Interesting Snippets

Most of the Internet’s problems, Cerf believes, stem from the issue of state sovereignty. The Internet was designed to ignore national boundaries. It was designed this way, Cerf says, because “it was intended to deal with a military problem”: how could soldiers exchange messages without letting their enemies know where they were? … The Internet had no center at all. With one exception. The sole centralized feature of the Internet was the Domain Name System. The United States created that system, which lives on root servers, and Americans maintained it even as the Internet started spreading… Because the D.N.S. servers are the first stop, the D.N.S. is not just the Internet’s address book. It’s also the corner post office. Whoever runs the D.N.S. system can potentially control whether your browser requests get to the proper place and thus control where you can and can’t go online.