I always figured it was YouNghusBand, a popular Hmong orchestra focusing on self-esteem.

Mind if I ask you folks’ opinions/thoughts/commentary on the following items?

Endangered Domain: In Threat to Internet’s Clout, Some Are Starting Alternatives; Rise of Developing Nations, Anti-U.S. Views Play Role; Pioneer Sounds the Alarm; A ‘Root’ Grows in Germany
Christopher Rhoads. Wall Street Journal. (Eastern edition). New York,N.Y.: Jan 19, 2006. pg. A.1

http://tinyurl.com/dhnx6
http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~ingallsr/netprog/alternatenetworks.html

More than a decade after the Internet became available for commercial use, other countries and organizations are erecting rivals to it—raising fears that global interconnectivity will be diminished.

German computer engineers are building an alternative to the Internet to make a political statement. A Dutch company has built one to make money. China has created three suffixes in Chinese characters substituting for .com and the like, resulting in Web sites and email addresses inaccessible to users outside of China. The 22-nation Arab League has begun a similar system using Arabic suffixes.

“The Internet is no longer the kind of thing where only six guys in
the world can build it,” says Paul Vixie, 42 years old, a key
architect of the U.S.-supported Internet. “Now, you can write a
couple of checks and get one of your own.” To bring attention to the
deepening fault lines, Mr. Vixie recently joined the German group’s
effort.

Alternatives to the Internet have been around since its beginning but
none gained much traction. Developing nations such as China didn’t
have the infrastructure or know-how to build their own networks and
users generally didn’t see any benefit from leaving the network that
everyone else was on.

Now that is changing. As people come online in developing nations
that don’t use Roman letters—especially China with its 1.3 billion
people—alternatives can build critical mass. Unease with the U.S.
government’s influence over a global resource, and in some cases
antipathy toward the Bush administration, also lie behind the trend.

“You’ve had some breakaway factions over the years, but they’ve had no relevance,” says Rodney Joffe, the chairman of UltraDNS, a
Brisbane, Calif., company that provides Internet equipment and
services for companies. “But what’s happened over the past year or so is the beginning of the balkanization of the Internet.”
....

Google search used to find a copy of this WSJ article—Just an overview of sites discussing or posting this article.

http://tinyurl.com/c53gn
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=%22In+Threat+to+Internet%
27s+clout%2C+Some+Are+Starting+Alternatives%
22+Christopher+Rhoads+Wall+Street+Journal

Here’s one blogger’s scenario imagining the development of an Internet alternative:

Burnoff: Part 1 – The Bad Guys Win
Wednesday, January 25, 2006

http://tinyurl.com/awwc5
http://cwmet.blogspot.com/2006/01/burnoff-part-1-bad-guys-win.html

Apart from USA, the world is now using an alternate Internet called
altNet. It was built when the second tech bubble was bursted 2 years
after the DRM laws sponsored by MPAA were passed. Chinese and Indians bought all these dark fibre outside USA and built the alt-Net. Alt-Net is expanding faster than ever. It now has 10 times the traffic of the old Internet.

Besides USA, everyone is running their computers on Linux – actually, there is no more new software which does not run on Linux. These always on Linux machines formed the peer-to-peer backbone of altNet. People are sharing their storage media in their computers in return of storing their own files on other’s computer. These days, no one is storing their own data on their machines. All files are stored multiple times (in small fragments) on many remote servers. They are assembled on demand through special 64K encryption so that they are always backed up at multiple locations. They are so secured that not even the big brother can look it. All inter-computer connections are made ad hoc with security keys created on demand and dropped between packages. These operating systems deliberately drops all trace of
package passing through their machines.
....

And from the Wall Street Journal in November of last year:

Breaking Up Is Hard to Do Should the U.S. or the U.N. control the Internet? Here’s a third way.

BY BRIAN M. CARNEY
Saturday, November 12, 2005 12:01 a.m.

http://tinyurl.com/8t7fw
http://www.opinionjournal.com/forms/printThis.html?id=110007543

Would it be better if countries that want to muck around with the Net
just didn’t? Sure. But they do want to, and they will, and it would
be far better, in the long run, if they did so on their own, without
a U.N. agency to corrupt or give them shelter. It’s time to drop the
apocalyptic rhetoric about a split root file and start looking beyond
the age of a U.S.-dominated Internet. Breaking up is hard to do, but
in this case, the alternative would be worse._

So, folks, any thoughts on these?