Friday, March 14, 2014

"U.S. to relinquish remaining control over the Internet"

"U.S. officials announced plans Friday to relinquish federal government control over the administration of the Internet, a move that pleased international critics but alarmed some business leaders and others who rely on the smooth functioning of the Web."
The change would end the long-running contract between the Commerce Department and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a California-based nonprofit group. That contract is set to expire next year but could be extended if the transition plan is not complete.

“We look forward to ICANN convening stakeholders across the global Internet community to craft an appropriate transition plan,” Lawrence E. Strickling, assistant secretary of commerce for communications and information, said in a statement.

The announcement set off a passionate response, with some groups quickly embracing the change and others blasting it. Read More
This is fucked up. We invented something wonderful. Hopefully, handing it over to backward people will not come back to haunt us.

Washington Post

11 comments:

chickelit said...

This is fucked up. We invented something wonderful. Hopefully, handing it over to backward people will not come back to haunt us.

They said the same thing about the atomic bomb!

Revenant said...

In the long run, this will probably prove to be one of the Obama administration's dumbest moves.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

I was thinking about that Oppenheimer quote "I've become death".

What I'm thinking is that... couldn't the Internet be used to undercut American dominance.

I don't know about you... but the world is a better place because America is dominant and not China or Russia or the European Union.

Rabel said...

A concession to Russia related to an agreement about Ukraine?

YoungHegelian said...

Words fail me at how not only stupid, but immoral, this is.

It will be used to spread censorship from the top of the internet down.

What, oh what, was the Obama administration thinking when they did this? What do we as a country gain from this abdication?

YoungHegelian said...

Also, notice the date on that release of the article --- late in the day on a Friday. Notice there are no comments, and very few critics interviewed.

The WP yet again fellates the administration.

Come Monday all hell will break loose on this.

edutcher said...

Choom knows most countries would censor and surveil the Hell out of Internet traffic.

Revenant said...

In the long run, this will probably prove to be one of the Obama administration's dumbest moves.

Name a smart one.

Paddy O said...

The day the internet became like the Olympics.

Pay up. Bureaucrats need their greasing.

YoungHegelian said...

And all those smug Silicon Valley assholes who backed Obama? Now he sells out control of the internet to tyrants!

"First, do no evil." How about undoing the evil you guys enabled? I mean, we're talking major sack cloth & ashes walking up the cathedral steps on your knees in the snow penance.

virgil xenophon said...

This is all of a piece with Obama's view of white, euro-dominate "Amerikka" as an evil hegonomic force in the world that has plundered the resources and culture of "people of color" and whose rapacious works must all be utterly undone.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

This does seem dumb as hell. ICAAN might be a private organization, but so is the Fed, and look at all the good that's done. This is essentially an internationalized Federal Reserve for communications infrastructure that we're going to entrust with the future of electronic commerce and communications. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.

If a country invents and sets up an infrastructure I think it has every right to reserve as much say-so over what happens with it as is prudent. They're right that there's no reason for doing this other than as a political bone to throw to globalists. What stupidity.