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THE UNITED STATES plans to hand over control of the system for assigning website addresses to a non-government entity, an government official has said.
The agency has asked the non-profit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to convene interested groups from around the world to develop a proposal to transition the system, said Lawrence Strickling, administrator of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration in a phone call with reporters today.
“We will not accept a proposal that replaces the NTIA role with a government or intergovernmental organization,” Strickling said.
Backbone
The move represents the final phase in the U.S. government’s effort to privatise the backbone of the Internet that provides websites with their unique identifiers, which are essential for users to find what they’re looking for online.
U.S. control over Internet functions has come under attack from privacy advocates and foreign governments in the wake of revelations about National Security Agency spying.
NTIA plans to allow its contract with the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority to expire on Sept. 30, 2015, Strickland said.
Unique codes
It isn’t clear yet what organization or groups will take over its responsibilities to maintain unique codes and numbering systems that are used in the technical standards that drive the Internet.
The U.S. is fulfilling a pledge it made as far back as 1998 to relinquish control of the Internet’s domain name system, Fadi Chehade, president and chief executive officer of ICANN, told reporters on the conference call.
“We thank the U.S. government for its stewardship, for its guidance over the years,” Chehade said.
“And we thank them today for trusting the global community to replace their stewardship with appropriate oversight mechanisms.”
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We really do not know how lucky we are. The past did not have access to a fraction of the information we do, and the neither will the future once the internet is regulated.
That’s assuming the powers that be actually figure out a way to regulate it. They can’t even shut down PirateBay.
Their capabilities are growing rapidly, but hopefully the machines will rise by the time the corporate governments get a clue :)
Pirate bay has been blocked, by eircom, from any user wanting to access using their media
Emmm, http://www.proxybay.eu/….
“Blocked” ah someone needs to read about proxy servers
Pirateproxy.net works with Eircom and UPC. Exact same site.
Bye bye free Web, hello to more heartless sites like Facebook Where you just sign yourself up for spam.
Spam?
That must be new.
The govt don’t need to spy on us anymore …… Facebook now knows everything about us
Pat
That’s why FB was created
But people can vote with their feet and leave Facebook altogether in favour of another site and then leave that too when it gets too big for its boots and so on….
You don’t leave face book you can disconnect but they still keep your account
You can permanently delete your account and all photos etc…
This move is contrary to the vision put forward by the www’s creator isn’t it ? The internet is about to be privatised !
Team Merica at it again! Christ they would ware you down sticking there noses in every thing,
Time to go back to reading paper papers and giving out about it in the pub ;)
We can’t even do that anymore, did you not hear? Everyone has a massive drink problem. Absolutely everyone.
Hands off the internet yanks!
That’s what they are trying to do.
Did you read it? That’s what they’re actually in the process of doing.
If anybody thinks that they are /actually/ going to give up control they are quite mistaken.
Skynet!!!
At the moment there are people from around the world(?12 I think) who meet up every three months, login into a system to renew the clock on the name-ipaddress system, they are the keyholders to this. backbone, they fund the meetings and equipment themselves.
Found an article I read two weeks, http://WWW.theguaridan.com/technology/2014/Feb/28/seven-people-keys-worldwide-internet-security-web had to retype the address if it doesn’t work Google seven keys to the internet.
My tinfoil hat wasn’t in the right position so that wouldn’t come through for me, anyone else any luck?
If someone were to gain control of ICANN’s database that person would control the internet. For instance, the person could send people to fake bank websites instead of real bank websites.
On the other hand, if a calamity happened, the ICANN database could need to be rebuilt. So ICANN came up with a way to do that without entrusting too much control to any one person. It selected seven people to be key holders and gave each one an actual key to Internet. It selected seven more people to be backup keyholders: 14 people in all.
Google? Who else could do that job?
Mack John, if you could spell ‘guardian’, the link would work…
Cheers when I leave comments with my phone I can’t paste into journal comments and can’t see the text box, I have to scroll back up to che k it, that and along with my poor spelling skills doesn’t help. If you want to help others copy and paste the URL.
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