The structure of the Internet?
 

A few days ago, I read a fascinating article on BBC. There is a heated and very interesting debate on the future of the Internet, in the UN as well as at large.

•• Does anyone know of reliable sources casting light on the nature of the core Internet infrastructure, and the technical pros and cons of imminent future choices in regards to infrastructure and governing authority?

I have heard that there are actually less than a dozen supernodes at the core of the Internet – and that all the world’s Internet traffic passes through at least one of these.

If that is the case, I seriously wonder about the Internet’s degree of redundancy and robustness. I think it’s a given fact that modern communications is absolutely dependent on well-functioning Internet services – perhaps even more so than traditional telephone services.

I also wonder about the feasibility of anyone installing (or having already installed) filtering/surveillance technology (whether benevelont, benign or malevalent) at these nodes. Mind you, I am only raising the issue of what might be technically feasible. Without getting into politics, which is not my intention here. Anyone responding, please keep this in mind, so that any discussion in this thread does not get side-tracked.

I would be very grateful for any quality references or links to serious discussions about the future of the Internet.


With best regards,
ArcticStones

I doubt that all internet traffic passes through those nodes. For example, if you send an email to an account at the same ISP, the email probably never leaves the ISP's network, which is technically part of the internet.

Here's a few links:
http://www.ipv6.org/
http://www.ipv6forum.org/
http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/ipv6-charter.html

A large enough EMP pulse at the right places would take the whole internet down..

Then again, just fly an asteroid into the earth and destroy it :)

I read the article, Arctic, but am wondering what exactly the U.N. thinks needs "fixing"? One of the wonderful things about the net is that, as messy as things can be, at times, it seems to be somewhat "self-regulating" in many ways so far with minimal government intervention. Continuing in this manner would seem to be the best way forward, imo.

That can be trickier than it sounds ;) :

http://ned.ucam.org/~sdh31/misc/destroy.html

There might be confusion about the 12 "supernodes" of the internet. That probably does not refer to big CIXes (commercial internet exchange, where the big operators peer) but to the DNS rootservers; there are actually 13 of them:

http://www.root-servers.org/

Six of them are located exclusively in the US which is indeed a concern because taking most of them out would shut down DNS-resolution as soon as the caches of intermediary DNS time out.

It is very sad to see that there is so much stupid power-play involved in the internet gouvernance debate. Things were handled in a much more sensible way while Jon Postel +was+ the IANA and did singlehandedly what is now done by count- and clueless bureaucrats.

The report of the UN Working Group on Internet Governance

http://www.wgig.org/docs/WGIGREPORT.pdf

is a pretty interesting read.

And Phil, in saying that indeed the internet should be as independant as possible, we do agree very much.
It might have passed under your radar that the US DoC recently declared that they did not intend to keep their word expressed in this and previous letters of understanding you probably still believe to be official policy:

http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/dom...t_09162003.htm

outlining steps to set the ICANN free from gov-agency supervision.

Instead the new position at the beginning of this month reads like this:

http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/dom...s_06302005.htm

Which is no less than a complete denial of the previously quoted memorandum of understanding.

I can tell you for hard fact that internet traffic does not depend on any specific core routers. I spend a lot of time tracerouting, I know where packets go. Internet robustness is incredible; if you got to tour some of the facilities I've seen, you'd be stunned. For example, a provider I work with is in the main data center in Los Angeles, many stories underground, and equipped for one month of fully isolated survival. No power, no food, no water, they'd still be operational. The bandwidth aggregated in that place has more zeros than I own. There are interconnects directly across the Pacific (underwater fiber terminates there), as well as to hundreds of other locations.

Routing is handled by BGP 4. If a route breaks, it gets routed through another. If we simply don't like a route--for example, we had a latency issue once--we just push another route upstream and suddenly the packets get there another way.

I think the UN is very upset that they can't censor/control the internet and that the US is the primary innovator and holds so much of the bandwidth.

Carlos, while the technical part of your post is most interesting, it seems highly unlikely to me that for example the .iq domain could have vanished without trace from DNS if the rootzone was not controlled by the political agenda of one country.

What kind of censor/control action do you fear the UN could have in mind ?

Both the ITU and the UPU would certainly not kick off any of their members off the phone network or postal distribution just because that country happens to be at war with another and hopefully internet.governance will ripen to the same point.

But then let's admit that in some countries, the internet infrastructure is in the complete control of the governments of those countries and they can do all kinds of things to hamper it before it reaches their citizens or their citizens reach out. In many others, the US being exemplary, the internet still meets the criteria set by the founders of being very nearly literally bombproof. The kind of disasters it would take to interrupt all internet traffic in the US would leave the US not caring.

I don't know anything about .iq or the situation you describe, so I can't speak to that specifically. What you're talking about is a DNS root server issue, not a routing issue, and maybe that's what was meant in the original post. I understood it to be talking about routing.

I won't say anything more on the UN as it will be judged as political and will just kill the thread. It's a great question, I have an answer, but we're not allowed to discuss that here.

That page is HILARIOUS! :D I know it's off topic, but I couldn't stop reading it! Even my fiancée was laughing!

zeb, glad you liked it.
I definitely consider that page to be a canonical example of most subtle british humor.

Carlos, even without both of us going into further detail about the political issues we might have with the UN or the US-gov, do do we agree that the US DoC control over the rootservers and some other aspects of IANA/ICANN needs to be moved to a neutral administration ?

That and quite a lot of other questions are actually being debated here:

http://www.itu.int/wsis/

Given the importance of the issue, we can all only hope that the politicians don't screw this up, but there is indeed quite some room for improvement.

I don't have a position on that. It's not something I've really considered at all. I certainly don't want a corrupt organization like WIPO handling it, or a political one like the UN.

Who should be handling it then? Some corporation that only acknowledges responsibility to it's largest/richest shareholders?

I don't think that a political solution is an ideal choice, but really, what is the alternative?

Remember that DARPA started all this in 1962 and several engineering institutions (MIT and others) joined the fray shortly after that. It was to be an indestructable nationwide net of interconnections that couldn't be interrupted. It was handed over a few years later to the National Science Foundation, and continued development in American Universities, a move which spawned the .edu domain.

I agree with cwtnospam - large corporations and government agencies aren't the answer - I think a consortium of large universities around the world should be in control. They understand the technology, they are better at seeing future ramifications, and they could gather a large volunteer force to do things.

I'm still wondering what's "wrong" with the present system that someone -- the U.N., a government, or universities -- needs to "be in control"? The net seems to work quite well.

The snail's pace at which IPv4 is being replaced with IPv6, for one!

The internet is so big now that it rivals (is larger than?) television. Like television, it is now dominated by commercial interests that don't care about advancing the technology unless it is for their own financial benefit.
The result is that without the government mandating HD broadcasts, TV would have remained (will remain?) at standard definition indefinitely. Likewise, without intervention, the internet is in danger of being rendered useless by a sea of spam and other nefarious activities. The term 'information superhighway' is already far too inaccurate since most of the internet today is more infomercial than information.

True, that would be almost as bad as the UN. I'm with Phil, I don't see why it needs to be changed.

The UN hates not having control of things, and hates the US even more. Having the US appear to be in control of the internet, regardless of the fact that we created it, has got to be making them insane. The UN has pushed for "hate speech" controls many times, and is not happy that the US still has a Constitution that prevents such censorship.

Are you kidding??? The FCC was the reason that Japan had HDTV five years before us. And why Europe had GSM ten years before us. The FCC is a preventor of technology, not a leader.

On what do you base this? Besides, I think that at least some of those recommendations are based on the idea of having overseer bodies populated by as many different stakeholders as possible; as opposed to being run by one such stakeholder. With a rotating membership...wouldn't that be more democratic in nature...everyone gets a say in how the household is run!

The FCC prevents technological improvements because it is controlled by large corporations and religious extremists.

Yes, and I think democracies (mob rule) are a bad thing. The US wasn't designed as a democracy; it is a republic. A democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what's for dinner. The internet should follow the constitutional principles of our republic; no matter how many people vote to restrict speech, it is protected at a higher level, and can't be usurped.

The large corporations that would make huge profits from everyone buying a nice new HDTV? Um, yeah.

I've had to deal with FCC crap for a very long time in doing microwave and other radio/data installations. They are a useless, obstructionist organization that serves only itself and is solely interested in more power and control. I could only wish it was controlled by companies with profits to make and things to get done; for then things WOULD get done.

Let's just drop the FCC, it's OT and leads nowhere.

I would have no objections at all and would even be delighted if an all-american guy as talented as Jon Postel was to run the show. After all, back then things went very well indeed and the question "why change ?" would have had my undivided support.

As far as democracy vs. republic goes, it would probably not do the discussion any good if we were to examine how much of the constitutional rights are left over in todays America. Fortunately, that doesn't matter much for the question at stake.

It is interesting to read what Jon Postel said, only a few days before he died, about how ICANN should be operated:

http://www.house.gov/science/postel_10-07.htm

Key quote: "it should be non-profit, to ensure the impartial central coordination of the Internet;
...
it should be guided by a broad international and industry consensus, and the board should represent the full range of international and functional interests;"

and

"...the Internet should not be managed by any government..."

I continue to be shocked by the DoC statement quoted earlier and can find no reason whatsoever why one country should have exclusive control over a clearly international infrastructure of constantly growing importance.

That is what needs fixing and the DoC concurred, at least until the beginning of July.

You ought to know better than that by now. :p

Well, lets look at another aspect of the original post then:

Concerning the implementation of censorship on the net, Chinas CN2 project involving Cisco, Juniper and Alcatel is, as revolting as it is, pretty much state of the art, including IPv6:

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY.../0605cnet.html

They make huge profits by selling lots of standard defs at slightly lower profit margins, because the standard defs look cheap compared to the over-priced HD sets. Then, they make obscene profits when anyone buys an HD set. That's why they've been constantly and successfully lobbying to push back the date when HD transmission is 'set' to replace standard def. I believe it was originally 1995, now it's 2006, but that still isn't certain!

AFIAK, the original time table for broadcasting in DTV was set in 1997 and had the Dec 31st, 2006 as the cut off date. Now it's been pushed back to 2009. I also thought the original slowness to the converstion had to do with clearing the 700mhz range that certain channels (51-69? something like that) were currently using.

The FCC has openly and publicly stated that the reason they keep old standards around because people shouldn't be forced to buy new receivers. This has been the case with every new radio-based technology including GSM, digital cellular, HDTV... They're trying to protect the users from those mean horrible corporations that want them to buy a new phone. They've behaved this way from day 1. And they have a point to some extent, but I disagree with the amount of time.

IPv6...people make it sound like it could just happen overnight. And if they did do it, requiring everyone to buy new hardware/software, we'd hear how the horrible big corporations are forcing everyone to spend money.

We probably would, but the fact is that it is almost always cheaper in the long run to just make a clean switch. By delaying any transition the consumer buys time by paying for obsolete equipment, and then they still need to buy the new technology anyway. The transition from standard def to HD is technically less complex than the one from PowerPC to Intel, but Apple will probably be done with theirs first, even though they've started more than a decade later.

Since corporations wouldn't allow the transition to take so long if it were costing them profits, the only reasonable conclusion is that they've found ways to make profits from it. I don't see how letting them do the same with the internet would benefit the average user.

Most of the equipment shipping now can do IPv6 or is firmware upgradeable to do so. Cisco and Linksys already have position papers on their plans to provide free upgrades to current equipment.

I don't even know how to address such "logic." Why would it be costing them profits? Why must this either cost or produce profits. What if it just doesn't matter? Cisco IOS has IPv6 support, and if I were handed an IPv6 connection I could simply make it happen.

If suddenly everyone were told to get with the program and become IPv6 compatible, can you imagine the mayhem? You think turning on WEP is too complicated for most people...imagine them being told they must upgrade firmware...

My point is that if you don't want the UN or some other 'corrupt' organization in control, who do you want? Corporations, by definition are looking out for their own best interests and have no obligations to anyone but their shareholders. That's why cost or profits matter, and that means that compared to the UN for example, corporations are more 'corrupt.' The UN is at least trying to look out for the interests of the world as a whole. What corporate program for example, begins to compare with UNICEF?

I don't want to defend the UN, but once again, what is the alternative?

I believe the UN is a power-mad organization looking after its own interests only, not those of the world. They've already stated that the Internet "needs" to be censored in order to stop "hate speech." Which sounds noble enough, but who gets to decide what speech is acceptable then? Since they've already shown their anti-US bias over and over again, why would we hand them the keys to the Internet?

What is the alternative...

1. Do nothing. It's working. Stop trying to fix it.

2. Give it to a consortium of academic institutions. The danger here is that anti-American/anti-corporate organizations try to put the wrong people in power.

3. Create a new organization. Same pitfalls as #2, but even more likely to happen.

I'm still voting with #1 until I see evidence of a problem that could be fixed in some reasonable way without creating new ones.

Since the UN is essentially a democracy in which the US and its allies each have more than one vote, I wouldn't worry as much as you about who woud decide.
1. It's not right to say it's working just because the system isn't grinding to a halt. Like the old wild west, things are getting out of hand and some semblance of law and order is needed.
2. I agree with you a bit here, but I don't see anti-corporate as being anti-American. Most (all?) large corporations are multi-national and really aren't looking out for our interests at all. The reality is that 'Corporate America' doesn't exist anymore. Academic institutions are probably the best bet at this point, provided we can keep corporations from interfering with those institutions.
3. Where would that come from? Most likely the same corporate interests that cause many of our problems.

Wow! What's with all this anti-corporation rhetoric on this thread? You'd swear there were no ethics whatsoever in the corporate world and that they could put just anything out there and consumers would buy them.

Sure, they have an obligation to shareholders, but none of them make money unless someone purchases their products. And they won't sell their products unless consumers place some kind of value in them. Which means . . . holy smoke! . . . they actually have to attend to that concern. And that introduces the dynamic of a relationship between corporations and consumers, which supercedes that of corporations and shareholders (who get nothing if the corporation can't sell its products). And when you start talking about a relationship wherein people express their values in some manner, ethical considerations enter in -- all that without university professors, the U.N., or a government agency controling anything. ;)

Oh sure, there is the danger of anti-trust developments, and we need government to help watch out for that. But I'm not seeing where that comes into play re. the Internet. Where there are problems that need to be ironed out, then it would seem that could happen between the corporations and agencies involved.

Having spent a great deal of time with each of corporate, government, and academic institutions, I'll claim they're all capable of being equally inept at performing just about any task.

Wow indeed.

So far we've had:

• a long, completely off-topic rant on the FCC, industry and how they conspire in lots of interesting ways.
• bold statements how various entities were anti-american and as such not qualified to take part in ICANN-like workgroups.
• how corporations are ethical; discussion on that topic here:
  http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=40945
  starting about Microsofts move to flag words such as "democracy" with error messages in their chinese blogging service.
• how corporate, government, and academic institutions can all be idiots.

Part of the confusion may be related to the fact that there are two distinct problems:

• Exclusive amercan control over ICANN
• The larger WSIS-approach initiated by the ITU

I am completely with those who feel that there should be no more regulation than strictly necessary. Keeping IPs unique, DNS running for all domains and the WIPO out of domain-disputes should hopefully be handled by an independant institution in pretty much the way Jon Postel outlined it (see post #21 in this thread).

The WSIS-process should indeed be followed very closely, because it will, like it or not, probably have considerable impact on the initial topic of this thread, the future of the internet.

Absolutely Right On. Having spent a 40-year career in all three myself (in two countries) Craig has got it right. The reason is simple: all of those institutions employ people and those people are all human beings with ambitions, foibles, political beliefs, variable ethics, external influences, etc.

The IEEE has a number of standards committees that are typically populated by representatives of all three constituencies. That might be the way to go - make sure that none has the balance of power, though.

Have you not heard of Enron, Adelphia, Tyco, or Worldcomm? Does anyone here think that either Love Canal or Three Mile Island was the result of too much government interference?

I'm not saying government and the UN are perfect, but we're living in an era that encourages people to believe corporate greed is good and will solve all your problems, be they in the real world or cyberspace. It won't. It will generate its own set of problems. Like it or not - and often I don't - some government intervention is necessary because every organization needs a counterbalance.

Edited:

There are tens of thousands of corporations operating without problems nor the need for the government to be "overseeing" them in the way that's being suggested here. Look in the white pages of your phone book and behold all the businesses--corporations! Also, consider the role the government played in destroying Arthur Anderson Corp, which was a legitimate business employing hundreds of people. It's a two-edged sword, this government supervision business.

I'm not saying there should be no relationship between government and business, only "oversight" shouldn't come in unless there are problems, and I just don't see that re. the Internet.

. . .we're living in an era that encourages people to believe corporate greed is good and will solve all your problems . . .

Well, fwiw, we don't believe that in Kansas. ;)

Yes.

As for the other question, Phil already answered it well. You point out a few problems, and there are thousands of others behaving well. Do you assume all black people are criminals because in the inner ghettos they commit most of the crimes?

Now where's the logic?
No he hasn't. Arthur Anderson was committing fraud on a massive scale! That fraud cost thousands of people their jobs, their homes, their retirement security and in some cases their lives.

Yes, I've only pointed out a few of the worst and best known offenders, but there are many more and the scale of their offenses is usually far greater than those of individual criminals. Making matters worse, it is rare that these criminals are prosecuted, so we don't hear about most of them at all.

What I assume about black people is that they should be offended that so many blacks are in prison today for committing crimes far less damaging to our society than those committed by companies like Arthur Anderson and Enron. Equality of justice doesn't seem to apply to white collar crime.

Could we please try to get this on-topic again ?
 

On-topic, argumented thoughts on the future of the internet anyone ?

I would be very glad if this thread could get back on track and become as interesting as some others of this kind we've had recently with remarkably more articulate and relevant contributions.

It is tempting to go after all the flame-bait that there is in the thread now, please be brave and resist ;) .

http://www.cbr1100xx.org/temp/jul/nofishing.jpg

I don't know if it's possible to make any change right now that would be logical and proper. There is so much political and financial pressure and the stakes are high. I really don't think there's a problem now, and don't foresee one in the near future with things the way they currently are. I'm open to seeing examples of why things need to change though.

Ok, let's get closer to the original post. The question was about the structure of the internet. I think we're all agreed that the physical structure is very robust and incredibly redundant. Upgrades to the physical structure take place all the time with no discernable interruptions to users. So what needs fixing? The logical structure dates back to the very begining of the internet. Back then, 4 billion addresses seemed incomprehensibly large. Today, more than that number of addresses could be used by China alone.

The problems now are:

1. Far too few ip addresses. This requires dynamically assigning addresses, which because they're more difficult to track, make it far too easy to create problems 2 and 3.

2. Spam accounts for most (almost all!) of the email sent. This isn't just a problem because it's annoying, it also uses an enormous amount of bandwidth. The added expense gets passed along to consumers, who also have to deal with slower internet because of it.

3. Viruses and spyware affect all of us. As Mac users, we may feel that we're unaffected, but we're not. We may never have to deal with a virus or spyware on our systems, but most of the institutions we deal with are constantly wasting money dealing with both, and they pass the costs on to us.

The current system costs more and delivers less because of these problems. When the switch to IPv6 is completed, it will be possible to significantly reduce both. Whether or not they are actually reduced will depend on who is in charge. That's why discussions about the future of the internet must always center on the political aspect. None of what we'd all like to see is technically impossible or even difficult. Getting a consensus is.

There really aren't even 4 billion address spaces in IPv4. Remember that the founding fathers, never anticipating the exponential explosion of internet use, made some decisions that we are paying for now. The 32-bit address space is bad enough, but their original ordering in octets has caused problems too.

Originally, networks were classified as A, B, C, or D, where an A spans the first octet (a /8 network), a B, the second octet (a /16), and a C is a /24 supporting only 255 addresses. D was a special 1.1.1.xxx used for multicasting. To make matters worse, IP address space was allocated on the basis of requests for it rather than on need. If I recall correctly (I used to teach there), MIT, for example, has all of 18.xxx.xxx.xxx - they asked for and got an entire A address space as one of the founding institutions. The octet grouping is also problematic. A /24 (just the last octet) is restricted to 254 hosts - too small - and a /16 (the last two octets) is 65,534 hosts - really too large in most cases.

To compound matters, quite a few of the available numbers are Private Addresses. These are addresses that a router will not pass on to the WAN.

10.0.0.0 - 10.255.255.255 is a private network range often used in corporate networks.
172.16.0.0 - 172.31.255.255 another large private set.
192.168.0.0 - 192.168.255.255 - the common set used in LANs and small routers.
0.0.0.0 - default route
127.x.x.x - loopback address - a whole A address space. Zeros at the end refer to the network
x.x.255.255 is a broadcast address to all machines on x.x.

I haven't studied IPv6, but in addition to more space, it presumably allocates that space for a continuing explosion. The most important factor in this expansion will definitely be a realistic allocation scheme or the IPv4 problems are just delayed for a while.

It is tempting to go after all the flame-bait that there is in the thread now, please be brave and resist.

Right, Voldenuit. :) There are lots of red herrings and straw men popping up as well, which complicates discussion.

--------

One question I've had is whether the net will be able to handle the traffic that's sure to increase through the years, especially if people begin to stream more and more movies. So far, things seem to be working out (re. bandwidth), but that could change. I'm sure the various providers of backbone services are aware of an are planning to accomodate somehow.

Anyone have any thoughts or concerns about the expansion process?

cwtnospam: That's why discussions about the future of the internet must always center on the political aspect. None of what we'd all like to see is technically impossible or even difficult. Getting a consensus is.

OK, but it's happened so far with a rather "laissez-faire" attitude re. control from politicians. Why could it not continue to happen that way? Phasing in new technology and protocols has gone on all along. What's so different now?

Well there is of course Internet 2, but that is primarily restricted to the research institutions that lost the original Internet, and don't plan to make the same mistake twice. ;)

What's different now is that the internet is much more commercialized than even a few years ago. It used to be about information, and now it's more about selling things. As the internet becomes more and more capable, it becomes far more likely that individual users will be overwhelmed by marketing messages. Can you imagine what would happen to your inbox if all the current spam blocking techniques being used by ISPs were to be rendered even 10% less effective? You wouldn't have enough time in your day to sort through it all.

Communities in the real world have passed laws to limit billboards and glaring neon signs because the signs threatened the quality of life in those communities. Now it's time to do the same with the internet, before its usefulness is negated by its pitfalls.

Wow. Talk about a political question! Or are you asking about laying fiber and installing servers and routers?

Good to see that we finally come to have a common appreciation on the conduct of a (slightly) political thread ;) .

Well at least in Europe, I am not worried. During the dot.com bubble years dark fibre has been buried at a scaring pace and combined with advances in modulation, I can't see a shortage coming anytime soon now. It's just a matter of putting another card in some massive Cisco or Juniper router.

In France, one operator, free.fr, has even started combined VoiP, TV and internet service over ADSL2 lines at speeds up to 20 mbit/s for 30 euro/month.

NightFlight (vol_de_nuit) is right, there's tons of fiber available - too much for current usage which was among the sparks that ignited the dotCom crash. But, and I don't mean to make this political again, much of this capacity is owned by the countries it's in.

ASIDE:

I did a consulting job in Chile some years ago at the behest of Cisco and was surprised to discover that the government of Chile had "wired" the country so that the internet reached every school in the country. They are internally well-connected. Their problem back then was limited (and slightly unreliable) bandwidth to the USA from there because they didn't control the pipes in between which then passed through Peru, Columbia, and finally reached Texas. Almost all the equipment was either NEC or Cisco, by the way.

Looking at a traceroute there now (3.5 secs) it goes from Nova Scotia to Australia for DNS, back to a switch in Toronto, then to the megacomplex in Fairfax, VA, on to an Australian switch, and finally to Chile. Roundabout, but entirely dependable.

Thanks for the constructive posts et bien le bonjour aux francophones ;) .

I think novascotian brings an important issue into the discussion:
Although potentially touchy, the "digital divide" certainly is a problem and whatever contributes to a wider, unfiltered access to the wealth of information available through the internet to more people certainly is a Good Thing.

From Europe, I have about 200ms latency to apple.com and only 70ms more for a target in Chile which is not that bad after all.

And to support the "laissez-faire"-attitude in net.governance, let me explain why I don't think that any of the three points raised by cwtnospam are to be addressed by IANA/ICANN:

1
For now, there is still some slack and there are quite some unused class A networks to be put into RIR allocation pools. And I am extremely worried by the legal initiatives in Europe trying to get ISPs to store IP-customer-logs for an entire year. Why not require the post-office to keep track of a year worth of your mail ?
IPv6 has a hen-and-egg-problem for sure where everybody waits for someone else to move first, but at least it is there, ready to be used once the real IP-shortage gets started.
BTW, China will start to use IPv6 soon, check out the article I quoted in post #23 in this thread.

2
Spam clearly is a problem. However, the conviction of Jeremy "spam-king" Jaynes to a nine years prison sentence under Virginia state law shows that the legal instruments exist to fight it - sensible territorial laws are all it takes.

Also note that the major proportion of spam these day is originated by 0wned Windows machines being made part of a botnet. Looking at the responsibilty of a corporation producing an OS that will, when connected in its out-of-the-box-state to the internet has only minutes to live before it gets hacked seems to be a lot more sensible to me.

As it is unlikely that the small proportion of morons who actually fall for spam mail will shrink to the point where it does no longer make sense to spam, technical solutions will be perfected to deal with it or other concepts such as

http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html

will replace the naive SMTP of today. (check out the guy behindd the idea, djb is quite a personality).

3
Again, while the basic statement that malware sux rox is true, efficient action should probably look at the vulnerable OS rather than pro-active port-blocking or other misguided band-aids. Corporations may be more or less ruthless, but they certainly try to not lose money on computer systems with a high TCO. Which is good news for Apple.

2 and 3 are annoying criminal activities and can be dealt with using the legal system of the country where the damage occurs. They are part of the not-exactly-perfect life as much as shoplifting. Yes, you pay higher prices because there is "shrinkage".
So, death-penalty for shoplifters ?
Hopefully not...

But increasingly less so for individuals; my ISP catches some, Spamfire catches most of what's left (but hasn't yet figured out that I don't understand any language not written in the Roman alphabet with a few accents thrown in), and Eudora sorts that out for me, so I spend only a minute or so per day dealing with it. Similarly, pop-up blocking is effective for web sites that don't serve their own ads.

The problem then is really on the dark fiber lines where gigabits/second of bandwidth are devoted to spam that never actually reaches anyone and goes unseen, and except for the expense to us, it's not our problem. Mass mailings do have their uses - I'm often informed of software upgrades and new products by this path (though often after I've seen them in an RSS feed).

Given, however, that there is currently such an abundance of dark fiber capacity, no one is really paying much attention to the spam problem (with the exception of Virginia, I guess); they're leaving it to the end users to deal with it. When that trunk and giga-switch capacity begins to be strained, however, THEN, the owners of IP backbone and the providers of the switches that control it will jump in to do something about spam. I doubt very much that it requires govenment regulation to get there - all it requires is a cost to the spammers that makes spamming unprofitable.

The latter, and some of the responses are suggesting that the capacity is already there. That's good to know.

True, but that method has already shown itself to be far from efficient, and relying on it invites the kind of government intervention that so many seem to abhor!

FWIW, I never read anyone on this thread objecting to legal action against people who violate laws pertaining to use of the Internet. Countries making laws about spam, pornography and even net commerce isn't the same kind of intervention as "overseeing" or "regulating" the ongoing development of the Internet. The consensus of most participating in the discussion seems to be that this has gone quite well so far, and there's no reason to "fix" what isn't even "broken."

I didn't say they objected to legal action, only that relying on it can and probably will result in just what they do object to, since governments find it difficult to pull their noses out of anything once they stick them in.

I wouldn't say the internet is broken either, but I don't believe that in the long term it can't continue to grow the way it has been because the abuses it allows will outweigh its benefits at some point.

Great response!
 

Wow!
I just got back from hiking and fishing in the mountains; posted the tread just before I left. Really glad to see the interest in the topic. Looking forward to reading the posts in detail and checking out some of the links.

:)

Another interesting illustration how ICANN is not independant as it should be and the US WSIS delegation never stopped affirming, is the case of the .xxx domain and how it got killed by right-wing religious pressure groups.

Let's keep things apart here:
It may or may not be a good idea to have such a domain. There are, as you can see from the document I'll refer to later, also people in favor of the .xxx domain with the afterthought of then forcing all "sexy" content to go exclusively there.

That's not my point.
My point is:
Us-american lobbies and day-to-day political opportunity get to decide what happens to the internet at large, rather than a neutral institution with a net-wide horizon and a long-term vision like it is supposed to be.

Here's a short article:
"On Friday, May 19, 2006, ICM Registry announced that it would file a reconsideration request with ICANN. ICM Registry applied for the .XXX top level domain from ICANN and was turned down May 10 following pressure on ICANN from the US government. It is also filing a judicial appeal under the Freedom of Information Act to challenge redactions and omissions from the internal US government documents released to it under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.In connection with its judicial appeal, ICM Registry released 88 pages of documents obtained under the FOIA showing how the U.S. handled its application. Even with the major redactions, these documents show how US supervision of ICANN was influenced by domestic political pressure. They leave no room for doubt that the US altered its policy toward ICANN in response to this pressure, and that it actively worked in tandem with ICANN to conceal the nature and significance of US governmental influence over ICANN from the media."
http://www.internetgovernance.org/ne...foiaxxx_051906

And here are e-mails and other documents showing how things happened behind the scenes, obtained, with some redaction, under the Freedom of Information Act by the would-be-xxx-registrar:
http://www.internetgovernance.org/pdf/xxx-foiapage.pdf


Even if you disagree, please, be good to this thread, try to go for articulated dissent. There has been enough shouting already.

An argument for international control
 

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Those of us who are concerned about the future of the Internet are in good company. There is an interesting article on BBC about Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Internet.

He is concerned, amongst other things, about US efforts to charge for different levels of online access -- i.e. a two-tier Internet. Tim Berners-Lee, director of the World Wide Web Consortium, insists on an open mode.

Interestingly, he points out, Microsoft and Google want legislation guaranteeing the same. (Ref: the Net Neutrality Bill currently before the US House of Representatives.)

So, who disagrees? Who wants a closed model? Well, telecom companies for one. If they succeed in their efforts, giving better access to those willing to pay, they would essentially become gatekeepers for content as well. Why? Because one group of content providers that might be prioritised is Web TV, and they have the bucks to pay, and TV audiences may be equally willing.

Personally I find this sort of discrimination very questionable.

Should the Congressional bill fail, it seems yet another excellent argument for yielding control to an international body, and not on controlled by just one nation. It seems more likely that we can then avoid what Tim Berners-Lee fear would be "a dark period for the Web".
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MacRumors headline on Network Neutrality
 

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MacRumors has clearly found Network Neutrality important enough to headline the issue on 26 May. For a front page topic, they have a rather lengthy article about the proposed Congressional bill. (There is more background info on Network Neutrality on Wikipedia, including an in-depth brief of the bill now before Congress.)

It will be very interesting to see if it passes both chambers -- and finds a willing Presidential signature. That would be a strong statement, making it much more difficult to move in the wrong direction.
.

Just to make sure there's no misunderstanding:
Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the www, not the internet (nor did Al Gore...), which is the "enfant naturel" of the US military and the hippie generation and something about as all-american as it gets.

Network neutrality is an important issue, understanding that everybody being able to connect with everybody else regardless of marketshare is the basic paradigma that made the internet such a wild success.
The very fact to bring up a debate to question that principle is scary.

Exactly voldenuit. I read a frightening acticle the other day regarding a push by the telecom companies that not only want the "tiered service" points, but they also want to control prioritized pricing on sub-levels of those tiers. Bascially, they'll be able to not only "tax" people for using the Internet, but they'll further tax you depending on the type, amount, size and content of the data.

Obviously with the latest passing of the Net Neutrality Bill, this idea has bee somewhat throw by the way side. However, just the thought that the big teleco's were even thinking of such a thing just makes you realize that they are not in this for anything other that the money. Its amazing how so many people have become infected with the sickness of greed. It makes you wonder what life will be like in 20 years. Somewhat scary, I suppose.

Net Neutrality isn't a law yet, correct?

This stuff scares me as well. It makes me think of Verizon blocking bluetooth file transfer on their phones so you have to buy ring tones, etc. from them. What would stop Comcast, Qwest and all the others from doing the same? Nothing would. Right now everyone has to be competitive in price and service and when your the best that sells your product.

I just read this commentary subtitled: "Newsnight's ubergeek talks to BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen and finds him distinctly equivocal about fears of a two speed internet." Interesting alternative viewpoint on Net Neutrality.

There are a couple of problems with this article:

1
It insinuates that some traffic (in this case bit-torrent) is less worthy than others.
Neither BBC-reporters nor ISPs don't get to make such decisions. Their customers pay them to pump packets from A to B as fast as humanly possible.

2
It reads like decentralised caching was a recent invention and problematic in terms of net.neutrality.
For web-content, Akamai-like services have existed for quite some time now and there is exactly no problem at all with the fact that big companies pay extra to get their contents to their customers worldwide by using such setups.

It is sad to see that respectable mainstream press often lacks the most basic understanding of even moderately technical subjects.

Sad, perhaps; but come now - surely you weren't surprised?

I agree entirely with your analysis, however. If you've followed how Google does its thing, it's quite similar - they cache all over the world. That big companies want to pay extra to get more bandwidth doesn't bother me either as long as the solution is external to the backbone and they use the same backbone as everyone else does.

A fight for the backbone
 

And that is the crux of the matter. If they left it at that, there would be no problem. But as far as I can see, this is a fight for backbone -- and that scares me.

More about Bram Cohen:

"Why Bram Cohen Isn't Actually Against Net Neutrality"

Cluelessness is not reserved to journalists, Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) just managed to make a complete fool of himself:

http://blog.wired.com/27BStroke6/?entry_id=1512499

It's ok that elderly senators don't know exactly how the internet works, but shouldn't they get staff capable of explaining it to them to a point where at least they don't embarass themselves when talking about it ?

It certainly is hard to have an informed opinion on the wide variety of subjects they get to vote on, but it's their job after all and blunders such as this are not really encouraging voters that they're competently represented.

In all fairness, he's great at going to the zoo ;) :

http://stevens.senate.gov/gallerydisplay.cfm?gid=27

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Ideology is one thing, but there are many astonishing instances of technological ignorance in the legislative debates -- and I’m sure it comes in all political colours. Mr Ted Stevens adds his amazing example to a very long list.

In Norway the newspapers had a field day after our Parliament (Stortinget) voted on a bill that had implications for making MP3 copies of legitimately purchased music in order to play on iPods and similar devices.

If I was to dig up copies of those articles and translate choice quotes, I am sure there would be howls of laught from many Forum members. Not to mention some worries along the lines “Hey, are these the people who make decisions for us?!”

This problem isn't limited to technology. We have quite a number of legislators who have never driven a car, and don't even have to use household appliances because they have maids to do that. They don't have to worry about security because they have bodyguards.

These people are legislating on things they have no clue about, from technology to appliances to defensive weapons to cars. The only way to stop this is to replace them with people who have life experience and common sense, but those people don't have enough money to get elected.

Three Norwegian Ministers...
 

A side note from overseas: One of our recent Ministers of Transportation, Odd Einar Dørum, did not have a driver’s license, and he publicly acknowledged a severe fear of flying. He was, however, an excellent minister – approaching the job with a humble open mind and a solid dose of self-irony.

He is not alone in his open mind. Norway has had the only openly gay Finance Minister that I know of, Per-Kristian Foss. In fact he won a standing ovation from his political party (the Conservative Party) when he announced his orientation.

Rolf Presthus, another of our Conservative Finance Ministers, had a very interesting angle on the long-discussed simplification of the tax reform:

“Actually, we can reduce the Income Tax Form to three questions:
– how much do you have?
– where do you keep it?
– and when can we come and pick it up?”

I think that’s pretty darned good irony for a Finance Minister! No, I am definitely not trying to start a political debate. I just thought it might be a worthwhile digression. :cool:

Best regards,
ArcticStones

There was a related article in New Scientist magazine, 1 July 2006 "The Net Reloaded" that basically dismissed the idea that the net could be brought down by destroying a few key nodes. Essentially there are enough alternative routes to mean that any destruction would be localised.

I would be very interested in that article! I’ll try the local library, but not sure they subscribe. If you happen to have an Internet reference, I would be very grateful. :)

I would have to agree. Even if things did slow down tremendously. There are SO many possible routes, that a full failure is almost impossible. It might take a few minutes of reconfiguration, but there are lots of alternates.

Surviving an EMP attack on DNS root servers?
 

Are they saying the Internet would still be well-functioning even if 4–6 DNS root servers, which handle virtually all Internet traffic, are taken out by coordinated Electro-Magnetic Pulse weapons (EMPs)? Or are they only dealing with less radical scenarios?

By "a few key nodes", do the authors of the New Scientist article refer to the 13 DNS root servers? If the Internet has that kind of robustness, then I am both surprised and reassured. I do note Vol de Nuit’s earlier post in this thread:

Just 13 DNS root servers – that’s not an awful lot! Even though it may, perhaps, be more appropriate to use the terms “server systems”. Here is an expanded presentation.

The internet would continue to function if the root servers imploded right this second, due to DNS caching by all of the ISPs and most independent networks. What would not work is the addition of new DNS entries until new root servers were created (or elected from existing servers).

There is a web site www.newscientist.com but you have to subscribe to see the full article. That's why I didn't post it.

Princeton professor Ed Felten published a rather interesting paper titled
"Nuts and Bolts of Network Neutrality" that should definitely be read by Senator Stevens and everybody else interested in net.neutrality:

"Network neutrality is a vexing issue. Proponents of neutrality regulation argue that the free, innovative Internet of today is threatened and government action is needed to protect it. Opponents argue that regulation is not needed, or will be flawed in practice, or is a bad idea even in principle. One of the reasons the network neutrality debate is so murky is that relatively few people understand the mechanics of network discrimination. In reasoning about net neutrality it helps to understand the technical motivations for discrimination, the various kinds of discrimination and how they would actually be put into practice, and what countermeasures would then be available to users and regulators. These are what I want to explain in this essay. It’s not my goal to answer every question about net neutrality—that would require a book, not an essay. What I want to do is fill in some of the technical background in a way that illuminates the core issues, in the hope of providing a little clarity to the discussion."

Complete ten-page pdf here:
http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/pub/neutrality.pdf

His conclusion is rather surprising, but makes a lot of sense, read the paper to find out ;) .

Excellent analysis and explanation - well worth the read. :)

Musings of Doctorow & Co
 

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There is an excellent article on BBC’s website, essentially summarizing the expectations of our foremost Internet experts. It makes a fascinating starting point for dwelving into the topic. Many of those interviewed, such as Cory Doctorow, expand on their thoughts elsewhere.

Attacking the heart of the net
 

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I’m rather astonished to read that 3 of 13 DNS rootservers in the world (!) were put out of action yesterday, albeit temporarily. That sounds significant, to put it mildly. Here is the article on CNN: Hackers hit key Internet traffic computer, and on the BBC: Hackers attack heart of the net.

So, I am curious:

>> Was anyone here significantly affected by yesterdays meta-scale hacking attempt?

>> Any thoughts on the objectives of this particular attack?

>> Or how future attacks on an even larger scale can be avoided or neutralised?

As I understand it, the consequences would be pretty immense if someone succeeded in putting most of the Internet out of action for any length of time...

Best regards,
ArcticStones
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Olav posted this after a conversation we had via PM. Those guys are colocated a few cabinets over from my servers, and a couple of mine were partially compromised also. I spent from about noon yesterday to 5am today fixing things, slept a bit, and I'm back at it. Just one machine left to recover.

One thing to know is that nearly all of the machines used for attacks like this are compromised Windows machines. There are millions of them, joined into and controlled by botnets.

Controlling attacks is somewhat art as much as science, and we're getting much better at it. Every attack leaves more information to learn from. There's no way to stop it altogether; it's literally impossible with the current architecture of the internet. However the attack yesterday showed that while there was a small impact, it was just that; small.

Tracing to the source
 

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Servers, compromised in what sense?

One more thing: Given the fact that botnets are used, is it realistic for anyone to actually trace such an attack to its original source (read: people)?

I would really like to understand this.


PS. My ISP’s email server was down for about nine hours. When I called them, they said it was "maintenance", but the person on the other of the line didn’t even sound like he believed that himself... Are there dots to connect?

And why did it take such a time-consuming effort for CAvarez to recover the machines? What happened to them?

Three machines in the facility had weak passwords and no RSA keys for SSH. A script kiddie was able to gain access, but did so much damage through his ignorance that the machines were useless, even to him. We saw his traffic to a botnet on IRC, pretended to be a bot on the channel, saw what they were saying. Eventually talked to them while we tried to stop the access. There was a brief process-killing battle, we won, and they got really pissed off. Funny how those scumbags really do believe that you're the bad guy for kicking them off your own machine. Amazing.

Why so long? A number of reasons. First they are production machines handling VoIP traffic. We couldn't just kill them and reinstall. They had to remain up but we had to regain control. One way we did that was to have the NOC block out all non-VoIP traffic at the head end router while we tried to regain the machines.

Then there was just the comedy of stupid issues. One Dell server had a bad CD drive, couldn't boot from the Linux installer CD. The Dells also can't boot from USB--argh--I hate Dell. We had to back up many fluid files (voicemail, prompts, etc) to make sure we could restore to the last state, not to the previous full backup. That was challenging, given the limits of the size of the servers (1u), drives we had on hand, etc. Of course lots of little challenges popped up. In total there were five of us working on different things.

When a machine is rooted like that, you have to simply destroy it and install clean. There is no way to be sure it is clean otherwise.

The password thing would be funny and ironic if it wasn't such a pain in the arse... We are just taking over these machines, and three days ago I said to my partner that they had horrible passwords and root was enabled, so we had to fix that. Because of the transition and need for people to still have access, I though, "It's been that way for years, what can a few days hurt..."

Argh.

I read that about 25% of computers on the net are bot-net zombies.

The number ranges from 25 to 75, no way to really know. Even if just 10% of Windows machines are compromised, imagine the size of that botnet...

I spoke too soon. Found three more semi-compromised machines. Damaged but not owned, they don't have access but the machines are going to have to be fixed.

at any time please correct me if I am wrong....b/c I very well could be.

It is my understanding that windows uses a different method of processor hierarchy in their kernel. things like drivers and system processes run as root level processes. Where as in other OSes, like unix/linux/os x it's more of a mirco kernel or a micro managed kernel ( I could be using wrong terminology here) which lets things run as high level processes but never root, unless it is indeed a root process.

That being said, and having to help maintain a huge windows enviroment at work I can say windows has too many loop holes. I mean drive mapping itself is a pain because if a user authenticates via NDS/AD and needs to run an application off a network drive or needs the right to install updates you basically gave them a limited admin account. Through various known exploits you can map just about any drive on the network....pretty freaking scary. Gladly most users don't know this kind of stuff, and of course things that are too important or things that need restricted access are a lot more highly restricted. The problem lies in, if use A needs rescource access to resource X and we give it them, it opens up pathing exploits of windows to those things in the same permission range. So, effectively user A can access things user B can, but is not suppose to have access to them. This pathing exploit also works in other ways, allowing users access to the control panels and other system settings. I once had several computers drop internet connection, couldn't ping them or remote in so I had to go out on site. I check the nic on the machine, no link lights at all. so I test the drop and it tests good....Long story short the student had used a pathing exploit to give themselves access to device manager (which they do not have access to by default) and disabled the NIC, by hardware profiling it out. Even when policy is pushed out there is generally a way around it, and then you play cat and mouse. Patching each exploit until another one pops up. This gets annoying from the OS level to the application level.

Vista has change several things about their directory structure however, I have not messed with it enough to see what has exactly been changed. I know for one thing they changed, is there is no more documents and settings directory, its now all under the /Users which is a good move I think.

Also, MS just bought a bunch of security (like 300 million worth) from Novell, and not from Novell's netware products, it was from their Linux product. So, now MS has access to Linux security technology. It helps to have money I suppose.

sources: http://www.techworld.com/opsys/news/...fm?NewsID=7250
http://articles.techrepublic.com.com...1-6137444.html

[OT] Aside..
 

My grandmother always said "Whether you're rich or poor, it's nice to have money". Since I've experienced a substantial portion of that wealth range over the last 7 decades, I concur. Haven't thought about that for years, but Larkin's comment was a "deja vu all over again".

you've been spending up for 7 decades? dude, how old are you?

Oh...where do I start. I mean, that's correct, but it's much much worse than that. Let's see... Lazy programmers have chosen to write programs that only operate as admin/root, so nearly all Windows users are forced to be running as admin at all times. I mean, even mainstream things like QuickBooks! Then you have the driver implementations which also must run as admin, and even the good ones are running at privilege level in the background even when the user is not. So then we have IE, which has massive security problems (intentional--that's another paragraph), and is also running in privileged mode. Well...I don't need to explain 2+2 for you.

IE, Outlook, and other MS programs were purposely written with interaction and extensibility in mind, but NO thought to security. Literally, they assumed all users were good. And every admin knows you can't even trust your own users, let alone the outside world.

Privilege escalation isn't so much a bug in Windows as it is a feature.

The CNN article that Olav referenced is, in my opinion, understated. And for good reason, you want to tell these losers that their efforts had no effect, to discourage them. The reality though is that I think this cost a lot of people a bunch of money. I know my company lost at least 20 of our own man-hours over it (two person company...ouch) plus many hours with our partners and contractors. The opportunity cost is huge because I should have been working on closing a deal for $30k for the next three months and another $100k over a year.

That is exactly why some students have to have admin privileges and how we hide mapped drives because of its design, and that is what enables the pathing exploits.

Yup windows is annoying

A shocking stance by the US Justice Dept
 

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It is with great dismay I read that the US Department of Justice is opposing legislation designed to guarantee Internet Neutrality. This is the complete opposite stance from what it would be reasonable to expect -- if, that is, they were truly concerned with democracy and justice.

The dismantling of Internet Neutrality would have grave consequences, seriously undermining a key characteristic of the Internet as we know it: Equality in the way traffic is handled.

There is a more complete BBC story here, and I’m sure there are other articles elsewhere.

Respectfully,
ArcticStones

I agree with "astonishing"; an understatement, perhaps. Mind boggling, even. Leads to the question: "How on earth could a logical thought process lead to the notion that abolishing internet neutrality would be a good idea?

Let me guess. Aside from the heavy lobbying by the telecoms, the average North American or British legislator does not really use the internet the way it is used by the vast majority. To them, it's probably email, news, and Google.

Further, the RIAA & Movie folks have convinced the solons that most of the high-bandwidth use of the internet, strangling it to hear the telecoms tell the story, is contraband music and/or video and/or porn and/or internet gambling, while another big chunk is "kiddy crap" like Facebook and/or YouTube and/or violent, sex-filled games; I mean, who needs that, they say. The kids should be playing sports and getting decent grades, not sitting in a dark in front of a computer eating junk food.

"Real" businesses (i.e., read those banks, traders and corporations with tons of money and a lot of political clout with the solons) don't go for any of that; their use is (they say) the same as the solons', and all this crap content is slowing them down.

Blinded by those prejudices, they're out to save the world, absolutely unheeding of any rational understanding of the unintended consequences.... as usual. I'm not really surprised.

Apparently, the US Department of Justice is in favor of violations of the Sherman Antitrust Clayton Act, which they are supposed to be enforcing.

The real tragedy is that I don't find this the least bit surprising.

http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/foia/divisionmanual/ch2.htm

Could you expand on that, please? I would also be interested in links to articles/sites where this particular point has been discussed in an intelligent way, if you know of any.

I misspoke. I was thinking of the Clayton Act, not the Sherman act. I edited my previous post, and added an appropriate link. I'm not aware of any discussions on the topic, but I would also be interested in reading them.

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Thanks, J Christopher.
I only vaguely remember the Clayton (and Sherman) Act from my US history classes, and that was a long time ago.

Roughly what are we talking about here? For I don’t think I have the patience to read through all that legalese... From a quick look on Wikipedia, this would certainly seem to apply:

"The Clayton Act prohibits: ...price discrimination between different purchasers if such discrimination substantially lessens competition or tends to create a monopoly in any line of commerce"

Slowing the traffic of small companies, for many of whom the Internet is the primary source of customer contact and arena of sales, would most definitely discriminate in favour of larger companies with the economic clout to insist on faster service.

I know from the travel industry, that the Internet was decisive in the rise of Norwegian Airlines, which in just a few years has risen to challenge the virtual domestic monopoly of SAS-Braathens. And I’m sure we could find tens of thousands of similar cases.

To put it in other words: Dismantling Internet netrality would be a grave blow to economic democracy.

Personally I am even more concerned with the free exchange of ideas that is an essential underpinning of any true democracy. In this regards, the flat structure of the Internet has been a huge blessing. In fact the MacOSX Forums are but one modest example of that.

I suspect this is about telecom profits, but also control -- in the broadest possible sense of that word.

Tragic.

Time for a change?
 

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I would go so far as to say this: If the US Justice Department recommendation becomes US law and practice, then it is high time the Internet be removed from American hands and placed under an international authority.

Otherwise I wouldn’t mind things continuing as now.
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Of course, it's high time anyway, no matter which way they go on net neutrality. Clearly, if the US chooses to allow their telcos to throttle the net in the US for their own profit, then the users of the net in the US should take the hit and know that in other parts of the world, that hit isn't being taken. Isn't it possible that a throttled net will just encourage many providers of content to move offshore? Then, the US throttle will look to the hoi polloi like censorship does to Chinese netizons. Until now, the best feature, the enduring feature of the net was that it wasn't politically controlled. Politicians hate that.