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Some countries use firewalls or other means to block content they do not want their citizens to see. The US removes them from the Internet to ensure nobody in
by ThinkBeat 6y ago
Some countries use firewalls or other means to block content they do not want their citizens to see.
The US removes them from the Internet to ensure nobody in the world can read them. A great display of American exceptionalism.
Presumably this entitlement to outright remove content on the web should be extended and available for other nations as well.
A form of immediate global censorship.
I hope over time the Internet infrastructure and operations will either make these types of operations impossible or available for any country.
- ffpip 6y agoLiterally every country does this. US has more power because it controls .com domains. They have taken the most effective way of blocking the site instead of using ineffective blocks like DNS, firewalls, etc.
- Biganon 6y agoIsn't the ICANN supposed to be independent though? I thought that had been their main fight in the last 20 years
- kube-system 6y agoYes, but the registries that operate TLDs are not.
- tialaramex 6y agoEver since the ccTLDs were bulk generated the sovereign entities they notionally belong to have exercised about the level of control over them that you'd expect. See also the flags flown by ships. If a ship has a French flag, the French state actually takes some responsibility for it, even if you saw it in port in Brazil, that's still a French flag, France cares about that ship 'cos it has their flag on it and they don't let that flag fly just anywhere. On the other hand, if the ship has the Comoros flag, well, don't expect too much from a poor island nation that was mostly glad of the cheque paid. If you're lucky Comoros can give you the phone number for the people who actually own it, but they want nothing to do with that ship. What matters here is that these were gTLDs operated by American registries, so it's up to the Americans if they want.
- syshum 6y agoVerisign, a US Corporation, Controls the .com namesapce
- nullifidian 6y ago>most effective way of blocking The most effective way of blocking a site is IP/DPI blocking, something countries like Russia or China do, but US doesn't.
- ffpip 6y agoIP's can change with the domain remaining the same. Many domains are sometimes linked to same IP. Also, when IP blocking is usually deployed, all you need to do is change your DNS provider to get the website's IP and connect to it. China are Russia control .cn and .ru domains and regulate them.
- kube-system 6y agoLots of countries have requirements for use of their TLDs, not just the US. I can't buy a .eu address here in the US. Iran has their own TLD, no?
- djsumdog 6y agoAnd those requirements can be all over the place too. The admins of .lgbt will remove anything they find offensive without refund. There's still a .su if you want that soviet era cred. Another interesting case is .bio which has hard requirements if the domain relates to organic farming.
- Waterluvian 6y agoI’m hoping that the last four years have reminded the world that the US is not reliable and our dependence on them needs to be divested slowly over time. Long term it will be very healthy for almost everyone else, probably not as much for Americans. Would probably be a healthy thing for the Internet to expand capability and capacity to other parts of the world.
- coliveira 6y agoAll crucial internet and telecommunications technology should be created as independent from the US, as the US itself is gladly reminding everyone about China. It doesn't make sense to have a single country dominating these technologies, as this is the modern form of control and censorship that can be used to dominate other countries.
- franklampard 6y agoIt takes decades or centuries to build trust, but it only takes 4 years to break it.
- ecommerceguy 6y agoAre you saying all internet servers in the world are located in the US? You are a geographer?
- sippingjippers 6y agoWholeheartedly agree, actions like this add significant oil to the idea of national and regional Internets. Long term its hard to imagine how this won't eventually become a thing out of necessity
- TheOtherHobbes 6y agoWhich is of course the problem. While some people are complaining about "technically incompetent" comments the political reality is that one of the primary motivations for the original Internet was a tool for avoiding government censorship. The phrase used to be "The Internet perceives censorship as damage and routes around it." Now it seems any censorship is fine as long as it's nationalist enough. And if by a quirk of history the US happens to control the domains with the widest reach - well, so it goes, never mind, and let's wave a flag. The inevitable outcome will be a Balkanised Internet, with each sphere of influence monitoring and controlling its local content. This has happened formally in China and Russia (and elsewhere) and has been happening informally in the US and EU. Perhaps the requirements of realpolitik justify this - and perhaps they don't. It's not a simple question with a simple answer. So it's a debate worth having - not on the basis of TLD ownership, but on the basis of international civics and the ever-decreasing free movement of information which is not corporate or government-controlled, online and elsewhere, in all spheres of interest.
- sippingjippers 6y ago> The Internet perceives censorship as damage and routes around it Gosh, it's genuinely shocking I haven't heard that phrase in a long time.
- zokier 6y ago> Presumably this entitlement to outright remove content on the web should be extended and available for other nations as well. Sure, within the tlds under each nations control. Iranian government can seize as many .ir domains it wants to. It's historical happenstance that legacy tlds like .com are US controlled, but nobody forces you to use those. While the press release did not list the seized domains here, I bet none of them were .ir.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoIt's my understanding that these operations are available for any country, and we hear about them in the US so much just because the registrars for the biggest TLDs are all in the US. There's really no reason you have to have a .com these days, so anyone who's concerned about US censorship should (and does, I think) pick a different TLD.
- n3t1z3n3 6y agoIt doesn't really work that way; different entities control different TLDs, for example ".io" is administered by a UK company and most countries have their own. People used to make complaints like yours when the US had DNS control, but Obama handed that off to ICANN in a somewhat controversial move years ago. One of these sites was called "usjournal.us". Would you be surprised if Russia seized an allegedly CIA-controlled domain called "russiatoday.ru"?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- slezyr 6y ago> Would you be surprised if Russia seized an allegedly CIA-controlled domain called "russiatoday.ru"? It's HTTPS cert is from RT[1]. Which is 100% russian propaganda. How came you think it's CIA controlled? 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT_(TV_network) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT_(TV_network)
- hilbertseries 6y agoIt was a hypothetical...
- almost_usual 6y agoWhat is up with all these bizarro completely technically incompetent comments on HN?
- ecommerceguy 6y agoThis has been my experience on HN too recently. It's a downhill slide to Slashdot, HN will be there soon. Does anyone use any of the Chrome extensions to filter HN? I fondly remember working at my university computer center constantly refreshing /. using a text browser on a VT terminal. It's radically changed since.
- baxtr 6y agoWell, isn’t that just the usual product cycle? Something everyone dreams of? Start in a niche with some nerds, then expand from there. Become mainstream over time. Books have been written about it! Crossing the Chasm comes to mind. And of course myriads of Medium articles. I think that’s just way it goes. Question is, what’s the next hot thing now?
- ceilingcorner 6y agoReddit influx. High on political angst, low on technical knowledge.
- sieabahlpark 6y agoI'm surprised people are just now noticing. This has been the trend for about a year. Just wait until you're downvoted just like on reddit and you're banned from speaking!
- nitrogen 6y agoThat user account was created over seven years ago.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- roadbeats 6y ago
- hereme888 6y agoWould you say that about Facebook, Google, twitter, etc? The US fights terrorism and oppression of people both foreign and domestic, while big tech fights for their political opinions.
- DeonPenny 6y agoWhy would anyone use that internet. Fair doesn't mean optimal. It would be fair if anyone who published a social media site would get an equal share of the traffic. Isn't optimal though