US retains hold of the internet

jjw1965

Electoral Member
Jul 8, 2005
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In an eleventh-hour agreement ahead of a UN internet summit in Tunis, Tunisia, negotiators agreed to leave the US in charge of the net's addressing system.

More...
 

Jo Canadian

Council Member
Mar 15, 2005
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PEI...for now
 

GL Schmitt

Electoral Member
Mar 12, 2005
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Ontario
For a country that has so vividly demonstrated within its own borders (and beyond) with what little regard its present Administration holds freedom of speech, permitting any control over the internet to be left within its — or indeed, any single entities — hands, is nothing, if not disheartening.

With luck, before the present administration can pervert the freedoms (both political and perverse) of the internet community, the current United States government will have been exchanged for leaders espousing less despotic objectives.
 

Jay

Executive Branch Member
Jan 7, 2005
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The thanks they get for such a great invention.
 

Reverend Blair

Council Member
Apr 3, 2004
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Winnipeg
RE: US retains hold of th

Would you put Italy in charge of all radio transmission, Jay? How about putting Germany in charge of all printed material?

No single country should be in charge of the internet because it is a way of disseminating information around the world. Hopefully Bush will be impeached and the next administration will give control of the internet to an international body.
 

Twila

Nanah Potato
Mar 26, 2003
14,698
73
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RE: US retains hold of th

Except , Jay, that it wasn't the US gov't who invented the internet....
 

Twila

Nanah Potato
Mar 26, 2003
14,698
73
48
RE: US retains hold of th

Wait Rev, maybe we (Canada) could own the phone lines. Then we'd be in control of all dial up access and nobody could call their grandma's without our permission!!!mahahahahaha...this could be a great idea!
 

Jay

Executive Branch Member
Jan 7, 2005
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"Would you put Italy in charge of all radio transmission, Jay? How about putting Germany in charge of all printed material? "

The world can go ahead and make their own radio transmissions, newspapers, and computer networks. That isn't a good enough argument for the US to give up control over the "Net".
 

Jay

Executive Branch Member
Jan 7, 2005
8,366
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Re: RE: US retains hold of th

Twila said:
Except , Jay, that it wasn't the US gov't who invented the internet....

The current "net" is the invention of the US military.

You might be refering to BNC networks. They were invented by the British....
 

Twila

Nanah Potato
Mar 26, 2003
14,698
73
48
RE: US retains hold of th

Jay, I don' t know if I can have a url war with you on this....I hate when history is presented with 2 completley different "facts" It causes confusion....

I'd gather from what I read (your url and my own) that it was not an individual thing nor was it a entity. It looks like it required mulitiple individuals working with multiple agendas.....
 

Jay

Executive Branch Member
Jan 7, 2005
8,366
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I don't want a URL war either. :)


I just understand it to be the....The US military wanted a network that would work even if "nodes" were hit by nukes. They needed a way to still have traffic on the network....and we got the "internet" out of it.

That’s why the DNS servers are American, and that is why they have control over the addresses.
 

GL Schmitt

Electoral Member
Mar 12, 2005
785
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Ontario
Re: RE: US retains hold of the internet

Jay said:
. . . The world can go ahead and make their own radio transmissions, newspapers, and computer networks. That isn't a good enough argument for the US to give up control over the "Net".
That’s like saying because Henry Ford popularized the automobile, the Ford Company owns all the roads.

The seminal design for the computer was probably the automated lace-making control developed by expatriate British weavers working in Calais, following the Napoleonic Wars, but Charles Babbage is generally credited with its first design as a digital computer — the Difference Engine — which he began to design in 1827.

In any case, the computer is an unexclusive invention. No one, until Bill Gates came along, tried to own the technology, the originators of cybernetics had a different paradigm in mind.

While Gates confiscated much early public domain software for the personal computer, no one owns a patent on the basic hardware, and people in every country, of every persuasion, can write software.

Networking around an obdurate America would not be a big problem. It would cause only a temporary impediment.
 

Jay

Executive Branch Member
Jan 7, 2005
8,366
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"That’s like saying because Henry Ford popularized the automobile, the Ford Company owns all the roads. "


No it isn't.

"Networking around an obdurate America would not be a big problem. It would cause only a temporary impediment."

Thats right. Good luck.
 

Summer

Electoral Member
Nov 13, 2005
573
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Cleveland, Ohio, USA (for now...)
RE: US retains hold of th

Found on Wikipedia:

"The ARPANET and nuclear attacks

A common semi-myth about the ARPANET states that it was designed to be resistant to nuclear attack. The Internet Society writes about the merger of technical ideas that produced the ARPANET in A Brief History of the Internet, and states in a note:

It was from the RAND study that the false rumor started claiming that the ARPANET was somehow related to building a network resistant to nuclear war. This was never true of the ARPANET, only the unrelated (sic) RAND study on secure voice considered nuclear war. However, the later work on Internetting did emphasize robustness and survivability, including the capability to withstand losses of large portions of the underlying networks.

The myth that the ARPANET was built to withstand nuclear attacks however remains such a strong and apparently appealing idea - and of course "a good story" - that many people refuse to believe it is not true. However it is not, unless one means that these ideas influenced the ARPANET development by way of the RAND research papers. The ARPANET was designed to survive network losses, but the main reason was actually that the switching nodes and network links were not highly reliable, even without any nuclear attacks."
 

Jay

Executive Branch Member
Jan 7, 2005
8,366
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1962
RAND Paul Baran, of the RAND Corporation (a government agency), was commissioned by the U.S. Air Force to do a study on how it could maintain its command and control over its missiles and bombers, after a nuclear attack. This was to be a military research network that could survive a nuclear strike, decentralized so that if any locations (cities) in the U.S. were attacked, the military could still have control of nuclear arms for a counter-attack.

Baran's finished document described several ways to accomplish this. His final proposal was a packet switched network.

"Packet switching is the breaking down of data into datagrams or packets that are labeled to indicate the origin and the destination of the information and the forwarding of these packets from one computer to another computer until the information arrives at its final destination computer. This was crucial to the realization of a computer network. If packets are lost at any given point, the message can be resent by the originator."
Backbones: None - Hosts: None
1968
ARPA awarded the ARPANET contract to BBN. BBN had selected a Honeywell minicomputer as the base on which they would build the switch. The physical network was constructed in 1969, linking four nodes: University of California at Los Angeles, SRI (in Stanford), University of California at Santa Barbara, and University of Utah. The network was wired together via 50 Kbps circuits.
Backbones: 50Kbps ARPANET - Hosts: 4
 

Jay

Executive Branch Member
Jan 7, 2005
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I'm sorry...the link I already posted. I should have been clear.