ICANN taking over the 'net from Uncle Sam? Ted Cruz to the rescue! Four leading Congressional figures, including US presidential candidate Ted Cruz, have questioned whether the Obama Administration has the legal right to transfer control of the internet's key technical functions outside the US government. In a letter [PDF] to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), chair of the Senate …
While Teddie Cruse and other US politicians have millions to spend on their minions and lots of help from government-funded private interests to advise, I would like the representatives to actually have a real knowledge of the issues that they spout.
Back in the old days of the US of A, reps were actually working people. They ran farms, businesses, possibly enslaved some workers. But they knew what made the world really go around, back in those days.
Nowadays, most of the pontificators (mea culpa, monseigneur) are paid sycophants for vested interests. They have no knowledge of the real world.
Yes, they can cite many industry/interest studies to support their demented POV, but they would be totally helpless in a true debate on the merits of ANY issue.
But 15 years later, the Cruz letter notes: "We understand that to perform this work, GAO will need to conduct both significant audit work and complex legal analysis."
But, later, when Cruz was informed that serious money would be required to do the complex legal analysis, he angrily retorted, "The United States Gub'mint will not spend one taxpayer dime to support the lavish lifestyles of a bunch of Gub'mint lawyers!" And so, as is so often the case in Washington these days, nothing was done, and ICANN went on to ruin run the Internet.
I was musing along similar lines just yesterday - what if everyone took their toys home and left ICANN to play with themselves (make of that last bit what you will ;-) ) ?
The answer of course is that "no-one will" - for the very reasons outlined in another article just last week.
If any small group wanted to break away, then in practical terms they'd be well and truly stuffed as they'd then be in their own little bit of isolated internet - their users would not be able to access the majority of the internet, and whoever stuck their neck out and tried it would find that their users would very quickly cut it off.
Only if you got enough people together - and in particular, all the registries involved - then you could possibly try a break away and "take the internet with you". But again, speaking practically - unless the "new root" and the "ICANN root" are the same, then there would be mass confusion which would be bad for everyone.
A breakaway group could declare it's new root as "THE" root - but until all DNS operators worldwide update their hints files then the "old root" would still be active. Get millions of admins worldwide to agree on changing their root hints ? Good game, good game !
You might possibly get by with just taking "most" of the root servers with you - then you could update the records they publish to exclude the ones still controlled by ICANN. But that's still a bit hit and miss and DNS servers around the world would then suffer "indeterminate" data depending on which root server they happened to query when updating. Registries would need to ensure that they kept the records up to date at both the new and ICANN roots - lest the TLDs they operate should become "flaky" (only resolvable if the DNS server doing the resolution has the "right" root server list).
So while it would seem an attractive thought - just tell ICANN where to stuff it's root - in practical terms it just can't happen.
"If any small group wanted to break away, then in practical terms they'd be well and truly stuffed"
True enough. But that's not what would happen. What would happen is that all the root zone operators outside the US would get together and do it together. Then you'd soon end up with a roughly even split between half the resolvers in the world using the US-controlled root servers and the rest using the non-US ones. Not saying that would be a Good Thing though... imagine a world with two parishilton.com's...
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