easier for ICANN to survive if it's not an arm of the big, bad, US government. The US is already a minority of users, and (somewhat justifiably) some of of those users bristle at the internet being controlled by the US at the base level. It's good to remember that nearly all of the internet runs by agreement and cooperation and keeping up perception is a big part of keeping everything working.

 

As for IPv6, I'm rather annoyed at the careless way the addresses are split up. I realize there's a *ton* of addresses, but it still doesn't make sense that the default way to create a local subnet is to give it 2^64 available addresses (18 quintillion). Each site prefix (organization) can have 65535 networks; that sounds like a lot but if you're a large company or government it's not so far out of the range of possibility. They could have easily balanced that out and had a mere 281 trillion per local subnet but each site could use 2 billion different networks.

Edited March 24, 2014 by MattPie

[LastPommerFan]

To the first part: agreed. It's a lot easier for ICANN to survive if it's not an arm of the big, bad, US government. The US is already a minority of users, and (somewhat justifiably) some of of those users bristle at the internet being controlled by the US at the base level. It's good to remember that nearly all of the internet runs by agreement and cooperation and keeping up perception is a big part of keeping everything working.

 

As for IPv6, I'm rather annoyed at the careless way the addresses are split up. I realize there's a *ton* of addresses, but it still doesn't make sense that the default way to create a local subnet is to give it 2^64 available addresses (18 quintillion). Each site prefix (organization) can have 65535 networks; that sounds like a lot but if you're a large company or government it's not so far out of the range of possibility. They could have easily balanced that out and had a mere 281 trillion per local subnet but each site could use 2 billion different networks.

 

But in reality, even in a large institutional environment, doesn't the practice of sub-net masking really reduce the need for a huge number of networks within a physical organization?

 

In the end, IPv6 is a huge step forward over v4, but we'll be back scratching our heads and rushing to implement IPv10 within 2 decades. Our ability to plan for the future is always outpaced by our ability to create and innovate.

[MattPie]

But in reality, even in a large institutional environment, doesn't the practice of sub-net masking really reduce the need for a huge number of networks within a physical organization?

 

In the end, IPv6 is a huge step forward over v4, but we'll be back scratching our heads and rushing to implement IPv10 within 2 decades. Our ability to plan for the future is always outpaced by our ability to create and innovate.

 

Yes and no. I suppose on a normal high-speed network it's OK to have a lot more machines in the same broadcast domain. The Windows chatter is annoying, but shouldn't eat up too much bandwidth. The problems is when you get to development environments where you might need multiple concurrent instances of some piece of software that doesn't behave well when there's another on the same subnet. Or in the case of multicast video, something that'll eat nearly all the available bandwidth and everyone will be stuck seeing the traffic (yeah, multicast should only get to the endpoints that want it, but I've yet to see that work right).