quote:
Originally posted by Jobe:
Without the ingenuity of America’s brightest minds and the investment of
U.S. Taxpayer dollars, there would be no Internet, as we now know it today.
Now, the Obama administration has quietly moved to cede control of the web from the United States to foreign powers.
http://newsmax.com/Headline/ob...2010/01/31/id/348514
The article's brief history of the Internet is, well, incomplete (to put it nicely). There were other people instrumental in the development of the Internet and they were working on the project before Kahn and Cerf. Leonard Kleinrock and the legendary JCR Licklider (who had been envisioning a global network of computers since the 1950's) both come to mind.
Moreover, TCP/IP is not an "identifier." I have no idea where this guy got that from. TCP/IP is a set of communications protocols that was invented in order to bring all the disparate packet switching networks (that were around in the early 70's) under one umbrella and make them all interconnected. Yes, everyone is uniquely identified on the Internet via an IP address, perhaps this is what the author meant?
I don't think there is anything to worry about as far as DNS servers or IP blocks are concerned. IANA is merely a body that assigns IP blocks and controls DNS servers. It wasn't until this past year that non-Latin characters were finally able to be used in domain names (which is quite surprising it took this long when you think about it). What I mean is that Asians, for instance, are now able to have
www.asiancharacters.com type of domain names. It's about time I would say. If the Internet is going to be global, we (the USA) have to allow others to play ball too.
So, allowing an international body the ability to control IANA is not a big deal at all. After all, the majority of the "backbone" of the Internet still runs through the USA. That is, we still manage all of the major pipelines and infrastructure; most traffic around the world has to come through here. Therefore, there is no way that an "international" body would ever try any funny business with our DNS registrations or IP blocks.
At any rate, after reading the rest of the article I am amazed that this guy was ever a Deputy Assistant to the President (although it was to Dubya, and he isn't known for being the sharpest knife in the drawer). The history was dubious, the technical info inaccurate, and the grammar was even worse.
