Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard

I am always a little shocked to hear people defend the level of control that the American government has over the Internet through its influence of ICANN, and just as shocked to hear people’s paranoid speculation that having America’s role transferred to a UN body would somehow lead to massive censorship and spying taking place, as if that’s never been possible in America, and as if UN technical bodies have any history of doing that. It is understandable when people fall into the logical fallacy of argumentum ad ignorantiam, with an “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” attitude, but even if we don’t know what a future UN solution might look like, we do know what America’s record of managing ICANN is, and it is not something about which you can say “it ain’t broke”. A friend of mine said that it was too stressful talking about these complicated technical and political matters early in the morning while I was driving us to catch a train, but hopefully none of my readers will be browsing my blog in that sort of situation. Anyway, below I will list some past actions of ICANN that are causes for concern, and explain why they were the result of American governmental influence.

A friend of mine was apparently inspired by my solution to the problem of finding the first 10 digit prime number in the digits of e, and he told me about a seemingly similar problem he faced while trying to manipulate a text file he had created in a custom format. While some techniques from solving the e problem may be applicable, his data format allowed for arbitrary length strings, rather than having this 10 digit limitation, which made the problem suddenly much harder. I will detail the exact problem below, as well as listing some of the methods we used to tackle it.