>http://salon.com/tech/books/2002/06/14/root/index.html
review of the new book "Ruling the Root" by Milton L. Mueller >documents and explains precisely how "Internet governance" >has evolved from the enlightened despotism of a technological elite >into a tool of special interests intent on protecting and expanding >the control of intellectual property online. >Once upon a time, a handful of geeks made the decisions; >in fact, for many years a single person, Jon Postel, had >an extraordinary amount of power to decide such things as >who might be responsible for an entire nation's regional domain name system. >Funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, Postel was in charge of >allocating the numerical addresses for Internet domains. >Today, a coalition of special interests whose primary concern >appears to be trademark protection runs the show through ICANN, >the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. >ICANN was originally formed in late 1998 as part of an agreement >between the U.S. Commerce Department and a coalition of interested parties, >including companies such as IBM and MCI, several foreign governments >and groups representing the original technologists such as the Internet Society. >The Commerce Department has yet to relinquish ultimate "policy" >authority over the root, to the dismay of foreign governments, >but for all intents and purposes a governing structure has been set up >that is beholden only to itself and dead set against allowing >any significant level of public input or influence. >[...] the free-speech utopia of cyberspace is evolving into a domain >where corporate interests have more power to control speech >than they have had in other arenas. >The opposite has happened. The Internet community, such as it is, >has little to no voice in Internet governance. >ICANN has done everything it can to limit the power and participation > of directly elected members. >And it has bent over backwards to act in ways that serve the interests >of large corporations and owners of intellectual property. there is a new web waiting to take off, which did not originate in the US military: Freenet is free software designed to ensure true freedom of communication over the Internet. It allows anybody to publish and read information with complete anonymity. Nobody controls Freenet, not even its creators, meaning that the system is not vulnerable to manipulation or shutdown. Freenet is also efficient in how it deals with information, adaptively replicating content in response to demand. http://FreenetProject.org/ kind regards philippe, http://FreeRoots.net - choose open free roots today
