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Comment by gdy | Hacker News Reader

And yet the risk of the opposite verdict is the reason why domains must be managed by the United Nations and not by an American organization.

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The UN is one of the most self serving and corrupt entities on the planet. They are the last organization that should be managing something this important.

ICANN needs to be managed by people who have no other professional priorities than keeping the internet running and free from corporate, governmental and political interference.

Maybe I'm a bit naive, would this be something EFF could handle or perhaps FSF?

I agree that this should be under the control of an international organization, but the UN is unlikely to be an impartial or intelligent arbiter.

Some kind of iana.int, perhaps?

It's really an unresolved question at the moment.

it's only as impartial and intelligent as its members are.

The UN is broadly as impartial and 'intelligent' as its voting members, which is kinda by design. The happy reality is that the UN is successful at most of the almost unimaginably diverse myriad of thing it's has to do. It seems to me to be a great choice for the role.

> voting members

Except 5, other countries don't have a permanent say in the system. The 5 can veto any resolution. The sad reality is that UN has been successful on various issues (while still failing on very many) despite being an utterly undemocratic establishment and that is constantly being used as an excuse to continue with the current system.

Five is the number of permanent members of the UN Security Concil which has nothing to do with things like managing internet.

I agree that this should be under control of an international organization as long as this organization includes all countries and isn't a closed club of America's lapdogs.

The vast majority of UN nations are ruled by undemocratic and corrupt regimes. Why should they have any say over who runs my DNS?

Yes, we should let the control of the Internet stay in the hands of the regime which has invaded dozens of countries and was first to use a computer virus (Stuxnet) as a tool of war.

The UN is basically an american organization.

That's essentially correct. Funny thing is, people outside the US consider the UN a Trojan horse for US hegemony; many living inside the US consider the UN a Trojan horse for destroying US sovereignty.

why can't it be both?

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