The revolution will not be webcast

I’m surprised this isn’t getting more coverage. A little while ago, the US announced that it wasn’t going to give up control of the Internet’s root DNS servers anytime soon. These are the servers that figure out which computer should be the one that sends you the data you asked for – web page, email, whatever. If these servers were to stop working, it would be like taking everyone’s phone books away. The phones would still be there, but no one would be able to talk to each other, because no one would know anyone else’s number.

So anyway – the US has always taken care of these things. For a little while there, it looked like they were going to hand it over to an international coalition, but they did a bit of a policy u-turn recently, and announced that they’d be hanging on to control indefinitely.

Enter the UN.

[They] had just announced a political coup over the running of the internet.

The Guardian has a small article about the Internet situation from a UK perspective. I certainly hope the US loses control of the Internet. While they did start it, it’s now a global network with far more nodes outside the US than in it. I just hope this doesn’t lead to a Balkanisation of the resource, where there are national mini-nets that don’t communicate with each other.