This Report currently running on CNet highlights an ongoing disagreement between the US government and countries like Brazil and China over what institution has the right to assign Internet names and run the root servers of the Internet. The writer raises the possibility that failure by the US to surrender control of the Internet risks a “Balkanized” Internet with multiple root servers and where servers could resolve the same address differently depending on where the client was located.

I say, let them fork it. The only content worth anything on the Internet is in Western Europe (primarily the UK), the US, Canada and Australia (in English too, I might add). Those are the only markets where enough people have both Internet connections and the money to buy things over the Internet. If the developing world wants to sell to the developed world (which they must to survive), then they must be able to connect to our version of the Internet. So the heck with them. I won’t miss anything from Syria or Brazil, but they will sure miss the opportunity to sell stuff to me.

What really has me perturbed is the notion that a UN agency would have the authority to decide what a domain name costs me, tell me which one I can have, tax my connection or domain names and potentially decide what content is permissible. I don’t really trust my government to do that so I sure don’t trust the Indian ot Chinese governments to do the job. So fork away world. I doubt we’ll miss you, mainly because you need connectivity to us more than we need it to you.