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In an effort to block Amazon from getting the top-level domain .amazon, Brazil may have put governments on a crash course with the private sector over control of the web.
In an aggressive and contradictory letter [PDF] on Wednesday to the overseer of the internet's domain name system, ICANN, Brazilian technology minister Benedicto Filho insisted the US non-profit not approve the creation of .amazon, and states strongly that governments have the final say on what should appear online.
As you may well know, Brazil is particularly enamored with the word Amazon, being the home of the Amazon Jungle. And it doesn't want some moneybags American retailer nabbing the top-level domain for the rainforest.
"It is the right and duty of governments – and not of Amazon the company, nor any panel constituted by three nationals of a single country in their individual capacity, nor even of the ICANN Board of Directors – to identify the public policy issues that may justify the Board to adopt certain decisions," Filho said.
He goes on to say that if ICANN was "required to substitute the views of governments and the GAC [Governmental Advisory Committee] for its own judgments ... it would be dealing a fatal blow to the multi-stakeholder governance model upon which ICANN is based."
In essence, Brazil says that unless ICANN does what it says – in this case not allow for the creation of the .amazon top-level domain for Jeff Bezos' Amazon – then the entire model of internet governance that the organization represents, where all parties including governments, the technical community and business have an equal say, is invalid.
That extraordinary contradiction – that an equitable decision-making process only exists so long as governments have the final say – is not the only one in the letter.
Filho goes on to insist that all governments agree with Brazil and Peru's position that .amazon not be added to the internet, but in making his case only cites meetings held in Brazil by Brazilian interests.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/27/brazil_dot_amazon_gtld/
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @08:46PM (10 children)
There are a lot of Anonymous Cowards out there; not every AC is me, yet our community here on SoylentNews seems to be able to hold meaningful interactions nonetheless.
Can you imagine what a horror it would be if you had to register your baby's name with some central authority before being able to use it?! There are thousands and thousands of John Smiths, and yet the world keeps turning just fine.
Surely, then, we can figure out how to let multiple entities share the same name. Why can't "SoylentNews" in the tech network be different from the "SoylentNews" in the health-drink network? Leave it up to consumers to figure out which one they want, and how to contact it, just like they have to do with John Smith.
Security concerns?
Well, start taking webs of trust seriously. Come on, folks; why must we always depend on a centralized bureaucracy of paper pushers?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DECbot on Monday October 09 2017, @09:10PM (2 children)
Would you accept my personal, extra secure 25-dollar note in exchange for $25 of gold? Why yes, it is printed on toilet paper--hand printed and double-quilted.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @09:22PM
History is replete with examples of the blessed authority ("government") issuing the trusted money note, only to renege on its promise to exchange it for whatever. I mean, since the establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913, the U.S. dollar has lost around 98% of its purchasing power, and can no longer be exchanged for gold. Thanks, Dear Leader.
Similarly, there are cases where ICANN (or whatever) has sided with a big corporation, and forced a small player to hand over control to the organization with a better branding claim. You can't really trust the system that is run the so-called "authorities" of a centralized, imposed regime.
In contrast, something like Bitcoin can be trusted; over the last few years, it has faced an immense onslaught of both technical and political natures, and yet its fundamental promises have remained in place.
That is to say, we have the technology with which to abandon would-be overlords; we don't need the Dear Leader—actually, the results are a lot better without Him.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @12:56AM
But does it have those little flower patterns on it?
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Monday October 09 2017, @10:38PM (6 children)
Because billions of dollars arent riding on the fact that your name is john smith just like the other nobody schmuck down the street.
The part that bothers me here is us schmucks would have an awful hard time trying to convince ICANN to give us our own TLD. Yet the multi billion dollar economy that is Amazon gets theirs.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @10:46PM (4 children)
It's all about centralized control, because there is a vast amount of money to be made.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday October 10 2017, @02:26AM (3 children)
They are close to becoming their own economy. Factory to door step. The other day I was thinking about how an Idiocracy or Demolition Man like future where Amazon owns and controls so much of the supply chain infrastructure that they are a near monopoly.
Buy an Amazon prefab home in an amazon village complete with smaller edge warehouses stocked with the most consumed items for that particular hub (food stuffs, toiletries, and other consumeables) that are nearly empty buildings full of robots that just dump packages into amazon cars that are part taxi part rental car for the tenants of the village. Maybe you get to live in the village so long as you agree to only consume certain items from amazon. Want to order takeout? Amazon Chinese American, Amazon Pizza, Amazon Burritos. Or just walk down to the local amazon burger joint.
I mean where does Amazon stop? I saw an article the other day asking "Why doesn't Amazon get into Pharmaceuticals?". I mean what's next? Amazon home/auto/life/health insurance becoming part of your prime family care package? I could see Amazon buying a truck manufacturer for billions just so they could build their own autonomous electric truck fleets for 100% end-to-end supply chain control.
Think Walmart is bad? LOL! Amazon are the guys who keep Walmart execs awake at night. Walmart isn't a competitor. No. They're a speed bump in the path of Amazons runaway manufacturer-to-DOORSTEP supply chain freight train.
"Choo choo, Mother Fuckers!" --Jeff Brazos
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @04:26AM (2 children)
... and then city. It would be a great experiment to see some market-driven innovation in social organization.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @11:29AM (1 child)
> I'd love to see Amazon start a neighborhood and then city. It would be a great experiment to see some market-driven innovation in social organization.
... I hope this is a troll. [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @01:13PM
Give it another go.
(Score: 2) by TheLink on Tuesday October 10 2017, @06:31AM
I realized the ICANN weren't about technology and more about money years ago when I tried to get the ICANN to reserve .here for everyone to use privately (similar to RFC1918 but for domains e.g. MyNAS.here [1] ) but they were too busy approving YetMoreDotComs like .biz and .info.
Even back then to merely _apply_ to get a TLD from ICANN required an application fee of $185,000 or something like that.
[1] Basically .here was to be DNS equivalent of the RFC1918 IP address ranges - they shouldn't normally be seen on the public Internet, but OK for internal networks. And by reserving them for internal use you can be sure your internal FQDNs won't clash with something else the ICANN wants to make money from later. e.g. say people in South America were using .amazon internally and ICANN suddenly approves the public .amazon TLD.
Also tried with the IETF too: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-yeoh-tldhere-01 [ietf.org]