The Duke of URL

It was while sifting through Outlook (my fav serious mag) that I came across this article on the truth behind the internet. Many of us perceive the internet as the last frontier for free speech (despite the recent blogstorm over IIPM and Gaurav Sabnis). The final place on earth without too many rules. Where each person can reveal his darkest of secrets without having to worry about who will judge him. The place where the world is opened out to a child sitting wide-eyed in front of a screen in darkest Peru.

But the reality is rather different. The backbone of the internet is something called a DNS (domain name server). It is basically a computer that stores enormous lists of URLs (net addresses) and their corresponding IP addresses. To any browser ‘http://www.google.com’ and 64.233.187.99 mean the same thing. However without the IP address, no internet resource can be accessed.

In the world there are 13 root DNS servers in the, that contain these master lists. Of these ten are located in the US. As of now only the US can make changes to these lists. Clone DNS servers contain information identical to these root servers. However they can at any time be blocked by the possessor of the root server, crippling internet services in particular country, namely the US (from now on will be referred to as Big Brother). Not to mention the billions of dollars it earns every year.

Though Big Brother has not to date exercised it’s power, there really is nothing stopping it from doing so. Imagine the economic impact of such a strike on India’s economy.

Big Brother on the other hand claims that it intends to maintain it’s ‘historic’ role in the maintenance of the internet, as a safe and stable environment. Okay. Let’s examine Big Brother’s above statement. By safe, Big Brother means a place where leering old men provide a demand for child pornography. A place where you can arrange a trip to Cambodia. A nice peaceful trip where your friendly travel agent provides you with, among other things a cylinder of helium. For your average painless suicide, if you were wondering. By stable Bigger Brother means a place where hackers can steal your identity. A place where pimply fourteen-year-olds sitting across the border from us can deface the websites of our educational institutions and access the secret databases of our nuclear facilities.

Bigger Brother still maintains that it is essential, that in the fight against terrorism it retain it’s current position. Bigger Brother recently made a complete u-turn on it’s promise to democratize the internet, claiming that it is for the general good of mankind that it not relinquish it’s position of power. An equivalent real-life statement would go something like this – “I have you by the balls. I’m not squeezing, so why should I let go?” Am I mistaken, but wasn’t 9/11 a result of policing a world that did not want to be policed?

So it seems that Bigger Brother will have the power to filter through every mail you send, every page you visit. Essentially, if you press the tilde key on your keyboard, Bigger Brother will be onto you (check out Project Echelon). ‘Thought crime’ isn’t so far away. Wonder what substitute will be found for Newspeak. HTML maybe?