back to article UN takeover of internet postponed indefinitely

Efforts to squeeze the United Nations into the throne of the internet have been comprehensively defeated at a key meeting in South Korea. The result raises the possibility that after more than a decade of fighting, the threat of a UN takeover is a thing of the past. After more than two weeks of negotiations at the United …

  1. Duncan Macdonald

    What is the difference (at least in the US)

    In the US the government is a wholly owned lapdog of the big corporations. The cost of getting elected is so huge that only multimillionaires or people sponsored by multimillionaires have a chance of election. These super-rich also control and/or are major shareholders in the big US corporations.

    Quote "What has changed? The battleground. It's not governments that will be distorting the internet to their ends and away from yours any more; it’s the corporations"

    1. WalterAlter
      Devil

      Re: What is the difference (at least in the US)

      Mostly correct but your anti-capitalist ideology fails to detect ITSELF and leap to an understanding of IDEOLOGY as a primary determinant of human idiocy. Ideology is precisely what happened when the shoe-in Hillary Clinton was USURPED by an Obama out of nowhere representing the trotskyite internationale in a hidden schism rendered transparent to anyone with a non-ideological interpretive framework. Then too there is the hideous specter if international BANKING headquartered in the City of London thrashing about in the political orchestra pit as defined for all humanity to weigh, balance and amplify in the following seminal video:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dq9yjt_JbWs

      1. Graham Marsden
        WTF?

        Re: What is the difference (at least in the US)

        Is WalterAlter a new challenger for amanfrommars1?!

      2. Terry Cloth

        Could someone forward this to Jacques Derrida's ghost...

        ...and ask him to deconstruct it?

  2. Mark 85

    Good and bad...

    I'm believing this is a good thing (the postponement) in that the Internet won't be run in typical UN fashion with endless meddling and politics. It also means that the committee gets to have another round of meetings in some other location with high dollars being spent of food, drink, and accommodations and little accomplished.

    The downside, if you want to call it that is that the corporations and spy agencies still own us but the Internet works.

    I think that if the UN takes control than with their bureaucracy and inefficiencies, the corps and spys would still own us but things probably won't work so well. Important decisions will always be deferred and the "design by committee" model will bring things to a screaming halt.

    I'm not a fan of the UN so read into this what you want but for now, the Internet is better off with them running it. However, they could learn to be effective and streamlined and pigs can learn to sing.

    1. Yes Me Silver badge

      Re: Good and bad...

      Mainly good though. If the ITU ever gets control, some things you don't like will get worse (governmental control makes spying easier; monopolistic administrations make price gouging easier) and some things you do like will get worse (geographical addressing reduces competition and makes national firewalls easier; central control makes routing less robust). Off hand, I can't think of anything that gets better. Certainly not security: it's the NSAs and GCHQs of this world that hate general use of end-to-end security the most, and they plus the totalitarian governments would block any moves in that direction via the ITU if they could.

      Hats off to the democratic governments and the NGOs that have beaten back the totalitarian pressures once again. But don't relax; they'll be back.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Good and bad...

      ITU is not "UN fashion". It is worse - it is the sole remnant of the pre-UN League of Nations (this is why it is HQ-ed in Switherland by the way).

      So instead of "endless meetings" you get backroom horse-trading to cater for vested interests. Just in this case the vested interests of Google and Co won (they spent a few million to lobby here, that's for sure).

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Good and bad...

        >ITU is not "UN fashion". It is worse - it is the sole remnant of the pre-UN League of Nations (this is why it is HQ-ed in Switherland by the way).

        While it's true the ITU pre-dates the UN, it also pre-dates the League of Nations (and it's been attached to the UN since 1947).

        Also, although the official headquarters of the UN is located in Manhattan, they have 3 additional regional headquarters, one of which is in Geneva (Switzerland).

    3. streaky

      Re: Good and bad...

      The problem isn't the UN it's that the ITU is controlled by Russia and China and they want to do scary things with it. Devil you know and all that applies in this case.

  3. btrower

    We do not need to trust these people and we should not trust them.

    There is no necessity for any group to have *control* of the conversations taking place on the world's communications networks. Nowhere is it more apparent how rotten and downright evil it is at the top than on the Internet where it is laid bare.

    We are stuck in the tiny IPv4 address space so that it is more convenient for controlling psychos in entities like the NSA to locate and hack into systems.

    We have a PKI web of trust whose root Certificate Authorities are among the *least* trustworthy of all the players on the Internet.

    We endure SPAM because our security is woefully inadequate and it is inadequate by design to allow our overlords access and control.

    We have a fractured ecosystem of cable, satellite, wireless, broadcast television and radio, etc, etc in order to maintain profits for rent-seekers who have captured regulatory control.

    We have an infrastructure with encroachments like Treacherous Computing (TM, Patent Pending (C) All rights reserved). Few things promise to be more dangerous. Under the guise of providing needed security it renders effective security impossible.

    We have, I am convinced, woefully limited bandwidth all over the world because it allows authorities to capture all traffic. If bandwidth were increased radically worldwide we would be able to keep a traffic level high enough at the edges of the network so that it would be in-feasible to capture, monitor and store all the world's traffic as is being essentially done by the NSA now.

    We have encryption switched off by default. When it is switched on we have limited key sizes and deliberately weakened algorithms whose only conceivable purpose is to allow governments to illegally spy on its citizens.

    DNS and routing are dysfunctional and insecure, essentially by design.

    As a practical matter, https is broken. It does not work. Explaining how it *might* work if everybody did everything properly and root CAs could be trusted is not equivalent to suddenly making it work. It does not work.

    We are rapidly getting into a situation where the effort required to throw off tyranny will be extreme and may well be ineffective.

    1. Gene Cash Silver badge

      Re: We do not need to trust these people and we should not trust them.

      > stuck in the tiny IPv4 address

      You'd rather have IPv6 where the network ID identifies you explicitly?

      1. Yes Me Silver badge

        Re: We do not need to trust these people and we should not trust them.

        Rubbish. Your IPv6 prefix identifies your house, just as your IPv4 address does. There's just no difference there. The IPv6 interface identifier no longer needs to be tied to your MAC address; in fact it can be random and varying. In any case, once they've found your house, it's game over.

        (Tech ref: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7136)

        1. Ole Juul

          Re: We do not need to trust these people and we should not trust them.

          I'm not certain where I'll be with IPv6, but I can tell you that my static IPv4 address is consistently identified as being over 100 miles from here, and not even in the same place all the time. Someone would still have to subpoena ISP records to find me.

          1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

            Re: We do not need to trust these people and we should not trust them.

            > subpoena

            So quaint.

      2. frank ly

        Re: We do not need to trust these people and we should not trust them.

        @Gene Cash - If you knew my IPv4 address, a quick DNS lookup would tell you my ISP and, if you were familiar with the four letter abbreviations, the name of the town I live in/near. If you contacted my ISP with the required formal authorisation then they would tell you my address, my phone number and my credit card number. So, how is IPv6 any 'worse' that that?

      3. btrower

        Re: We do not need to trust these people and we should not trust them.

        Saying that IPv4's tiny address space and hence vulnerability to brute force scanning for open ports is not equivalent to saying IPv6 is secure. IPv6 suffers a variety of ills and although I think it is better than IPv4 its value proposition has not been sufficient to cause wide-spread adoption.

        [Aside: We should have gone to a backward compatible extension to IPv4 rather than IPv6 and I think that is so much more of a compelling idea that we may yet see such a thing adopted in place of IPv6.]

        A larger address space does not ensure that it is proof against various attacks. However, the smaller address space of IPv4 means it is directory vulnerable to brute force scanning. A company like Google has the resources to scan the entirety of the IPv4 address space. It may well have done so already.

        1. A Non e-mouse Silver badge

          Re: We do not need to trust these people and we should not trust them.

          A company like Google has the resources to scan the entirety of the IPv4 address space

          I think you'll find that you don't need Google's resources to scan the IPv4 address space. There have been many research papers where the researchers have scanned the Internet for some reason. My IP addresses at work are also getting continuously scanned and probed by various parties - and my work isn't a particularly high value target. (e.g. Finance, Central Government)

    2. Gordon 10

      Re: We do not need to trust these people and we should not trust them.

      @btrower

      Some very good points ultimately spoilt by your tinfoilhattery.

      1. btrower

        Re: We do not need to trust these people and we should not trust them.

        @Gordon_10

        Re:tinfoilhattery

        I hate to say it, but the deeper you look into this, the worse it gets. It is easy enough to get information from the Snowdon leaks. The $50,000,000,000+ enterprise of which the NSA is a charter member is so far beyond reason it sounds like fantasy. However, as fantastic as it all sounds, the evidence points to it being essentially true. There appears to be some vendor hyperbole, but anywhere I know enough to confirm or deny, the capabilities are essentially real and they are being used.

        As huge as that budget is, I expect that the effective budget is larger still. Recent revelations about Gen. Keith Alexander show that at least some of the ill-gotten knowledge the NSA has obtained is worth real money. They can't seem to stop themselves from stealing anything else, why would they stop short of stealing money as well?

        It is always good advice to follow the money.

        We already know that these people have tampered with security to our detriment. If we can identify a weakness it is a safe bet that they can too and they freely admit that they are pledged to exploit any weaknesses they find.

        I have no doubt that the infrastructure as we have it was initially designed with good intentions. However, the architecture dates back to a time when it was considered mannerly to host an open relay. It was, in essence, insecure specifically by design to make access and use as easy and flexible as possible. Those days are long gone, but there has been no real push to re-invent the network so that it is secure.

        Recent weaknesses that have come to light in various things like OpenSSL stem at least partially from the fact that these things are grossly underfunded. They are essentially funded by the unpaid labor of part-time volunteers. OpenSSL is used all over the place to secure things. The government investment in ensuring it is sound is $0. Meantime, the government is spending literally billions of dollars investigating ways to defeat security everywhere. Is it really that big a stretch for you to imagine that the people directing billions of dollars of security funding who have allocated *all* of their security funding specifically to defeating such technology may well be pro-active in weakening security generally?

        I have seen plenty of evidence that big players have spent money to defeat civilian security. I have seen very little evidence that they have spent money to improve it.

        The state of mind of the various 'perps' is irrelevant. Operationally, they have been proactive in weakening civilian security and in keeping it weak. They have not been proactive in strengthening civilian security.

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