U.S. to retain control of Internet domain names

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Ok, sorry to rain on your "OUR INTERNET" party but...

.. You guys are wrong. Plain wrong.
Once again the American version of history has forked from the real one.

As a British citizen, it is fairly insulting when I hear the plain garbage that "some" Americans (and I use that term carefully, as I have a great deal of respect for what America / Americans TRULY have given globally in many areas) come out with when referring to history.
Here are a few points you may want to consider when deeming the Internet "yours"...


1. The dawning of the computing age can be pinpointed precisely. On 21 June 1948, shortly after 11am, Baby, the first device we would recognise today as a computer carried out its first successful program run. This epochal event took place, not in Silicon Valley, but at Manchester University, more than seven years before Bill Gates was born.

2. Colossus, developed at Bletchley Park for use in code-breaking during World War II, started work in February 1944, and was instrumental in winning the war for the Allies. Though it was not programmable in the modern sense, having to be rewired each time you needed to run a different job, it was still a recognisable ancestor of the modern computer.

3. The first company in the world to appreciate that the computational power of early computers had applications in business administration was tea company J Lyons & Co. Lyon's computer, Leo, ran the world's first commercial calculation in September 1951.

4. America may have created Arpanet, and fellow Americans Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf may have developed TCP/IP, but it took British super-brain Tim Berners-Lee to create the World Wide Web. Without Berners-Lee, there would be no HTTP, no URLs, and therefore no global information space where the world can exchange data. The millions of teenagers now able to call up images of a scantily-clad Kylie at the press of a button owe him a debt of gratitude.

Now, as far as the original topic, I have to say that having control of the "13" is not really the same as having control over the internet. The "13" are not physically located in the US, therefore it would be unwise to think that the US could simply "turn off" the Internet. (See http://www.root-servers.org/ for a more detailed explanation of the "13")
I agree with the view that the "13" must be administered by ONE defined body, regardless of who that may be. Look at the way DNS works, and then consider different root servers in conflict with each other. Even worse, imagine the scenario of two different DNS roots that refuse to share information between them (which I believe has already happened in the US with major backbone suppliers).

Posted by: Scrat   Posted on: 10/18/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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