Reborn in 2010, the AI ​​in my mind is too powerful.

Zhao Houlin was eventually able to leave with his colleagues; he was picked up in advance and taken to Honolulu.

Fortunately, the sight of the aurora-like robots in the sky convinced him that the Swiss probably wouldn't dare to resort to any tricks.

On the way, he began to consider his next strategy, regarding Aurora's pursuit of online rights.

He felt very anxious, and he began to worry about the ITU where he worked.

The ITU, or International Telecommunication Union, is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for information and communication technologies. It is the oldest specialized agency of the UN, established in 1865, 80 years before the UN itself and 55 years before the League of Nations, the UN's predecessor.

Zhao Houlin graduated from Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications in 1975. In 1979, he was among the first group of visiting scholars sent to Switzerland by the Chinese government for further studies. In 1986, he was selected by the former Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications and recruited by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) through an open recruitment process, where he began working for the ITU.

He's been in this institution long enough that he's very sensitive to related matters.

He was secretly delighted when he saw the news that the submarine fiber optic cables had been cut.

After learning that Aurora had promised to provide internet access, he knew things were in trouble and seemed to be out of the control of the International Telecommunication Union.

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has long wanted to include the Internet in the International Telecommunication Regulations and take over governance from ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers).

In 2012, they took action. The International Telecommunication Regulations (ITCR) are an old treaty from 1988, governing how telephone and telegraph transactions are settled across borders and how they are interconnected. A new era requires new rules.

They convened the World Telecommunication Conference in Dubai, with 193 member countries participating. This was the first attempt in 24 years to revise the International Telecommunication Regulations.

However, at the meeting, no party was willing to concede on the rights to the Internet, and there were three main disputes.

Russia and other countries proposed that member states should have equal sovereign rights over their own internet resources, including the allocation of IP addresses.

Arab countries, on the other hand, believe that cybersecurity and the fight against cybercrime should be included in the treaty, and that the ITU should be given a greater role.

Some countries also want to add special provisions for unsolicited bulk electronic messages to spam and similar emails.

The United States disagrees with all three of these points.

The first point is the most unacceptable. If this point is passed, many of the benefits that the United States has gained over the years by virtue of its first-mover advantage in the Internet will be lost.

Articles two and three are seen by the United States as giving governments around the world a pretext to control networks.

Ultimately, the US representative made it clear that the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) should only regulate traditional telecommunications and not extend this to the internet. Internet governance should continue to be the responsibility of multi-stakeholder organizations such as ICANN and the IETF. The US Department of Commerce will not renew its functional contract with ICANN upon its expiration, transferring its regulatory role to the global multi-stakeholder community.

These two models represent a clash of values ​​regarding who owns the internet.

The United States adopts a multi-stakeholder model, believing that the Internet was created jointly by governments, businesses, technology communities, and various non-governmental organizations and scholars, and should be managed through multi-party consultation.

Standard policies are generated without voting, relying on general consensus and working code.

From a more philosophical perspective, they believe that the Internet is a technological infrastructure that should be managed by the people who build and use it. They believe that the project still has a market and that effective management will be formed from the bottom up.

This is not surprising, after all, the Internet originally developed in the United States in this way, and they habitually believe that this is the right way.

The other school of thought is the multilateralism model, which argues that the internet should be managed by sovereign states, with one country, one vote. Decisions should be made through negotiations, voting, and treaties between governments, relying on the binding force of international treaties and laws for governance.

Philosophically speaking, they believe that the Internet is an extension of national sovereignty and should be entirely handed over to the government for management.

Russia, the East, and most developing countries belong to this school of thought.

Of course, if you look at it from a self-interest perspective, you'll understand that it's all based on self-interest.

For developing countries to catch up with pioneers, simply competing on technology is bound to be difficult. Therefore, it's only natural that they hope to create some kind of barrier to entry through national borders. Pioneering countries, of course, don't want to relinquish their technological advantages for nothing.

In short, the two sides engaged in a long debate over whether the Internet should be a technological infrastructure managed by engineers and all users, or a sovereign domain managed by the government with one vote per country.

Ultimately, no agreement was reached; 89 countries signed the new rules, while the United States led 55 countries in refusing to sign.

This is a rare public split in the history of the International Telecommunication Union. A global treaty that was supposed to be unified has been a piece of waste paper from the very first day it was created.

Zhao Houlin was the Deputy Secretary-General of the International Telecommunication Union at the time and personally experienced this failure.

He felt somewhat humiliated at the time; the meeting was convened by the International Telecommunication Union, but they had absolutely no control over the situation.

What he found even more unacceptable was that the International Telecommunication Union felt like it had been slapped in the face.

The dispute between the two sides has actually been going on for a long time. In the year 2000, the United Nations attempted to take over the management of the Internet but failed, and has tried many times since then without success.

The IETF, a loose organization of engineers at the time, famously said, "We reject kings, presidents, and votes."

Zhao Houlin suffered a setback in every incident.

So when he learned that the submarine fiber optic cable had been destroyed, he felt a sense of triumph. The Americans were always so cocky, but in the end they couldn't even protect their own submarine fiber optic cable!

But when he learned that Aurora had stepped in to cover for him, he realized that things were not as good as before. He was a little scared. What if Aurora really had something in mind?

What will happen to the International Telecommunication Union?

Is there still a place for them in the newly established organization, the Holy Alliance of Humanity?

He worked in this organization for thirty years, rising from a low-level employee to become the first non-European head of the Telecommunications Standardization Authority, a position that was even close enough to become the highest-ranking secretary general.

As the car landed in front of the Honolulu Convention Center, Zhao Houlin began to cheer himself up.

It's not that he has no options; he can't control Starlink's laser transmission.

NASA once promoted the OCT standard in hopes of enabling interoperability among various companies, but nobody listened.

Every company has its own wavelength, modulation, capture protocol, and encoding; he can't control that.

However, the radio bands that Starlink has always used, such as Ku/Ka/E/V/W, require coordination from the International Telecommunication Union, which may be its only remaining leverage.

After entering the venue, a robot came over and led Zhao Houlin to a seat in the first row.

He looked around. He recognized many of the people who came today, and even those he didn't recognize, he recognized the names of the companies or organizations on the table.

It can be said that the underlying framework of the Internet is now complete.

All five registration agencies, except those from the Netherlands and Mauritius, were present at the scene.

VeriSign, a leading global provider of internet infrastructure services, is responsible for network infrastructure services. They manage the registration system for the world's top-level domains .com, .net, and .cc, and operate and maintain two of the 13 root domain name servers worldwide, A and J, providing critical infrastructure support for the global internet.

ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is a non-profit international organization established in October 1998. It is responsible for coordinating the Internet's unique identifier system, including IP address allocation, protocol identifier assignment, and the management of general top-level domains and country code top-level domains.

IANA, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, is responsible for coordinating the allocation of root domain names, IP addresses, and other Internet Protocol resources worldwide. It is one of the oldest Internet organizations, dating back to 1970, and operates the L root domain name server.

The other root server operators, except for the one located in the occupied Netherlands, were not taken over.

The rest came along: the USC Institute for Information Science, Cogent Communications, the University of Maryland (Fight, fight, fight for Maryland), NASA, the Internet Software Alliance, the U.S. Department of Defense Network Information Center, the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, Netnod from Sweden, and the WIDE project jointly undertaken by the University of Tokyo and Keio University in Japan.

In reality, these operators and maintainers don't make any money at all; they are more like volunteers who survive by donating membership fees, government grants, or raising funds themselves. Only VeriSign receives hundreds of thousands of dollars in symbolic fees every year.

However, operating the root server has many hidden benefits, and its influence is significant at both the technical and administrative levels.

Moreover, this is a scarce resource. There is a reason why the logical root only has 13 identifiers. In the early days, due to technical limitations, DNS responses had to be packed into 512-byte UDP bytes, and 13 records are exactly about 436 bytes. Adding one would exceed 512 bytes and trigger the TC phase.

Although the technology has long since made breakthroughs in this area, the root hint file is pre-installed in every parser worldwide, and the ecological inertia is too great, so the status quo has been maintained.

Zhao Houlin believes they will not give up their interests so easily and will definitely prevent Aurora from excessively interfering with the Internet infrastructure.

However, what shocked Zhao Houlin was that there wasn't a single primary backbone network operator present.

Tier 1 backbone network operators are the highest level in the Internet hierarchy. They possess backbone networks covering the globe or countries. Their core characteristic is that they do not pay any other operators to purchase relay traffic, but can reach any corner of the Internet through free peer-to-peer interconnection.

For example, China Telecom and China Unicom are first-tier backbone network operators, while China Mobile is somewhat lacking.

There are only about 20 globally recognized Tier 1 backbone network operators, each holding a large number of network traffic entry points.

Their absence made Zhao Houlin feel that the aurora might be even more extreme than he had imagined.

A short while later, the people from Aurora finally went up on stage.

Chen Yiran did not come; this time the pairing was Musk and Amy.

Musk had hoped to conduct the negotiations peacefully for a few days, but to his surprise, before he could even open his mouth, Amy went straight to the point, saying very bluntly, "Aurora needs to take over the global network, and you need to cooperate."