A bit of beginner’s info: whenever you type a name of a website into your browser, such as matazone.co.uk, your computer has a look at what is called the DNS list. This list links together names of websites with their IP address. The IP address is a series of numbers telling your computer where the information for that domain is stored. In other words, it’s the way to find the server where the website resides.
Since the beginning of the internet DNS has been run by the US. All of the DNS admin, and I assume the money charged for it, occured in the US for every country around the world. Understandably, with the internet being of massive importance to almost every nation on the planet, for commerce in the west and for communication in developing countries, quite a lot of places would like to have some more say about how DNS is run.
Guess what? The US isn’t very happy about this idea, but it looks like it’s going to happen anyway.
Nevertheless with just one day remaining, the pressure to seal a deal is intense, and it looks increasingly likely that by 5pm Swiss time on Friday 30th September 2005, the Unites States will be negotiated out of control of the internet.
This is actually a very important event in the history of the internet. It’s going to be very interesting to see what happens next.