So wait, is this satire? It started out very interestingly until his paranoia kicked in: This guy's entire proof of his theory are links to his previous writing. ICANN has been around since 1998, handling this on behalf of the US government from the west side of Los Angeles (not far from the Tattle Tale Lounge, actually). I'm not saying that's a dramatic improvement, but at least it's based on external evidence. More importantly, domain name servers are everywhere. There may only be 13 TLD servers in the world, but you're not directly pointing at them all day. If they all went down, you wouldn't be typing everything -- you'd be pointing at old TLDs. You wouldn't notice for years, unless your fetish is brand-new TLDs. This is a FUD piece. "Oooh, the scaaaaaary Americans!" Yeah, whatever. Your nation can invent the next robust, fault-tolerant innovation. Why couldn't there be more about what actually happened to the TLDs of obsolete nations, instead of a couple sentences each? Why not tell the story of Tongo's deal for .to? Sidenote: the Tattle Tale is amazing on Saturday nights -- scary folks signing karaoke in front of a pool table. Start at Menchies for frozen yogurt and free plastic spoons before you go drinking, then sober up at Jack in the Box. It's that part of Jefferson where it merges with the fabled Sepulveda (well south of Pico), filled with Culver City lovin'. The Internet(...) is effectively run by the American government and its finger-puppets.
Heigh-ho! Author here. I hope you don't mind if I have a few notes on your comment. I don't believe I linked to any of my previous writing in this article, and I did put some detail in the footnotes about how NTIA, ICANN, and IANA are owned by or are under contract to US government agencies. It's not quite fair to call that a theory — the ownership and contracts of these organizations are public record. For example the fact that NTIA is owned by the Department of Commerce is literally the first thing on their website, where you can get plenty of other information on their role in the DNS system:
http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ You're right — as I mentioned in the article the Internet per se is not owned by America, but the DNS system is and that's the gateway to the Internet for most folks. You don't need to control every DNS server in the world to control the DNS system — you only need the root zone. It would be really cool to see a "second Internet" crop up that uses an alternative DNS and/or addressing system. There probably already is one, but I daresay it's a tad unsavory. Frankly I trust politicians about as far as I can throw them. I wouldn't want the world's most important computer network in the hands of a notoriously fickle, self-serving, and inefficient organization like the US government. As it happens my nation already built the current robust, fault-tolerant innovation — I am American — but that doesn't mean I have any faith in the political system. I don't credit the government with enough imagination and guile to do anything truly nasty with the Internet, but if that's the only thing stopping them then I think it's legitimate to have concerns for the ownership of the system. As for the other obsolete nations, there are a fair few of them. If you have some juicy details about Tongo, I'd love to hear about them. I'm a nerd, so I find this kind of thing pretty interesting.
It's important to point out though that even if the root servers were disabled in anyway, DNS is designed in such a way that we could easily create new ones. In fact one of the ways that Turkey suppressed twitter was by modifying the routes to some of the popular root dns servers. If you _really_ wanted your own custom tld accessible from the world, you'd just have to a. Run a server which would field requests for the tld
b. convince admins to direct queries to your server a. is easy you can do it with modern nameserver software (TOR does this with .onion addresses in fact)
b. Is going to be harder. Why should admins trust you? How do we know that you aren't going to rewrite other authoritative addresses for personal gain? There is a historical reason for all of this though, and it takes us back to the mysterious year of 1998! Jon Postel emailed the admins of several DNS root zones and subsequently changed Network Solution's primary ip address. It pissed of the military brass who thought they were in control and they threw around a memo talking about how they needed to improve the nature of how how internet names and addresses are managed. In other words, Postel at that moment in time literally had the ability to control the entire internet. He could have easily used it for profit, he could have sabotaged it. He could have made everyone's computer give him $1. When the government realized this, it hurt their feelings and pride and they took away the power. If you'd like to know a little more "inside baseball" stuff about this, you can read this RFC which was made to commemerate Postel: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2468
You've outlined it really well — the DNS system seems to be series of servers that we've all agreed to trust. It would be easy enough to set up your own servers and direct popular domains to the wrong place or have a gateway to some alternate Internet. I don't know how those much talked about "darknets" work, but I know enough to imagine some techniques they might use. The idea of there being a secret second Internet makes me feel like a kid looking for a secret passage behind the bookcase, but alas if there really is a secret Internet then it's probably very seedy. And thanks for the Jon Postel story! I love these "man behind the curtain" kinds of Internet yarns. Vint Cerf's memorial for Postel was very entertaining and moving at the same time.
When IPV6 becomes widespread I predict we're going to happen to see a lot of new "private network" spaces which will be large, wide spread networks which use the public ipv6 space, but which use acls to allow specific networks to access them. We do this a bit now with NAT, but ipv6 could do this on huge scales and still not exhaust the available ips.The idea of there being a secret second Internet makes me feel like a kid looking for a secret passage behind the bookcase, but alas if there really is a secret Internet then it's probably very seedy.