I am pretty sure that most of the activists and proponents of so-called Net Neutrality legislation don’t have too much background knowledge in what the Internet is and how it is managed. maintained, and governed now. For those of you who don’t know much about the Internet, I did a huge brain dump that you should consider an Internet Primer.
The Internet is truly international. The internet is already managed democratically and there is already strict international oversight which is already under American stewardship. The US should really not “brand” the Internet as American any more than it does by trying to legislate all over it in the form of Net Neutrality.
Like I said before, the Internet is the result of a lot of incompatible private networks, "made up of thousands of smaller commercial, academic, domestic, and government networks," that agreed to share information — to "debabelize" if you allow me to make a Tower of Babel analogy.
There was an agreement, managed first by DARPA and then maintained by IANA and now ICANN, that agreed on a language (can you say Babel?) and a protocol (think of Diplomacy agreeing on French and Diplomatic protocol back in the day) that would allow these incompatible networks (Token Ring, TCP/IP, ect) to interconnect (to intercommunicate) with eachother, thus becomeing an Internet. Thus the name.
Diplomacy is another good analogy because if you want to be recognized internationally as a soverign nation-state, you need to agree to a language and a protocol. If you are unwilling, you are not acknowledged and will not have a diplomatic mission or Embassy in your "country."
In the case of the Internet, you are considered a Nation State on the Internet if ICANN grands you a Top-Level Domain — the US has .us and France has .fr and Russia has .ru. (.COM, .NET, .ORG, .MIL, .GOV .US, and some others, are also managed by the United States).
To be granted a TLD (Top-Level Domain), you must strictly follow the protocol and standards of the Internet. TLDs can be broken down into ccTLD (country code TLDs such as .US) and gTLD (generic TLDs such as .COM). chrisabraham.com is considered to be a subdomain of .COM, also known as a domain name managed by the Domain Name System.
A top-level domain is misleading because there is a level of domain above the TLD, called root, or infrastructure top-level domain. .ARPA is the only true root infrastructure top-level domain.
The entire Internet is actually all based on IP addresses. Unique numbers that represent each and every node and server on the Internet. Each one, in most cases short of a subnetwork, requires a unique IP address. As an aside, we’re running out of IP address "blocks" and we are moving to a new format architecture of IP allocation, called IPv6:
"IPv6 is intended to provide more addresses for networked devices, allowing, for example, each cell phone and mobile electronic device to have its own address. IPv4 supports 4.3×109 (4.3 billion) addresses, which is inadequate to give one (or more if they possess more than one device) to every living person. IPv6 supports 3.4×1038 addresses, or 5×1028(50 octillion) for each of the roughly 6.5 billion people alive today."
The current oversight organization — the Internet is not a no man’s land — is called ICANN — ICANN "was created on September 18, 1998 in order to oversee a number of Internet-related tasks previously performed directly on behalf of the U.S. Government by other organizations, notably IANA"
More on ICANN from Wikipedia:
"ICANN (pronounced "I can") is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Headquartered in Marina Del Rey, California, ICANN is a California non-profit corporation that was created on September 18, 1998 in order to oversee a number of Internet-related tasks previously performed directly on behalf of the U.S. Government by other organizations, notably IANA. The tasks of ICANN include managing the assignment of domain names and IP addresses. To date, much of its work has concerned the introduction of new generic top-level domains. The technical work of ICANN is referred to as the IANA function; the rest of ICANN is mostly about defining policy. Paul Twomey is the President/CEO of ICANN, since March 27, 2003. Vint Cerf is currently Chairman of the ICANN Board of Trustees."
"The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is the authority that coordinates the assignment of unique identifiers on the Internet, including domain names, Internet protocol addresses, and protocol port and parameter numbers. A globally unified namespace (i.e., a system of names in which there is one and only one holder of each name) is essential for the Internet to function. ICANN is headquartered in Marina del Rey, California, but is overseen by an international board of directors drawn from across the Internet technical, business, academic, and non-commercial communities. The US government continues to have the primary role in approving changes to the root zone file that lies at the heart of the domain name system. Because the Internet is a distributed network comprising many voluntarily interconnected networks, the Internet, as such, has no governing body. ICANN’s role in coordinating the assignment of unique identifiers distinguishes it as perhaps the only central coordinating body on the global Internet, but the scope of its authority extends only to the Internet’s systems of domain names, Internet protocol addresses, and protocol port and parameter numbers. On Nov. 16, 2005, the World Summit on the Information Society, held in Tunis, established the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) to discuss Internet-related issues."
