UN's ITU election may spell the end of our open internet Every four years, the United Nations' International Telecommunication Union (ITU) stages a Plenipotentiary Conference at which member states decide how the organization will steer the development of communications technologies. The event is usually only of interest to telco and policy wonks. But this year's event has become a …
Despite some minimal level of backwards compatibility with IPv6, how long would it take for some new IP standard that would have to go clean slate to support tying an identity to a connection to take over?
We'll all be dead before we have to worry about it. If China wants new IP they'll do it in their country whether or not it is an internationally recognized standard. They'd prefer the color of authority behind it, but there are many many bigger things to worry about in US/Russia/China relations.
There is more than a single protocol at stake here. They want to close the process and force all development to pass through formal national and international committees. Transport protocols are expected to control and restrict content. In such a network it will be anything but trivial to implement and test new application protocols the way you can on the current open internet. My experience with everything ITU is that it slows development to a crawl, and the political influence on development leads to rubbish standards and products. The open IETF-model with standards based on consensus and prior proof of concept is a lot more efficient.
My experience with everything ITU is that it slows development to a crawl, and the political influence on development leads to rubbish standards and products.
As an example, X.25, the ITU alternative to the Internet, which I had to deal with back in the 80s. There were three different proposals, from the US, Europe and Japan. Politics meant that all three were accepted but none were mandatory so it was possible to have implementations of X.25 that were "correct" by the standard but completely incapable of interoperating. Compare that to the IETF's approach of "if it passes interop tests it's valid, if it doesn't it's not". This is why the world and its dog use IETF protocols these days.
The ITU is basically a playground for failed politicians to build little empires.
Markets and business models evolved too. When X.25 from the monopolistic PTTs was no longer the only game in town, it died because customers could and did vote with their feet. X.25 was a flop - technically and financially. It only managed to survive for as long as it did because it was the only service that PTTs offered and governments allowed. Unless you paid $incumbent $$$$$ for a leased line.
The business model of X.25 was a fucked up shambles too: per-packet charging on top of per-session charging. And since it came from 1930's era telephony, X.25 offered reverse charging.
Many years ago an ISO technical subcommittee opened their meeting with an attempt to define "interoperability" for different vendors' implementations of some published network standards.
It took about an hour*** to come up with "Able to communicate - and do useful work". The chairperson then told us that a higher level committee was still struggling to produce a definition - after 18 months.
***The subcommittee's deliberations would generally have been quicker - except that one vendor's delegate regularly objected to the use of the term "third party" for competition to their product line.
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Somewhere, there must be a handful of routing tables that basically make the Internet work. And there must be servers on which those (master) tables are hosted.
Who, specifically, owns those servers? Because that body, whoever it is, surely has the ultimate veto to any changes they don't like.
Who, specifically, owns those servers?
It doesn't work like that. Many different people own those routers - and they agree to work together to make routing work. There is no body that can veto anything.
In addition, anyone who wants to (you, me, Google, Facebook, my government, your government, ...) can add routers and can choose to which routers they choose to send their traffic. Of course, they need to make sure that replies (from people they care about) can reach them back again.
What that means, in practice, is that some big players (facebook, etc) and some big countries (US, China, EU, etc) can control their traffic any way they want. And other players have to play by their rules if they want to participate.
There is no body that can veto anything
then why can't I access www.rt.com ?
Because whoever operates your default DNS server has decided not to resolve that particular name, or because your local ISP has intentionally blackholed the necessary route. Mine hasn't done either of those things, so if I want to look at RT's absurdist propaganda and lies, I can do so.
It is blocked in the UK (and much of Europe, I believe) because lawmakers issued some kind of legal notice to all the ISPs within their jurisdiction.
I'm not sure quite how the blocking has been implemented. "drill"-ing Google's DNS server informs me that the address of www.rt.com is 178.176.128.128, but although I can ping that I don't seem to be able to point a web browser at it. The connection just gets reset. Perhaps someone else can fill in more details.
Actually, there isn't really such a master database.
AIUI, there are five registries which tie blocks of IP addresses to organisations via AS numbers. An AS is an Autonomous System - put simply, consider it a bubble within which the owner can do their own thing routing wise, and with one or more points where it connects to "other systems". And there are a lot of these ASs. Now you could argue that these five registries could be your central points of control, but in practice I suspect that if one of them were subverted in such a way, there could be moves to replace it with something not subverted - though there are technical issues there in terms of keeping everything in sync so you don't get two organisations claiming the same IP block. But they do not have the power to prevent a route being advertised anyway.
Each AS advertises the IPs within it using a routing protocol called BGP4 (Border Gateway Protocol) - so each of its neighbours knows about those IPs. All the routers running the internet exchange information via BGP, so those IPs in an AS will eventually find their way into each router - even if it's 10 or 20 hops away. Yes, it is a MASSIVE table.
But, there is a problem here in that BGP relies on honesty - each router is expected to be honest about what routes it knows. This does break down from time to time - sometimes accidentally, sometimes maliciously.
There was a case some years ago where some small ISP somewhere accidentally published a route that sent all internet traffic through it. Needless to say, they couldn't handle the traffic so it ended up going in the bit bucket and the internet started to disappear (a bit like Wesley Crusher's accidental warp bubble making the universe disappear for those within it). And as mentioned above, when a change is made, it doesn't replicate to the entire internet instantly, so when they fixed it, it was still a few hours before everything got back to normal.
And there have been cases where "unusual" routes appeared - sending certain traffic via countries with questionable motives.
A third misuse I've read about involves criminals finding unused blocks of addresses, temporarily claiming them via BGP - and then using their "clean" reputation to make it easier to send spam.
I've not been following development, but I believe there have been efforts to add some security to BGP - but I think that's difficult given that for every AS to know about every other AS, it has no choice but to accept routing information from it's direct neighbours which will include information about routes many hops away.
"Somewhere, there must be a handful of routing tables that basically make the Internet work."
There's one global routing table with 910561 entries as of last night, however there are thousands of copies in BGP border routers of the 63301 autonomous systems across the Internet.
Those routers can filter or aggregate routes according to internal policies and drop routes as their operators desire, thus Russia and China could/can separate themselves from the wider Internet as they desire.
thus Russia and China could/can separate themselves from the wider Internet as they desire
It's not that that's the problem (except for their citizens), it's when the buggers decide to grab everybody else's traffic to take a look at it. BGP security and sanity checking can't come fast enough.
Indeed. But whenever it's come up in the past, I've observed the same fundamental problem.
Suppose I advertise a route - it's possible for the immediate neighbours to (for example) check in a registry database to see that I am indeed the "owner" of that IP block. Sounds reasonably simple - and what every ISP should be doing with customers taking part in global BGP.
But what about the neighbours to those neighbours ? My immediate neighbours also need to advertise my route(s) to their neighbours, having added on the path cost they have to reach me. And those neighbours of neighbours have to advertise it to their neighbours, and so on. For completeness for those who don't know how it works, at each node it may well receive multiple route advertisements to me - it will pick the one with the lowest total path cost and ignore the rest. Over time, each node will learn "the best" route to me - which may change if (e.g.) a link or router goes down or comes up somewhere. See also Dijkstra's Algorithm.
For my route to work, it has to reach all the other internet routers - so a large number of routers, an arbitrary distance (in network cost terms) away. I can't see any security system that could scale to internet scale which can tell any router if its immediate neighbour is simply passing on my route - or is some nefarious actor trying to intercept my traffic.
It would appear "an open internet" is the preferred view; Doreen was elected.
The result is posted at the link below, which may and/or may not remain a link (due to my lurking way, way more than posting)
https://www.itu.int/en/mediacentre/Pages/PR-2022-09-29-ITU-SG-elected-Doreen-Bogdan-Martin.aspx
Yeah, the "Uodated to add..." came in barely 12 hours after the story was published. If they'd waited for the result it would not have been a story at all.
Did El Reg jump the gun to get an "exclusive" or was it click-bait? In hindsight, it seems the outcome is as expected by those in the industry.
172 member states were present and voting, Bogdan-Martin received 139, Ismailov received 25.
Apparently 8 abstentions?
I can't find a list of who voted for Ismailov. I'm sure it would be interesting reading.
Any idea what the breakdown of voting was, or was it anonymous?
It appears it was a secret ballot which doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
IMO there is too much wanting to categorise as "good guys" and "bad guys" than being willing to accept others hold a different view to our own these days.
"IMO there is too much wanting to categorise as "good guys" and "bad guys" than being willing to accept others hold a different view to our own these days."
Seriously? In this context?
The good guys are those wanting a reasonably free internet. The bad guys, China, Russia etc, want to increase the ability to monitor and control the internet. They are, by any sane measure, the bad guys.
It would be a mistake to assume that the "free" countries are run by people who want it to stay that way. Some of them just have more subtle ideas of exactly how to accomplish that "freedom removal".
For example, if you have exactly two options for search and only one or two authorities who will grant HTTPS TLS certificates, do you really need the low level protocols to support censorship? See also: exactly two social networks, one source for all videos, etc. With the magic of monopoly, tyranny need not be blatant or trigger widespread public opposition!
There are a lot of other regulatory & legal moves happening that will likely end the open web as we know it. Just today the US Supreme Court agreed to hear a case on Section 230. There's also a bill before Congress proposing a links tax on media articles (like the Australian law). California passed a child safety law & Texas stopped social media companies removing posts. The UK obviously has the Online Safety Bill & will now replace GDPR as well. The EU have various laws & proposals regarding chat control, messenger interoperability & internet services paying the telecoms companies sending data through their cables. Plus there's lots of antitrust lawsuits against Big Tech as well. I think we'll see Silicon Valley companies being significantly downsized financially & in influence. People's ability to interact online will be severely restricted & material will be heavily screened before posting. You'll have an online ID tied to all your online activity (e.g. to make sure your old enough to access appropriate material). It'll make surveillance easier as well. The internet will be more like a streaming service. The old gatekeepers (e.g. newspapers, entertainment companies, etc.) will be back in control of their products. Even if this isn't what will happen, I suspect this the vision of the internet governments & certain businesses have.
"They are, by any sane measure, the bad guys."
Not to be picky, but who gets to define "sane" and "bad"? I'm sure Russia and China would see it differently to the rest of us. On the other hand, even if they see themselves as the "good" guys, what do they *really* think about their "allies"?
Creating international pariahs in this way is deeply counterproductive, because in doing so, you are also throwing away any levers you have to influence them and bring them back to the table.
The real problem is that the UN set certain things in stone in 1945, including the five permanent members of the security council: the US, China, the UK, France, and the USSR (now replaced by Russia). That particular selection doesn't necessarily refelct today's world, and it's nigh-on impossible to remove or censure Russia despite their territorial war(s) of aggression*. A more sensible formulation, if made today, would probably include many others, such as Japan, Brazil, Germany, at least one African nation, maybe the EU as a bloc, and so on. Geopolitics has changed so much in that time, it now seems really foolhardy to have made any members "permanent" rather than being up for review every decade or two.
*I'm not even singling Russia out here, there have been a number of land grabs and wars of aggression from all the permanent members since 1945.
Those of us with longer memories will remember the OSI protocol stack, being pushed by the ITU in the 1970s through to the 2000s as the one and only interconnection standard; CLNS, CLNP, CONS, X.25 etc. GPRS and UMTS even had built-in support for X.25 as a result of this push.
What's different this time that will cause people to preferentially deploy the ITU's recommended protocol stack, rather than continue with the IETF's IP stack?
>What's different this time that will cause people to preferentially deploy the ITU's recommended protocol stack, rather than continue with the IETF's IP stack?
The ITU's protocol stack is in my experience just plain useless and I expect it to remain that way. Where the ITU has been essential is defining the standards that are necessary to transfer the raw data. Where OSI has appeared in standards for data transfer, typically under our common standard of Ethernet, its been a bit of a mess. For example, everyday 802.11 has to deal with bit reversed address bytes and a redundant Type 2 header in every packet (and I suspect the quirks and irritations of Bluetooth are related to the use of OSI).
If "they" win then automatically "we" lose. In this case we have to have an American sponsored candidate win or its game over for technology. A really dumb mindset.
Its not China that's been politicizing technology in recent years, its the US (Russia isn't a major player in this game). Its the US that's been sanctioning other countries, trying to hold them back using every lever that they can dream up. Control is a must. Extending this to the ITU is dumb; all they do is agree technical standards, a complex process but not inherently political. The political aspects come in with the application of those standards (and if we're talking Internet censorship then the mostly likely and prolific source of censorship is going to be western media copyright holders).
I wondered if there would be such comments from those who have no clue about truly oppressive regimes and you didn't disappoint.
" censorship then the mostly likely and prolific source of censorship is going to be western media copyright holders" is simply stupid. You have no clue how China censors its people. In China you wouldn't be making such critical comments. first they'd be removed and, if you repeated them, you'd be hauled off for reeducation.
Close, but in China, you'd probably have been hauled off for re-education *before* you'd made those comments publicly, because they would have picked up on your opinions that you make known in private first.
China's intrusion into private life really is remarkable, and remarkably scary. Their "Social Credit" system is just the more obvious public face of it all. If you happen to be anything other than Mandarin-speaking Han Chinese, and certainly if you happen to be religious in any way (other than state-sponsored Buddhist), you're already in real trouble.
… in any way (other than state-sponsored Buddhist), you're already in real trouble.
China officially recognizes five religions: Buddhism, Taoism, Protestantism, Islam, and Catholicism (in descending order of population). The “personal belief in certain conceptions of divinity” of these five religions were estimated to include 27.44% of China’s population, according to 2014–2015 sampling in the China Family Panel Studies.
Yes, and given how eager they are to stamp out the religious practices of Uighur Muslims, what makes you think that being a Christian (of either main flavour) would mean you might fare any better. It's pretty obvious that the issue they have is with Abrahamic faiths in general, because they're not "Chinese enough". Buddhists and Taoists are probably safe (for now) because those faiths are pretty intrinsically linked to traditional Chinese culture, and President Xi likes that. Have the audacity to be anything else, and there's a strong incentive to "Chinesify" yourself to fit in...
Rather, given how eager they are to stamp out the separatist tendencies of some Uighur Muslims, which unfortunately has undoubtedly badly affected many non-separatist Uighurs. Uighurs are not the only Islamic group in China. The largest Islamic group in China is the Hui, and their religious practices are not being stamped out; neither are those of other Islamic groups in China, such as the Kazakhs, Dongxiang, Kyrgyz, Uzbeks, Salar, Tajiks, Bonan, and Tatars.
what makes you think that being a Christian (of either main flavour) would mean you might fare any better.
The count of how many Chinese Christian groups are trying to secede from China.
It’s pretty obvious that the issue they have is with Abrahamic faiths in general, because they’re not “Chinese enough”.
The issue that they have is with separatist groups in general, because they don’t consider themselves to be “Chinese enough” in the PRC citizenship sense.
IIRC the Chinese government runs their own organisation for Catholics - including ignoring the Pope when it comes to selecting clerics for positions in the hierarchy. Easier to control people in an "approved" structure than let them go underground. Rather like Russia where the Orthodox Church hierarchy is now tightly linked in with Putin's control.
Christianity many centuries ago found that validating rulers was a mutually beneficial way of controlling the social order. Some people in England still don't understand that the Anglican Church lost its major state legal powers in about 1836. Parliament transferred the Church's legal roles to the civil Registrars of Births, Deaths, and Marriages (plus divorces).
>In China you wouldn't be making such critical comments...
Do you actually know any Chinese people? I know its fashionable in our society to believe that China is just a big prison camp with one and a half billion people yearning for freedom and democracy but this defies both common sense and observation.
What we have done in recent years is to encourage Chinese nationalism. It wasn't that long ago that they seemed to be all about bling and out-westerning the west. Then we attacked them for being good at what they do. Now we've not got a competitor, we've got a rival.
I do actually know some Chinese people, both those living in China, and those who are now living in this country under a new identity to avoid being murdered by Snake Heads.
The Chinese people are pretty obviously not the same thing as the Chinese state, in the same way that I'm not the British government. Just as our government does some pretty bad things to some of its people, the Chinese state is demonstrably worse to some of its. The sheer existence of many large "re-education camps" that you would get arrested for filming near is testament to this.
The issue of who is responsible for Chinese nationalism is probably the same issue as we have of nationalism anywhere. It's generally whipped up for political purposes. It's certainly not a uniquely Chinese phenomenon, it is evident in many places: here, the US, Russia, Italy, Brazil, pretty much everywhere. It often comes hand-in-hand with authoritarianism, and often (but not always) with the extreme-right. Really, it's a pretty good alarm bell for something being horribly wrong in that country.
I've known so many Chinese people over the years that I can tell the difference between Cantonese and Mandarin just by the way they sound. Without knowing any Chinese. Thats what comes of living in a Chinese majority neighborhood for several decades. (Mostly Cantonese )
And yes, every single nasty story you read about horrendous human right abuses in mainland China are true. The Chinese expat media do a great job of covering these stories. As does the Taiwanese media. The HK media is now dead. Killed by the CCP puppets. What you see in the western media is just a small sample of the abuse that happens on a daily basis in China.
Look up the term "50 cent Army" to get just a small idea of just how all pervasive social control is in China. It would have made Stasi weep to know just what could have been possible only a few decades later. Real time observations of everything someone does, goes, buys, sees, hears. But the Chinese, being Chinese, have some fantastically creative and very cunning short-term work-arounds that work when needed.
You should get out more. Get to know people who come from all over China. Learn a bit of the geography and history of China and you will get to hear lots of interesting stories about peoples lives and their families in that huge country, And even what a Maoist style prison Xi has turned the country into.
It has been a source of interest that Xi's family was persecuted in the Mao era. That's one reason why his move to establish himself as a Mao-style "ruler for life" is surprising.
On the other hand - several revolutionary leaders have ended up emulating (or exceeding) the methods of their previous oppressors as they try to hold onto power against popular sentiment. Iran is a typical case - but the UK is in danger of espousing Oswald Mosley's BUF manifesto methods.
That's one reason why his move to establish himself as a Mao-style "ruler for life" is surprising.
I don't think it's surprising at all. Adults repeating childhood traumas is so common a psychological syndrome it barely merits mentioning, and in this case the benefits of successfully claiming that much power are a huge inducement.
This is just such a bad, poorly thought out take. By putting Russia or China in charge, it would become inherently political. The standards they are trying to push would legitimize their wish to remove free speech from people in their countries. On one side you have the free internet, and on the other you have an internet broken up in to regions that can be completely controlled by the country that owns them. If you see this as a zero sum, there is something wrong with your glasses.
If you've been following the news at all you'll have noticed that the problem western media corporations have is a collision between their desire to control the information flow and the lack of technical standards enabling this. This leads to weak responses like court/government orders to ban certain web domains and a scattershot approach to piracy based on the mistaken connection between an IPv4 address and a physical location (and so user). In addition, we're pushing for government control of ISPs, forcing them to police content or face huge civil penalties.
Obviously someone hasn't been paying attention. After all, as we all know "it can't happen here".
As I expected, we get the idiotic comments from those more fearful of Western states who could only dream, should they be so inclined, of the powers of control that states such as China have.
Simple fact. You wouldn't be able to post critical comments in China without attracting the chance of being jailed or enduring forced reeducation. There would be no debate around scanning user devices for content deemed unacceptable. The CCP just imposes its will.
Too many Register commenters are either Chinese sympathisers or fools.
... will opt for industry self regulation. We will have Cloudflare CAPTCHAs, which are morphing into identity tokens. And they are also getting into the web/application service business. With their CDN business sitting in the middle, they can prety much dictate the operation of their silos of the Internet.
current internet governance models need not change
how does that fare with recent articles here about Google's dominance on the Internet, it's abuse of monopolist position in search that it extends to browsers, and then ads, and then to data-mining ?
the QUIC protocol (...) originated at Google (...) The ITU is a United Nations body so represents nation-states.
ah, here we go. So ITU is a UN body dominated by private companies. Like the WHO also, remember ?
Well, I for one would very much like that the governance model of the Internet changes. Not the protocol itself – which is quite resilient – but the governance.
So ITU is a UN body dominated by private companies.
Wrong! It's dominated by non-technical government officials and regulators. The big ITU meeting that's currently taking place and makes all the organisation's important decisions is only for member states. Hint: it's in the name, Plenipotentiary. Private companies cannot take part or have a say in what happens there even if they are ITU members.
You're right to complain about google's dominance. But they're not the only ones playing the Internet aggregation/centralisation game.
You'd be wrong in hoping the ITU could fix this. Hardly anyone there can spell IP or has the vaguest clue about how the Internet works.
Sovereign countries already do what they want and control what they want. It's always been a delusion that the Internet was open and free everywhere. That's not to say that protocols and security mechanisms haven't been consciously designed to encourage open access and privacy, but, actually, governments do govern, for good and for evil. For example, they switch off the Internet or block certain apps and services whenever they find it convenient.
So, although some of the ideas suggested by Huawei etc., in more serious places than the ITU, are technically interesting, nobody ever took "New IP" seriously, either as a technical proposal or as a political strawman.
Since the ITU has had a Chinese Secretary-General since 2015, I also think the fears of having a Putin acolyte replace him were pointless. The S-G doesn't make decisions at the ITU; they are made by nation-state representatives. That's not to say the S-G has no influence, but they don't take the decisions that count. There is no way "New IP" would ever make it through the ITU process, and even if it did, the Internet would ignore it.
Good to see the first female S-G, but I'd rather it was somebody from a smaller country. There's no scope for US hegemony at the ITU either.
Well Huawei and its Chinese friends are taking New IP seriously. They're still pushing it at ITU meetings - and at other SDOs. Like this IEEE event next month:
https://newip-and-beyond.net/beyond22.html
They seem to be calling it IPv6plus now: www.ipv6plus.net. I've also heard it called "Green IP".
New IP has not gone away and it would get through the ITU process if concerned member states weren't there to shout "bullshit!" about Huawei's snake-oil.
But it still doesn't matter if it does end up in an ITU-T recommendation. Nobody cares, because that isn't where the Internet's technical standards come from.
Been there, done that, sat in meetings in Geneva, even before Zhao Houlin became S-G. All hot air, contributing to climate change.
P.S. As you probably know as well as I do, fringe workshops at IEEE-sponsored conferences are great for getting publication counts up, especially for grad students and early-career academics, but they don't mean diddly-squat as far as deployment by ISPs goes.
Your comment about fringe workshops is true but misses the point.
Huawei is sponsoring meetings and conferences on New IP - like the one somebody mentioned earlier on this thread. They've been paying for these types of New IP events for years. Huawei wouldn't be doing that unless they were taking New IP seriously.
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