[WSIS CS-Plenary] Fwd: Comments made this week in Washington - not helpful

[Federico Heinz]

On Fri, 2005-01-28 at 07:15 +0200, veni markovski wrote:
> One of the things I was thinking after last year's elections in the US was 
> that George W. Bush is fully capable of bringing back the root servers and 
> DNS under the Dept. of defence - after all the Internet was created for 
> military purposes.

Sure, he can try. He can even do it. With the US root servers. There are
root servers outside the US, and no part of the internet architecture
mandates that there must be only one such infrastructure, not even that
it be coordinated. So if the US wants to do that... there's nothing we
can do to stop them. Fortunately, the architecture of the internet
allows us to work around any such attempt. It'll demand ressources, of
course, but freedom and independence always have a cost.

> So, when I refer to some of you as to be cautious about challenging ICANN, 
> you have to be aware that I am not speaking for the sake of speaking.

ICANN is a private corporation doing contract work for the US Department
of Commerce. They would probably have no choice but to do whatever the
gevernment tells them to, so saying that ICANN could shield us from that
kind of things is at best an illusion.

> p.s. Oh, and by the way, do not try to say publicly that exactly because of 
> such statements, we need to move everything to the UN, ITU, or other 
> intragovernmental organization. Quite the contrary - if people try do that, 
> then FOR SURE the self-management is OVER.

I agree with you fully here. A good internet governance body ough to be
distributed, redundant, full of automatic cross-checks and able to cope
with temporary inconsistencies... just like the internet itself.

	Fede

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