I’m pretty sure this is news that will interest everybody: U.S. control of the internet may be about to end.
I have no idea how this will affect anything, although I am suspicious of new bureaucracies getting involved in the highly free-wheeling and successful world of the net. The story seems to say there are many unknowns.
People with more technical savvy than myself may have some input, but here is my guess: today, most of the technical decisions regarding the internet are made in the United States because it was invented here. In the future, these decisions will be made by international committees. This is how it works in the telecom world, by the way. A lot of telecom technology was invented in the United States, and international bodies have standardized this technology for the last few decades (so that people can call each other from one country to the other). If so, this change for the internet could have positive impacts. But if we end up with UN-style bureaucracy getting in the way of the internet, we all will rue the day this happened.
From a worldwide perspective this is necessary. As long as protocols for connecting are developed and distributed as they are now there should not be much of a problem. It sounds like other countries simply want to have access to their own local “root servers”, which is completely understandable.
Right now the world wide perspective is that the basic foundation of the net is centrally located in the US. This is a bad model for data storage, even though the net is spread out throughout the whole US, it is still central when considered part of the US.
What this could spawn, is global sections each one with its own root servers. Those servers could be tethered together in a complex net, but it could act as a way to build national firewalls to prevent certain things from passing through or at least monitoring.
This presents a whole set of other questions, but could provide some positive outcomes as well. It depends a lot on who controls those firewalls.
Geoff is too pessimistic about anything non-American. How will he feel when the Church starts to be governed by non-Americans?
The Church would never let the terrorists win.
Russ, having spent much of my adult life living outside of the United States, I would say that one of the clear advantages of a higher percentage of non-Americans in the Church would be a much lower relative percentage of snarkers on Church blogs.
But….but….. I am an American!
Geoff may be onto something (#4). I don’t think it has to do with American’s vs non Americans though. I think it boils down like this. The US has a much greater concentration of life long members. People whose families have been members for several generations. The rate of convert baptisms in the US seems to be slowing, although it still seems to be higher than other religions.
The real boom is other countries. These countries are filled with people first or second generation converts, people who really had to challenge themselves against their cultural conventions as to whether to join or not.
I think this results in stronger memberships and greater faith than those that are playing to the “cultural mormon” mentality, even if a person does not recognze it in themselves.
Some may be due to the lack of internet access and personal freedom to maintain a blog in some countries. And some may say that the degree of such bloggers is due to the fact that those with a subconscious axe to grind find themselves blogging more than those that are complacent or happy with where they are.
But that is the gist of my thoughts on snarkers in the blogosphere.
Let’s end the threadjack here (so I can have the last word :)) or start a new post on it if you like.
This is very bad. We have the only constitution which gaurantees the freedom of speech, and the internet is the only communication medium where the freedom is still largely being granted with little interference. With the decline of our civil liberties lately, the internet seems to be our one last hope. We give it the UN (or something similar) we may say goodbye to the worlds only surviving marketplace of ideas (a marketplace which is essential for the ideal democracy the current administration is so keen on spreading across the globe). You can find the text of a speech on this subject here: http://www.breitbart.com/news/2005/10/06/D8D2IU703.html
Its quite excellent.
The Guardian exaggerates. The United States does not have anything remotely approximating a “grip on the net.” The point of contention is U.S. ownership of the standard root name servers.
There is nothing special about these servers, however. If some country does not wish to be dependent on outside infrastructure, they can set up their own and require domestic service providers to use them. Switching is trivial.
Independent roots could potentially result in partitioning the Internet name space, but any incompatibilities would likely be trivial – like domains that can only be used inside a certain country, for whatever use that would be.