(via WSIS governance mailing list posted by Robert C. Atkinson, Columbia U.)
今天華爾街日報登出一篇名為"Breaking Up Is Hard to Do"的社論, 暗指聯合國別想得到Internet根伺服器的掌握權. 但美國也不要得意, 最後的結果應該也很糟...一個分裂的Internet.
摘要如下:
The U.S. is making apocalyptic predictions of what the U.N. would do if given control. Those predictions are probably optimistic; U.N. control would be a disaster. But there is a third way, as Mr.
Gore might say. That alternative doesn't serve the interests of either the U.S. government, which enjoys the control it currently exercises, or its critics, who would much prefer to do their censoring under a multilateral umbrella. But if the U.S. continues its Internet brinkmanship, the third way will become not only likely, but inevitable.
That alternative is a fragmented Internet, without a single "root file" that describes the locations of everything on the Net. The U.S. government has led many to believe that this is equivalent to
dismantling the Internet itself. But it is bluffing.
Root servers could spring up in France, or Cuba, or Iran. In time, the Internet might look less like the Internet and more like, say, the phone system, where there is no "controlling legal authority" on the international level. More liberal-minded countries would probably, if they did adopt a local root-server, allow users to specify which server they wanted to query when typing in, say, Microsoft.com. Would it be better if countries that want to muck around with the Net just didn't? Sure. But they do want to, and they will, and it would be far better, in the long run, if they did so on their own, without a U.N. agency to corrupt or give them shelter. It's time to drop the apocalyptic rhetoric about a split root file and start looking beyond the age of a U.S.-dominated Internet.
Breaking up is hard to do, but in this case, the alternative would be worse.
