OBAMA GIVING THE INTERNET AWAY

>>72298
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Kill yourself

>>72299

I choose that because its WALL ST. of all people

I had hoped someone would have noted that.

Here is another article
http://thehill.com/policy/technology/295794-gop-seeks-strategy-against-obama-internet-move

My point is there needs to be better dialogue about this.

I remember when SOPA/PIPA/CISPA tried to get passed and everyone was on the case like moths. Why not for this one??

>>72301
ted cruz will save us

Here's a source that isn't completely stupid:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3119891/internet/internet-naming-system-not-us-property-says-congressional-watchdog.html

For anyone who's curious, Obama is not "giving the Internet away".

Since 1998, a private, nonprofit organization called ICANN has managed key Internet functions under a contract with the U.S. government. The two most important functions of ICANN are IP address allocation (blocks of addresses are allocated to regional registries, who allocate smaller blocks to ISPs and such), and management of the DNS root servers.

All IPv4 possible addresses have already been allocated to regional registries, and IPv6 address are not going to run out, so there is little value in being able to control IP address allocation. If the U.S. were to exert control over the DNS root servers in a way that negatively affected anyone in any significant way they could just use an alternate DNS root server network, examples of which do exist and can be used with virtually no effect on the user.

What Obama wants to do it make the government's 18-year-old arrangement with ICANN permanent and irreversible, and in doing so the U.S. government loses nothing of value. If anything, this is a slightly positive thing for users because it means the U.S. government won't be able to do stupid things to the DNS root on behalf of media companies (which, again, would only affect users until the decided to use a different DNS root).

Conservatives are all about having a small government with less control over out daily lives, so as far as I can tell the only reason for them to oppose this is to avoid the perception that they agree with someone who they have spent years trying to demonize.

>>72318
tbh pcworld is only marginally better than Rupert Murdoch's WSJ version

The slashdot longhairs have a much better technical analysis:
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/16/09/13/154213/us-tech-firms-urge-congress-to-allow-internet-domain-changeover

>>72320
That one is different than the pcworld in one important way, which is that it makes it clear that the U.S. government is handing over "oversight" of ICANN, as opposed to handing over the powers of IANA /to/ ICANN permanently (as opposed to on a contractual basis), which is what I thought was happening based on all of the other sources, despite vague references to a "multistakeholder body", the nature of which has not been explained.

Slashdot completely fails to describe what the benefit of this "oversight" is, except for a vague reference to the fact that voting is involved, which would seem to indicate that "oversight" is not the right word to be using.

In any case, there's not that much you can do with the ability to assign blocks of IPv6 addresses to various regions. There are not annoying things that could be done with control of the DNS root, but it can only ever get so annoying before people just stop using it in favor of a better one.

Ironically, slashdot says that the Republicans' complaint about all of this is that some voting rights may go to authoritarian governments. There is no government who has ever used the Internet to violate people's human rights more egregiously than the U.S. government. Generally speaking, the less control they have over the Internet the better off we are as a species.