Master of the domains

From the WSJ.com's Morning Update e-mail newsletter, its quote of the day... this one about U.S. control of domain names:

"Who controls the flow of the ocean? Nobody controls it, and it works just fine. There are some things that can't be controlled and should be left distributed," Leonard Kleinrock, a UCLA computer scientist who did pioneering research on the fundamental technology underlying the Internet, tells the New York Times in reference to an international dispute over unilateral American oversight of the Domain Name System, which assigns network names and assures unique Internet addresses. The Times says several people involved in the Internet's creation are concerned the dispute may be based on a false premise -- that the Internet can lend itself to centralized or governmental control -- and could wind up fragmenting the network itself.