U.S. Protects the Internet

[Geee]

National Review:

This month, the United Nations revived a latent desire to wrest control of the Internet away from the United States. Congress, the State Department, and Americans of all political stripes should join with those who revere free expression and steadfastly oppose the scheme.

In our ceaselessly over-governed age, the Internet serves as a shining example of the virtue of decentralized free enterprise and of America’s commitment to free expression. With the egregious exception of the totalitarian and theocratic states, governments play very little role in the content of the Web. In most countries, private businesses and agencies provide Internet access, Web hosting, and domain-name registration, and leave it to free individuals to do the rest. There is minimal regulation. It is no accident that there is no equivalent to the DMV in cyberspace; the majority of Internet users do not require licenses for anything they do online — a credit card will suffice.

Scattered, raw, and unregulated as it is, the Internet does have one centralized element: a small file referred to as the “DNS Root Zone.” This is a master list of website addresses or “domain names,” such as “nationalreview.com.” Put extremely simply, this list is necessary in order to avoid multiple and contradictory registrations of the same address; think of it as the Internet’s Rolodex. Since 1998, it has been administered by a private Californian non-profit called ICANN, which is overseen with a very light touch by the U.S. Department of Commerce. (Prior to the creation of ICANN, the U.S. government ran the list in-house.) Other nations and organizations may host copies of the Root Zone file, but they cannot edit it. Ultimately, it is this arrangement that so vexes the likes of Russia and China. And given the potential of the Internet to undermine the authority of authoritarian regimes, their chagrin is understandable.

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Nonetheless, it is a wise rule to avoid fixing things that are not broken. The current system has served extremely well, allowing the Internet to flourish and grow with neither the dead hand of government interference holding it back nor baleful tyrants attempting to shape its structure in their own image. It is just 22 years since British computer engineer Tim Berners-Lee developed the language and architecture behind the World Wide Web and turned an electronic delivery mechanism that the American government had been developing since the 1960s into an information system with almost unlimited potential. His idea has caught on. The number of websites has grown from just 50 in 1992 to almost 377 million in mid-2012. In 1995, there were just 16 million Internet users; now, there are 2.28 billion. Such growth is a glowing testament to the salutary neglect of American stewardship.

[Draggingtree]

Paxton Loses Last-Minute Bid to Stop Federal Internet Transition

by Patrick Svitek Sept. 30, 2016 2Comments

 

Attorney General Ken Paxton on Friday lost his last-minute bid for a court injunction to prevent the federal government from transferring its oversight of internet registrations to an international body.

 

Hours before the transition was set to take effect, a federal judge in Galveston ruled against Paxton and three other state attorneys general who had asked him to temporarily halt the transfer while they pursue a lawsuit challenging it. The four sued the federal government late Wednesday after Republicans in Congress, led by U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, failed to halt the transfer. https://www.texastribune.org/2016/09/30/paxton-loses-last-minute-bid-stop-obama-internet-t/