UN to take over Internet?


The UN is expected to vote to take control of the internet's top level infrastructure away from the US

My friend Van noticed this article and, fearing the worst, stated "the internet will never be the same". I'm not so sure this is all that big of a deal.  The top level domains sound like they are a big deal, because they own the stats on all first level domains (e.g. they control who gets .com names).  But the entire design of the internet was decentralized on purpose, so if a particular location was bombed or shut down, the rest of the net wouldn't feel it.  By nature, decentralized systems are hard (perhaps impossible) to control from a central authority.  In fact, even the control of naming has been split apart into tons of little companies that eventually submit to ICANN.

That being said, of course, the UN having anything to do with anything generally means two things - bureaucracy and corruption (perhaps thats only one thing ;) ).  While I don't think they have the technical ability to muck around that much, they could make life very difficult for the people/companies involved in building and selling top level stuff.  The other danger is if they have control of the RFC (Request For Comment) process, because that dictates the underlying technology for the internet.  Still, the internet affords quite a lot of opportunity to thwart the efforts of intrusive governments, if for no other reason than the fact the technology is fast and governments are not.

Posted: Thu - October 6, 2005 at 10:44 AM | | | | | | |

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