IANA.
W3C.
IETF.
What do all of these things have in common? Well, they’re all crucial, important pieces of how we communicate today — without them, we wouldn’t even be able to text, email, or even just go online. They set the standards, organizations, and utilities we use to make sure that, for example:
- I can create this website using web standards (W3C, IETF, OpenJS Foundation)
- This website can be published under the name
cogsandsquigs.dev(IANA, ICANN) - Your computer knows how to get from
cogsandsquigs.devto it’s IP address (IANA, ICANN, IETF) - Your computer can route it’s packets from itself to
cogsandsquigs.dev’s IP (IETF) - Your computer can decode the packets it receives from
cogsandsquig.dev(IETF) - Your browser can understand the decoded files — HTML, CSS, JS (W3C, Unicode)
- Your browser can display the decoded files (W3C, Unicode)
- Your browser (and consequently, computer) understand when I published this page (IANA, specifically TZDB)
Any one of these things going offline would result in massive catastrophe across the internet, and subsequently would probably lead to the shuttering of many necessary and important services we use day-to-day (think: email communication, texting, digital maps, etc.).
And yet, here they are. In the US of A. Which is currently suffering under a fascist regime (and if you don’t think that, I just hope you read a history book one day).
If Trump (or, let’s be honest, Musk) decides to target any one of these organizations, we’re basically done for. No more communication globally, at all. Zip. Zilch. Nada. It’s not gonna be another Great Firewall (a la China). Instead, all of the internet will be at stake. People in unrelated countries, with unrelated politics and unrelated gripes will suffer. We all will.
I pray that hopefully, this doesn’t happen. Hopefully, I’m wrong. Hopefully, we can trust these organizations.
We will see.