A decision by the United States to indefinitely retain oversight of the main computers that control internet traffic drew concerns Friday from foreign officials, many of whom want an international body in charge instead.
"When the internet is being increasingly utilized for private use, by businesses and so forth, there is a societal debate about whether it's befitting to have one country maintaining checks on that," said Masahiko Fujimoto of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications' data communications division. "It's likely to fuel that debate."
"The signals and words and intentions and policies need to be clear so all of us benefiting in the world from the internet and in the U.S. economy can have confidence there will be continued stewardship," Gallagher told The Associated Press on Thursday.
He said the declaration, officially made in a four-paragraph statement posted online, was in response to growing security threats and increased reliance on the internet globally for communications and commerce.
Though the computers themselves — 13 in all, known as root servers — are in private hands, they contain government-approved lists of the 260 or so internet suffixes, such as ".com."
View: Wired News
"When the internet is being increasingly utilized for private use, by businesses and so forth, there is a societal debate about whether it's befitting to have one country maintaining checks on that," said Masahiko Fujimoto of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications' data communications division. "It's likely to fuel that debate."
"The signals and words and intentions and policies need to be clear so all of us benefiting in the world from the internet and in the U.S. economy can have confidence there will be continued stewardship," Gallagher told The Associated Press on Thursday.
He said the declaration, officially made in a four-paragraph statement posted online, was in response to growing security threats and increased reliance on the internet globally for communications and commerce.
Though the computers themselves — 13 in all, known as root servers — are in private hands, they contain government-approved lists of the 260 or so internet suffixes, such as ".com."
Cont...
It's not clear whether Famitsu is simply basing an assumption on the inclusion of the drive on Kutaragi's previous comments, or if the magazine actually has new information about Sony's thinking on the matter.
If PS3 doesn't ship with a hard drive, it will give an edge to the Xbox 360, particularly in terms of massively multiplayer games - an increasingly popular genre which currently requires significant amounts of storage on the client side. Sony may be hoping, however, that the PS3's superior capabilities for removable storage, which includes slots for Memory Stick and other types of high-capacity memory cards, will allow MMOGs to be played on the console even without a drive.
It's also possible that Sony may adopt the approach which many commentators expected Microsoft to follow with the Xbox 360, by launching two versions of the PS3 - one without a hard drive and with limited media capabilities, and a more expensive model with a hard drive and full media functionality.

RWI Thread
That makes common sense to me.
Surely other countries could create and develop other Internets, but would users really benefit from having multiple Internets?
But I think it should be worldwide. I mean, good principle says that a primary and secondary DNS server should not be placed in the same building, they should be in separate buildings at least, better if separate cities, even better if separate countries. (According to the design documents I have read so far in my oh so recent career, at least). What happens if tommorow someone trips on something bad and makes the US blow up out of the water? (Worst case scenario). It would make sense if they scattered the root servers around. It would also allow for better performance, maybe, even though you (this is you reading this at home, or at your college) almost never interact with root servers at all -- your ISP probably doesn't either, more often than not they all maintain cache from their upstream providers who often fetch their cache hits from higher upstream providers, and so on, until the last one queries the root servers.
Or whenever an uncaring (either lazy or incompetent, I don't know) server admin installs a DNS servers without forwarders.
Since the root servers content are distributed around already, sort of, into caching servers... I then wonder if it would change anything at all... hmmm....
Last edited by 53313 on 04 Jul 2005 - 15:51
The Internet itself was created in (I think) the 70's by a mixture of US universities and the US military...
If you're gonna get all stroppy about something, it helps when you actually know what you're talking about...
EDIT: Hmm, where'd that stroppy post I was replying to get to?
Last edited by 10533 on 04 Jul 2005 - 16:54
safer and faster.. too
"I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts."
Will Rogers (1879 - 1935)
Or how about Robert Heinlein's definition of a committee:
There is a virus and everyone has to be killed,
We are the Borg. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile
I'll almost think that bush already has been assimilated
if the root dns servers all went down there will be hell!
Just wanted to clarify that root dns servers physically being in U.S. does not mean that there aren't copies of data at other physical locations, but it just means that, these servers will perhaps be the last ones to be queried and that all other servers will abide by the data stored on these servers.
And besides, what have other countries done for the internet? Nothing! You kids can reply whatever you want, but it won't count anyways, because the fact remains that the USA made the internet, not Canada, not Japan, not the UK, only the USA made the internet. Saying otherwise is a lie and will be treated as such.
So all your responses are null & void already!
The internet does not belong to the US government. Since my computer is currently part of the internet, that suddenly does not make it US property - no I didn’t think so, nor for that matter, are all the internet backbones laid down throughout the rest of the world.
The US may created the original internet but it doesn’t own it.
As some people have pointed out already, the World Wide Web was not an American invention – I would have thought that that’s a very important part of the internet - so how can you say that no one else has done anything for the internet???
I think you need to get your facts right before posting
You are a nerd!
I just hate it when some fascist American makes comments about how the US is better than everywhere else.
Thankfully not all Americans think the same as you.
Commenting has either been disabled on this article or you are not logged in. Click here to login or register, its free!
Note: Anonymous commenting is disabled in order to keep the quality of responses to a high standard.