Ars Tech seems to think that being afraid of this change will turn out to be similar to fear of the y2k bug. They describe it as basically an administrative change.
They also correctly point out that the changeover began on October 1. I doubt anyone would have noticed without articles like the OP.
Yes, the impolite yet true fact is that the alarm is primarily being raised by known xenophobic crusaders like Ted Cruz.
While I am fairly tongue tied as this thread is in Great Debates and not in the Pit, it appears that they are more concerned about sharing control of this global resources with people whom may not be white Christians.
While I am grateful that congress funded ARPANET and DARPA which gave rise to the Internet, this is long overdue. Congress actually asked NSFNET to allow commercial traffic in 1993, and NSFNET sold it’s assets in 1995. There has been little to know reason to restrict oversight control to a federal agency for 20 years.
Note that BIND, while originally funded by a DARPA grant:
Was maintained under the control Paul Vixie when he was a DEC employee. And he maintained it under the private ISC org afterwards.
He was an open proponent the Open Root Server Network (ORSN)
And if there was some grand Chinese conspiracy to take over DNS a new root zone file could be pushed out to swap to those server and completely remove ICANN from the picture.
If you look at Ted Cruz’s statements:
Those claims are absurd to the point where I expect some reporter to ask Ted what he isn’t getting about that fact.
I would not surprised (and greatly amused) if he reply was.
Surprised this is just getting here now. Trump’s campaign tried to make an issue out of it but it didn’t seem to get any traction.
I happened to see it on the_donald subreddit and I tried to respond with factual information about what this is not (I normally don’t post there but this is grandma-chain-email cringeworthy) and it turns out they’re pretty hostile to factual information there. There was all sorts of circle jerking - “I thought you libs loved the internet? you always fight all those anti-internet things and here Trump is trying to save the whole internet and where are you?!!”, or even better, sarcastically saying “Trump is a really bad fascist guys! Everyone says he’s a fascist but he’s the only one saving the internet! This is like the least fascist thing anyone has ever done!”
The irony was that a guy creating or exaggerating a foreign boogeyman that only he could save you from is pretty much the first move in the fascist playbook. They’re not a smart bunch over there, and they fell for this hard, just like grandma’s chain e-mails.
I’m not sure the right-wing would consider it a BAD thing to have the internet controlled by Saudi Arabia.
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While I am fairly tongue tied as this thread is in Great Debates and not in the Pit, it appears that they are more concerned about sharing control of this global resources with people whom may not be white Christians.
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Because there can’t be a civil discussion about this? And who is ‘more concerned about sharing control of this global resources with people whom may not be white Christians’? Me? Epoch times? Or the Republicans? Could you be more specific? Seems like if you think this should be in the Pit and are just ‘tongue tied’ about the fact that it isn’t you must mean me.
Interesting. Well, I’ve been a network engineer for over 30 years. I think I have a better than average grasp on how the public internet functions, understand risk and risk management pretty well, and understand both what the author of the article in my OP was getting at, what the ICANN COULD do potentially and, now that cooler heads have pointed some stuff out, how some or much of that could and probably would be mitigated by the actions of other groups and countries. I also know what the US HAS done, and also what China has done in their own pond, and how they do it, and the fact that they want to expand that and that THEY think this comittee and the fact that the US has stepped back on this one front could aid them. You?
Personally, I think that what many of you are on about is that the Republicans don’t like this, but that has nothing to do with either the article I linked to nor my own points.
If you seriously think this just has to be in the pit, feel free to flag down a Mod to let them know.
As this is a debate, and because you are claiming authority, how about you explain how taking the final step to fully privatize these functions which were handled by private companies under US contract puts the Internet at risk? Claiming expertise and stating ambiguous FUD that does not talk about specific risks does no work. But let me be clear, the xenophobia republican christian right is being called out because they are the ones calling wolf. They are pretty much the ONLY group in the world that thought that this was a bad idea to complete.
IANA stewardship of names never stopped bogons, only IPv4 exhaustion did. ICANN and IANA didn’t fix BGP’s security issues, because that is the IETF’s role.
But lets be really clear here, the authoritative name servers that serve the DNS root zone, commonly known as the “root servers” are not changing, China does not have autonomy over any portion of the internet.
And the federal government really had no control over these functions post 1993 anyway.
Being as you have been in the industry please explain even a single plausible way that this change will impact thin in-addr.arpa service, the DNS service or heck even the IP allocation service that has been internationalized and regionalized for almost two decades now.
Outside of that it is FUD, not a single article i can find with Ted Cruz style cries of “we are giving up the internet” can even state a single mode of action that this would happen.
The only changes is that a broader group of people will have the formal responsibility of ensuring that the DNS root zone is being administered according to community-developed policies.
But lets be clear, by blocking this all that would have happened is the US would have pissed off the world community. But the US government is to blame there, it is the US government that is routinely takes actions that violate foreign citizens human rights, and it is their actions that are currently most to blame for putting the “freedom” of the global internet at risk.
A very recent example.
So come back with a real risk to mitigate, maybe something how ASN allocation policy is responsible for global warming or???
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But let me be clear, the xenophobia republican christian right is being called out because they are the ones calling wolf. They are pretty much the ONLY group in the world that thought that this was a bad idea to complete.
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And yet my cite wasn’t from the Republicans nor the Christian right, and their concern was completely different. They think it’s a bad idea because China has already stated their intent to try and use this. China, also not Republican nor Christian right seems to THINK they can, as well. Whether they could actually do it or not is certainly a debate.
You seem to be under the impression that I’m a Republican, that I’m getting this from Cruz et al, etc, but you are jumping to conclusions that aren’t there.
Never said they were. Nor did the articles I posted. The argument is that China would use its influence and the influence it has over some of the major stakeholders (such as Microsoft, CISCO, etc) to start putting into effect their plans for pushing out their own policies beyond their own cyberspace. Whether they can or not, again, is highly speculative. That someone who controls the root servers COULD have a major impact, however, shouldn’t be in question…they certainly could, if left unchecked. I conceded already that Richard Parker is probably correct, and regardless of what China wants to do they wouldn’t be unchecked, even if they did manage to suborn some of the other major stakeholders.
What? It hasn’t happened so it can’t? 
As for a plausible scenario, I’ve done that already. If you had direct access to the DNS root servers and could make any changes you want you absolutely could have a major impact. The more speculative parts are how you’d manage that, and as I said, I’ve already conceded that even China probably couldn’t do it per the earlier discussion.
Let me be clear here, since you don’t seem to be getting this…I don’t give a flying fuck what Cruz et al are saying or have claimed. I have no idea what their argument is, don’t care what it is, and I don’t think I’m making the same one here since it seems their issue is a loss of control by the US…which I don’t have a particular problem with, seeing as how the US has used IT’S leverage and position to affect internet access several times…which is why the though of China getting that power gave me pause. As I said, I know what the US has been able to do and has done.
When you come back, why not leave the strawmen at the door? Or if you feel like you just can’t hold it in, feel free to start a pit thread and bring all those global warming and Republican Right strawman with you there.
My speculation is this is probably more of a domestic issue than a foreign relations one. As Americans, we tend to think of China’s foreign policy first. But the Chinese government is obviously more concerned about China than America.
So the Chinese government if probably more interested in having the capability of controlling the Chinese internet than it is of controlling the internet internationally.
And there’s a prestige issue. The United States having control over the internet gave it some authority, even if it was symbolic, over the rest of the world including China. Removing that authority is an act of symbolic independence for China.
I am not building a strawman, your argument is not based on the realities of what the root zone does.
It may be useful for you to actually look at the zone file.
http://www.internic.net/domain/root.zone
This text file only controls referrals to subordinate zones, and those have been privatized for decades. Each country already controls their referrals to their country domains.
These 13 logical root name servers, with logical names in the form letter.root-servers.net do not serve up requests for a DNS name like boards.straightdope.com, they refer requests to authoritative sources.
China would have to gain control of all the companies, governmental institutions and educational institutions that run those systems, or all of the registrars in the world that publish the references to those to accomplish anything like you are claiming could happen.
And even if they did it would be trivial for that text file to be changed and to completely move to an alternative DNS root infrastructure. This hypothetical power play by China would be obvious and easy would provide plenty of time to move to a new system if they had any interest in doing so.
You have provided no information on how they would make some hypothetical power play.
And I am not sure if you are excluding the well known and long time existence of the “Great Firewall of China” to improve your argument or if you are just not aware of it’s existence.
Like Little Nemo said, outside of cyber warfare China is mostly concerned about limiting internal access, and that has been accomplished without some vast worldwide powerplay. Us in the US have absolutely no moral high ground left in either case and I will wave it off as special pleading.
If you understand how DNS works you would realize that the attack surface of the root servers is tiny vs effort of some grand international operation to control this is also likely to be the least effective way of doing so. The limited loud gnashing of teeth by the republican party and other groups is purely FUD by people whom do not have an in-depth understanding how DNS works and or not aware of the very real and far more effective areas which a much higher attack-surface and a far lower visibility ratio. The most viable attack against the root servers would be cache poisoning or other exploits and they can do those without getting large committees to collude with them in a massive conspiracy or powerplay.
The only change that will happen here is the governance of a group that chooses to add lines to a text file for TLDs that no one even uses.
For the most part they are basically an editorial board, that sets rules that allow companies to pay money for domains they will never use.
As an example note that Audi owns audi., yet try to hit www.audi or audi in your browser.
As someone whom has been professionally working in the internet industry for 22 years, and whom has sat in meetings with the likes of Paul Vixie, I have an unfortunately deep if not broad understanding of these systems. It is not because I am smarter but because I wanted to avoid the pager waking me up every 15 min and get a good nights sleep.
While I am absolutely sure that you are very qualified at your job and very knowledgeable in your field I am not seeing debate material presented that is anything more than FUD.
That said if you are holding back on technical details and concerns, please share them. The only people whom think that have nothing to learn are those whom fail to understand how much there is to learn.
So I beg of you to take off the gloves and provide more than conjecture, help fight my ignorance.
The thing that puzzles me is why the Americans would relinquish such control. How is this in the national interest?
Countries like China wish to control the ideological flow of information. This is not up for debate. That you believe this can’t happen is curious given European countries already control free speech.
This.
non sequitur, provide a way they can do this through an internationalized ICAAN, or you are just resorting to FUD
Ever hear of a thing called international goodwill and building partnerships?
Have you ever considered that other countries may have a valid concern about the US’s actions? Are you aware how much money is made by the US by Internet services? Are you not aware that international consumer confidence may improve those incomes? Have you ever considered that protectionist policies, especially when they provide no real benefit tend to reduce foreign trade and investment?
No it’s not
Ever heard of a thing called free speech? It’s a given that countries like China don’t respect that but now we have Western nations with their panties in a twist over “hate speech”. “International Goodwill” is eventually going to be translated into thinking and saying what you’re allowed to say. So your assurances that it won’t migrate into an international goodwill version of free speech is noted and filed under “well bless your heart”.
It was never really in our interest to begin with. It just meant we got to decide what domain names were created.
I did. Falun Gong practitioners volunteer to distribute the newspaper to the various stores and newspaper vending boxes around here at least. It’s a bit of a pet peeve of mine. for personal reasons.
Not saying they’re being untruthful, but keep in mind who’s doing the writing and take anything against the PRC with a grain of salt.