Whose Internets Is It, Anyway?
In the 70s while Richard Nixon was doing his particular impersonation of royalty, and the MSM was doing its best to bring him down a notch, or two, or three, something was happening in Chicago.
A federal judge was hearing a case about POTS – plain ole telephone service – and the judge (Green if memory serves) became the overseer of the eventual dismantling of AT&T and the Bell System. However, since so much of the bandwidth (even though we didn’t call it that in those days) of the major newspapers' front pages, and the networks’ leading stories were about all things Nixonian, this story garnered relatively little attention.
History, if as they say is not repeating itself, certainly is beginning to rhyme. While the Iraqi War, and Gonzogate and all the other emerging scandals are soaking up loads of media attention, there is an important controversy brewing deep in the tubes of the internets. It seems that the US government (in the form of the Department of Homeland Security) wants access to the master keys that control the worldwide domain name system.
This can have a far-reaching impact on the continued evolution of this remarkable technology. There is a long, involved (and not uninteresting) history about our government’s role in the creation and early development of the tubes. But the global internet has gown beyond any one county’s capacity to control it, and frankly, other countries will no longer tolerate that kind of dominance.
This may be one of those events that seemed too technical, too arcane, to pay attention to, until later, when we realize that it was not.
Here (from the UK notably) is a brief article laying out the issues.