My suggestion? Taking a deep breath, pouring the Koolaid down the drain instead of drinking it, and repeating to yourself, "I should really stop jumping on every conspiracy bandwagon I see." Seriously, I have little doubt that if we had a republican president and a democratic majority in congress was attempting to block this very same change you would see articles criticizing the block and talking about how government can't do anything right. What's going on now is that instead of a single company holding a government granted monopoly to run the DNS and numbering system there would be a group of companies and organizations doing the same thing -- with a US threat to seize control of it again if they misbehave. And as for fears this will lead to balkanization brought up in another post -- there have been threats to balkanize the Internet if control of the DNS system remained a monopoly held by a single US company or government agency. This is probably a damned it you do, damned if you don't decision. In the long run it's probably inevitable that no matter which way this decision goes there will be more fracturing. We're probably very lucky to have gone this far with as little fracturing as there has been. I can even see Moral Majority types on the right demanding tighter controls over the Internet in the US to crack down on "adult" content which would pretty much require making a US Internet with closely watched gateways to the outside (censorship and political correctness are not something unique or restricted to the right or left, there's just different names attached). Having thing not being run by one single company operating under a government granted monopoly might make it just a slight bit harder for that to happen. But really, I suppose we should panic. It's not as if the conspiracy theorists have ever been wrong. After all Texas has been under Martial Law ever since Jade Helm, every Hurricane for decades has resulted in thousands disappearing into FEMA death camps, there's all folks who lost homes to imminent domain to built the Mexi-Canadian superhighway that's exempt from US jurisdiction, and after a decade I still haven't gotten used to these new Ameros that replaced the dollar... ---- Keith Smith wrote: > The article states in part "Without the U.S. contract, Icann would seek to be overseen by another governmental group so as to keep its antitrust exemption. Authoritarian regimes have already proposed Icann become part of the U.N. to make it easier for them to censor the internet globally. So much for the Obama pledge that the U.S. would never be replaced by a “government-led or an inter-governmental organization solution.”". This could be really bad. What is the solution? Keith --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss