Who owns the internet?

[Randomness]

While reading the paper before class today, found a couple of interesting articles relating to the internet, access to it, and control over that access.

Pakistan kills Youtube (http://www.twincities.com/national/ci_8363455?nclick_check=1)

Secret ISP traffic management (http://www.twincities.com//ci_8363196?IADID=Search-www.twincities.com-www.twincities.com)

Any opinions?

[HUnewearl_Meira]

I'm not certain that "the internet" is a thing that one can "own", aside from being a l33t hacker, and having placed back doors on every server of significance.

I think that "internet" is kind of a thing that is owned in bulk quantities. A given company, including both consumer and commercial ISPs, may own a number of major servers, or a major educational facility may own a major point of traffic. It's up to all of these people to coordinate and cooperate in keeping this thing running, for everyone's mutual benefit.

Toward this end, individual governments have their own organizations in place to regulate the internet, as it exists in their own countries. In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission (also responsible for radio & television broadcasting, telephone networking, and airwave usage) is responsible for setting national Internet policy. In many countries, certain sites or internet usages are forbidden, such as in China, where even a Google search won't turn up results pointing to religious sites. Apparently, the Internet-governing body in Pakistan saw fit to forbid access to YouTube. The general agreement of DNS maintainers to cooperate with each other resulted in the YouTube snafu, a couple of days ago. Simple as that.

[Randomness]

I don't like the idea of one country being able to shut down a website like that. At the very least, countries like China and probably some hackers are getting some ideas from this.

[Shadowpawn]

Al Gore owns the internet, he invented it!

[Eihwaz]

Why don't you guys just check the map of the internet (http://www.xkcd.com/195/)?

[Sekani]

While no single entity owns the internet, the actual infrastructure (servers, routers, cabling) is owned by corporations and can be regulated by the government in which it resides. The few companies such as ICANN that setup the standards such as how IP addresses work and the assignment of domain names are located in the United States.

[Randomness]

This is NOT FKL. Please don't post any random crap, keep it serious.

[Shadowpawn]

Hmm. Well, to be honest I'm not very surprised that happened. It's not like it hasn't happened before, China regulates the internet within its domain, they even censor search results. Also, wouldn't it be possible to avoid the censor with a proxy? From my understanding of the story what they did was re- route the traffic to site saying youtube was blocked but they didn't actually blacklist the actual site. A pretty poor way of blocking a site if you ask me.

[Randomness]

On 2008-02-26 14:17, Shadowpawn wrote:
Hmm. Well, to be honest I'm not very surprised that happened. It's not like it hasn't happened before, China regulates the internet within its domain, they even censor search results. Also, wouldn't it be possible to avoid the censor with a proxy? From my understanding of the story what they did was re- route the traffic to site saying youtube was blocked but they didn't actually blacklist the actual site. A pretty poor way of blocking a site if you ask me.



No, the process of getting the site data, where your request is routed through servers until it reaches the site, well... that data request was just deleted. It wasn't redirected or anything, just straight out deleted.

EDIT:There may, however, be some differences between the web and print versions of the article.

Also, why does this topic have no comments about the second article?

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Randomness on 2008-02-26 14:21 ]</font>

[Shadowpawn]

Everyone knows about Comcast interfering with traffic on p2p and bittorrent programs and the like. It's kinda funny the FCC wants to do something about it now after the Net Neutrally campaign kicked into full gear. It's not as interresting as the Pakistan story, which just happened a day ago.

And yes, I was citing from a paper I read this morning about it.

[Randomness]

On 2008-02-26 14:28, Shadowpawn wrote:
Everyone knows about Comcast interfering with traffic on p2p and bittorrent programs and the like. It's kinda funny the FCC wants to do something about it now after the Net Neutrally campaign kicked into full gear. It's not as interresting as the Pakistan story, which just happened a day ago.

And yes, I was citing from a paper I read this morning about it.



And as far as internet usage goes... is there really any difference between bittorrent and games? Both are going to be running full-time upload/download... and it probably explains the nasty (And for some games, lethal) lag spikes I have to put up with.

At least PSU doesnt freeze the image when it loses connection... it just DCs me if it goes on long enough.

EDIT:Which reminds me of a particularly disgusting commercial that was around a while back, trying to make the concept of net neutrality sound like it was GOOD for the ISPs... And of course, I'd bet they were behind it to try and be able to sell premium speeds to websites.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Randomness on 2008-02-26 14:39 ]</font>

[KaneKahn]

On 2008-02-26 13:49, Shadowpawn wrote:
Al Gore owns the internet, he invented it!



He didn't invent it he just improved upon it.

As for the FCC, trying to control the Internet they can go take a flying fuck for all I care.

[Ilaya]

Its just a system of tubes anyway.. who would want to own it? http://www.pso-world.com/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_razz.gif

[KaneKahn]

$$$$$$$
Need I say more?


Ketchup edit: Don't do it again.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Ketchup345 on 2008-02-26 15:19 ]</font>