[RSSAC Caucus] observations on the illiberalism of ICANN's "one world, one internet" narrative

[Paul Vixie]

On Thursday, 19 December 2019 05:56:32 UTC Paul Vixie wrote:
...
> BRICS is correct in the model they want to pursue, even if their reasons
> are incompatible with the ICANN "one world, one internet" narrative. i'll
> explain in a reply to this message, in order to separate the threads.

let me explain. the internet has been captured in various ways, and there is 
good reason to suspect unilateral intentions when contemplating each next move 
we see. surveillance capitalism and social control (facebook; google; 
cambright analytica) are examples, and while outsiders may not appreciate 
china's or russia's one-party rule, we can at least acknowledge that their 
elections cannot be interfered with by outside interests, as the US and UK 
elections in recent years have been. however, that's not what i mean by 
unilateralism.

in new zealand and smaller land masses, there were for a time internet 
exchanges to avoid going off-shore to reach on-shore destinations, but it has 
almost always been the case that the metadata needed to reach on-shore 
destinations (such as DNS root, TLD, and 2LD servers, but also now "cloud" 
resources such as storage or HTML DTDs or style sheets or JS libraries) could 
be unreachable due to a dragged anchor killing a wet cable. the internet has 
never been locally resilient due to locality of scope like the networks it 
displaced (e.g., XNS, appletalk, decnet) due to interdependency. today much 
new zealand traffic snow-shoes to australia, because it doesn't matter, the 
interdependency problem is insoluble. however, that's not what i mean by 
unilateralism.

no internet user wanted new GTLD's. this is something ICANN cooked up all by 
itself with input only from their commercial constituencies. and indeed the 
DNS industry is now huge (DNS is Sexy!) and there are many voices calling for 
more content with which to feather more nests. as a 501(c)(3) public charity, 
ICANN has utterly failed to represent or even to understand the public 
interest -- decisions are made by "goers" -- those who show up to meetings and 
who have time to sit on committees and participate in show-trial governance. 
and this is part of what i mean by unilateralism.

in RFC 7706, the internet technical community found a way to decrease 
transparency and increase complexity of root name service, as if that was near 
the heart of our interdependency problems. it was not and will never be. the 
metadata needed on one side of a fiber cut or national firewall is hard to 
fully enumerate, but certainly includes quite a lot more DNS content than just 
the root zone. we can't even discover the DNS authority zones within our 
reachability region during a fiber cut, unless we can also reach the whole DNS 
delegation chain that denotes such servers. why we don't use multicast is that 
it's in nobody's fiscal/equity best interests to develop that technology. and 
this is another part of what i mean by unilateralism.

if the BRICS countries feel a need to develop and deploy and operate internet 
like infrastructure that does not require cooperation with globalist interests 
who come with a capitalist and liberal world order narrative, they might be 
making a decision they won't regret, and they may also come up with solutions 
by which i could share gigabyte-sized files with my neighbors without each of 
us having to pay our respective providers to carry the data, at an RTT that 
includes snow-shoe to sacramento and back. because internet capture and 
unilateralism has done what unilateralism always does: breed more of the same. 
in this post-westphalian world where corporations have information supremacy, 
a nation wanting to restore or preserve their relevancy had better challenge 
the ICANN "one world, one internet" narrative.

if this note weren't already overlong i would talk about anycast "public" DNS, 
DNS over HTTPS, Encrypted SNI, TLS 1.3, and so forth. not all tyranny is by 
the powerful, not everything that can be done should be done, and the internet 
community is nowhere near as welcoming nor is the stack as permissionless as 
the ICANN and IETF narratives want us to believe. but anybody in any smaller 
country where a plane ticket to marina del rey costs half a year of salary 
knows that the definition and utility of the internet they get will be driven 
unilaterally by wealthy western interests. it wasn't and isn't a conspiracy, 
but it's the end result of "rule by who can afford to participate or invest." 
we have an internet that _only_ works when fully connected, and that is a 
threat to nation-states whose governance model is incompatible with full 
connection. in 2011, i wrote:

> The Internet's social contract is a thin and fragile thing, and it's the
> responsibility of every country and every government and every operator and
> every user to try to hold it together. It is within the power of the U.S.
> Government to try to impose its will on the Internet, but the results would
> be neither as you expect nor as any of us desire. Relevant and sustainable
> contributions to the Internet take the form of creation not prevention, and
> are multilateral and cooperative not unilateral or imposed. I hope that the
> U.S. Congress will keep searching for ways to protect intellectual property
> until one is found that does not threaten to act as a "sheer force" against
> the Internet's fundamentally cooperative infrastructure.

(http://www.circleid.com/posts/
20110318_on_mandated_content_blocking_in_the_domain_name_system/)

"and now, this:"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lT1AnP2IxEE

-- 
Paul