Posted by the ManGeek

Thursday, October 6th 2005 11:54 am CDT

In an amazingly dense and foolish move, the EU has decided to move forward with an attempt to sieze control of the Internet's DNS root servers [technology.guardian.co.uk]. What does this mean? When you request www.google.com in your web browser, it goes to the root servers and asks who owns "google.com". They give back an address and you're able to request the address of the web server.

Control of these root servers allows ICANN in the US to decide what top level domains ("TLD") get created. For example, every country has a TLD for their country: .us, .uk, .jp, etc. Additional TLDs exist for .com, .net, .org and some of the more obscure and pointless .travel and .museum entries.

Why do I call this move dense and foolish? Because it will only serve to create government involvement over how people in many countries get access to the Internet and what they are allowed to do. It will also create restrictions in peoples ability to access information within the US and cut short commerce within their own countries. It will slow innovation for many smaller countries.

Why would other countries want control over these servers? Well the debate started when ICANN moved to approve a domain to hold adult content called .xxx and various countries became upset. For some reason they thought this would undermine the values in their societies. (Interestingly enough they never complain about the abundance of suggestive content in other domain extensions like .com.)

The sanest reason for this debate that I can gather is money and power. Right now since these countries do not control domain registrations, they cannot easily levy taxes against them. They cannot easily control the content that gets published. If you live in Brazil you can register your domain in the US and pay only the registration fee and the ICANN maintenance fee. I suspect many countries would love to charge people yearly "domain taxes" to increase their coiffeurs. They could even turn around and take back names from other parties. For example, if China didn't like something that was going on over at geocities, they could easily override that at the root and reclaim geocities entire domain within China. If they wanted they could even resell the domain to another party in China.

Technical scare point: For you techies out there, imagine a government entity overriding the DNS servers to point to their own servers and redirecting monitored web addresses at their server. Silently they proxy your request to the main server, the whole time recording your transaction with their server. Can we say nearly-invisible out-of-band wire tap?

As serious matters go, this item rates highly on the list. Few people will recognize the significance of this because as I said this function is critical yet trivial. Invisible to end-users only because the government hasn't been involved. In fact with the creation of ICANN the US government affectively removed themselves from involvement leaving just a trace of monitoring bureaucracy.

We should assume these people (foreign governments) are too intelligent to just "want to play in the United State's sand box". They don't just want access to our "toys". They want power and they want money.

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