Earth: Mostly Harmless

Having been glued to the books for the past month, I’m catching up on stories I missed on various blogs, particularly BoingBoing. This story answers (or more accurately, reveals ambiguities about)the governance of the Internet. I wonder if the Bush administration could exert enough pressure on individual DNS root server admins to get their way. Hopefully not.

I’d like the Internet to stay as international and as unregulated as possible, thank you very much.

Also, the Real Ultimate Power link is a hoot.

Root servers and real internet power:

Xeni Jardin:
Declan McCullagh recently interviewed Axel Pawlik, a managing director at the RIPE regional address registry who operates the “K” root server — which, with other root servers, maintains the list of top-level domains on the internet. Declan says, “Axel’s views are noteworthy because the root servers effectively serve as a check on the power of the Bush administration, which said this summer that it wants to be the only one to ‘authoriz[e] changes or modifications’ to the list of top-level domains.”

Snip from their Q&A:

Q: What would happen if the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) decided to approve a new top-level domain–say .xxx–and the Bush administration decided to veto it?

Axel Pawlik: In that case, I don’t know what the root server operators would do. Likely they would publish whatever is approved by ICANN. There is a difference between the content and the publication. We’re only publishers of the root zone file. We take it from IANA (a function of
ICANN) and we publish it.

Q: Let’s say the Bush administration accuses Syria of fostering terrorism and decides to invade. And it demands that ICANN remove Syria’s .sy domain from the Internet. What would you do?

Axel Pawlik: I don’t believe that the U.S. government would be that stupid. Seriously, this has never come up. But I am quite certain that the Internet community at large would not like that decision and I’m not sure it would be carried through.

Link. Declan has some great posts this week at Politech, following his return from WSIS in Tunisia.

WSIS-related bonus link:
Richard Stallman’s tinfoil beanie adventures

Bonus bonus link:
Real Ultimate Power

Bonus facts:

1. Root servers are mammals.

2. Root server operators fight ALL the time.

3. The purpose of the root server is to flip out and kill people.

And that’s what I call REAL Ultimate Internet Power!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(Via Boing Boing).