Re: monopoly of US on Internet Domains

[Padmanabha Rao <kvprao@igidr.ac.in>]

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On Mon, 28 Aug 2000 vamsi@siliconcorp.com wrote:

  Padmanabha Rao wrote:

  > one ought to be grateful to the americans that they threw open a
valuable
  > network for global use.

  I believe I was merely expressing Mr. Mehta's concern about monopolizing
  domain names...

I didn't mean to point at one.  Done.

  ...Which no country has the right to do so beyond the 2-letter
  suffixes alloted for each country.  You failed to debate on this concern.

I see no issue, let alone a point of debate. The internetwork is build on no
notion of rights. The US has no right to claim exclusive use of the .mil and
.gov domains.  The Non-US have no rights to say they can't do that, unless
we want to build the third Net (or is it the fourth ?) as a co-operative
enterprise. It's the old chicken-egg problem. For one, the Net has not been
a global co-operative enterprise. The US paid for the early backbone; it's
got its property rights. We might consider building an Asian Internet (equal
contribution by all nations) if we want egalitarianism here.
   I am not, I repeat not, grateful to your masters in the US!!  Americans
didn't   "throw open" the network to the world because TCP/IP is inherently
"open".

I believe the TCP/IP were developed by someone in the US, with a purpose to
boot, and paid for it ? I cannot question his/her conditions for its use if
s/he has laid them down. We might consider developing another protocol,
co-operatively to solve this historical impediment. In throwing open the
protocol for all the world to adopt and use, the inventor was merely seeking
to exploit network economics. Who says there's a free lunch. I am grateful
s/he did. It saved me some trouble and the costs, I think, isn't much
(please correct me on the costs, if I am wrong; I think, our conception of
the Net as a medium, a machine, a business is diffuse and it is extremely
speculative to say what impact the .mil and .gov domains would have;
india.gov and nepal.mil sound grand but what is the *impact* of not having
those?).


  ...I look at the situation entirely from a different perspective.  That
is, the Internet, as we know it now, is innevitable.  No master had to  give
the technology to his Indian servant (as some servants, with Sahib
mentality, may choose to think so) because computers around the world would
have found a way to interconnect regardless of who proposed the
interconnection protocol.

Yes, of course. TCP/IP is not the only way to connect computers. There's an
infinite number possible, including a GOD-TCP/IP (Globally Operated and
Developed TCP/IP ). We can only wish the globe had thought about this in
1969. The US gave itself and the Non-US the TCP/IP, period. It connected me
to them and the world, equally. I owe them a debt, even if they have already
reaped it by themselves.

rao

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