Judith Klinghoffer Does Not Understand How the Internet Works



   There is a rather funny passage in Robert Pirsig's Zen and the  Art of Motorcycle maintenance, in which a  rather boneheaded student at Montana State University makes the mistake of thinking that the university's accreditation is a physical object, and that the state governor can prevent accreditation from being withdrawn by posting the state police to prevent anyone from removing it (ch 13, pp. 140-44, paperback edition, Bantam, 1975).

    The debate about control of the internet is a similar sort of misunderstanding. The internet is not a physical object. It is a set of conventions, similar in principle to radio frequencies, which enable communication machines to automatically synchronize with each other. The United States government runs a series of "root DNS servers" to distribute copies of a short "telephone book," with a couple of  hundred entities listed (mostly national internet groups), and perhaps a thousand or so "phone numbers." I am given to understand that the directory only bulks 60K.  Your computer uses this directory for the sole purpose of contacting directory assistance in the country you are trying to  reach, and so on down the line, through a series of automatic operators, receptionists, etc., until you finally get the party you are trying to reach. The "root DNS file" is published, and millions of people all over the world have copies.They would use them if they were ever in any serious doubt whether their communications were being interfered with. That's the way domain names work.

   IP address are a little bit different. There are a few  regional registries (East Asia, Latin America, etc.) which allocate blocks of addresses (say, 16 million at a time) out to national registries, which in turn allocate smaller chunks (64,000, say) to companies engaged in providing internet service. These companies, again, maintain tables of IP address holders, and which wires lead to them. Again, if you want me to send data down the wire leading to you, you have to convince me that you have a right to receive it. This is something of an over-simplification, but I didn't want to "blind you with science." This is based on the IPv4 system, which has only  32-bit addressing. The internet is in the process of transitioning to IPv6 with 128-bit addressing, which allows about 18, 000,000,000,000,000,000 different addresses.  Any real controversy over IPv6 addresses is impossible. Each country can simply claim its own quadrillion addresses or so, in one big block, enough for all time, and use them as it likes,  and the total used would still be only about one per cent of the address space.

   In the Anglo-Saxon democracies, the national internet group/registry is usually an ad-hoc group of early internet pioneers, and there is generally a provision that anyone can join who is willing to pay $500 per year or so.  In France and Italy, the national  internet group is run by the government scientific research establishment. China's internet is run by the Academy of Sciences.

http://www.icann.org/
http://www.iana.org/cctld/cctld-whois.htm

http://politics.slashdot.org/politics/05/09/30/1254230.shtml?tid=95&tid=1&tid=219
http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=163877&cid=13685885

    The system works because names and numbers are not ultimately a scarce resource. You just make them longer until there are enough for everyone. You use punctuation marks, or round number conventions, so that local assignments can be made locally.
    The system is very much like the  Universal Postal Union and International Telecommunication Union, both of which are UN sponsored. When an American postal clerk sees an envelope with an address ending in "Hants., United Kingdom," which doesn't have a ZIP code,  he is not going to worry about what "Hants." means. Instead, he will push the appropriate keys on his barcoding machine, and the letter will be given some kind of mark which causes the sorting machines to route it to a special mailbox at JFK airport in New York, where it will get  sent on to Heathrow. At that point, the  British mail clerks can deal with what "Hants." means. There is no way that the Chinese can order the thing  to be sent to Shanghai instead, because American clerks know that the  United Kingdom is not in China, and British  clerks know that Hampshire is not in China.  The internet is  very  much the same system, only automated.

http://www.upu.int/

A minor example of the kind of thing the UPU actually does.
http://www.upu.int/irc/en/index.shtml

http://www.itu.int/home/

Now, the United Nations politicians seems to have been the  first party to confuse an accreditation with a physical object, but American politicians were not very far behind. It is depressing to think that typical statesmen have approximately the mental capacity of beer-swilling undergraduates, but there you have it.

NB: I see that  Bruce Kessler was quoting Mark Safranski, and when some techies told Safranski that he was mistaken, Safranski admitted his mistake frankly.  Kessler does not seem to have picked up on this.

http://www.democracy-project.com/archives/001898.html
http://zenpundit.blogspot.com/2005/10/why-those-who-would-be-lords-of.html
http://www.democracy-project.com/archives/001894.html