UN Takeover of Internet Must Be Stopped, US Warns 454
benfrog writes "In a rare show of bipartisan agreement, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle warned this morning that a United Nations summit in December will lead to a virtual takeover of the Internet if proposals from China, Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia are adopted. Called the World Conference on International Telecommunications, the summit would consider proposals including '[using] international mandates to charge certain Web destinations on a "per-click" basis to fund the build-out of broadband infrastructure across the globe' and allowing 'governments to monitor and restrict content or impose economic costs upon international data flows.' Concerns regarding the possible proposals were both aired at a congressional hearing this morning and drafted in a congressional resolution (PDF)."
Re:UN takeover must be stopped? (Score:2, Interesting)
In theory, but heavy-handedness can go far to ensure no Internet communication.
What I fear is that an international agency can enforce its wills on websites, where the US can't because people would complain or threaten to take their toys and go home. That lever is not there if a coalition runs it.
Think SOPA/PIPA except by a board immune to one's country laws. Toss in some ACTA love because what that one agency says, goes, so no reviews are needed. One can even have it where one country can have propaganda against another country, and the country being attacked in that manner would have sites dropped that rebutted the attacks.
Enforcing wills could be making sure sites are "correct" with the nation's religion, so a site mocking Elbonia's battery swallowing contest can be knocked off the air without any due process.
The US may suck, but having an international commitee of even more repressive governments (countries who wouldn't hesitate to turn their convicts into component organs to sell on the market, or machine-gun their own people) would be worse, and there would be nothing any can do about it. At least the US will cave into international pressure.
Re:UN takeover must be stopped? (Score:2, Interesting)
There is no "the people". There are those who want government to have less power, those who want it to have more power, and those who just think how that previous group tells them to think.
Re:UN takeover must be stopped? (Score:5, Interesting)
I am not American, by the way.
The USA government is not perfect. Far from it. The domain seizure (not the entire internet, just the big 3 TLDs) without due process is awful. The wheels of justice turn slowly, and often very slowly in America. As Winston Churchill put it:
"Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing...after they have exhausted all other possibilities."
this is in contrast to most other countries which will stop short. I know mine (UK) will. We have a shadowy organisation (the IWF) responsible for blocking child pronography. The list of blocked sites has not yet been leaked, but in every other country where a direct analog list has been leaked it's turned out that there's plenty more than just child pronography on that list. I doubt that our blocklist is any better. And they're always looking to expand it to other objectionable content like "hate speech". And the government are now looking to put filters everywhere.
Look at any other European (or Australia) country and it's the same. Look anywhere else and it's worse.
The USA is, frankly, the only organisation that I would trust to any reasonable degree to actually run the internet. They will do it badly, and have long periods of injustice. But they have the strongest free speech protections of anywhere in the world and will almost certainly do it better and with less injustice that anyone else.
Who do you think would do a better job than the USA and why?
Re:UN takeover must be stopped? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:UN takeover must be stopped? (Score:5, Interesting)
I must say that I think exactly like you on this topic. I'm not American - but when I read the list of countries this proposal came from, I nearly had to puke.
The US are not a judicial miracle wonderland - but they are certainly the best option we have.
And *anything* handed over to the UN is bound to finally be controlled by dictatorships in the worst case, or a complete bureaucratic dystopian organization in the best case. Better leave it with the US for now.
Re:UN takeover must be stopped? (Score:4, Interesting)
Nobody. As in "I think Nobody should have complete control over the internet".
The internet is a global "region". I don't use the word "resource" here because I don't consider it a resource in this context. I think it's more comparable to international waters. There are globally accepted rules about international waters and the global community enforces them. Any country with a coast also has a portion of the sea which is considered "theirs" and within it their rules apply. But the rest of it belongs to no one.
I think the same thing should happen to the internet. And let's be frank, by "the internet" here we mean control of TLDs, as everything else derives from that. The US government can then block "fuckamerica.com" from within the US, but not completely take it down in the rest of the world. That's the way it should be.
Re:UN takeover must be stopped? (Score:4, Interesting)
The U.S. has been imposing itself on the world since the end of WWII, and that's not going to change as long as the U.S. is in the position of dominance it's enjoyed since then.
True, mostly. I'm quite happy with the results by the way.
I trust a group made up of representatives from every country on earth a lot more than one comprised solely of representatives from just one of them, and that includes my own U.S. representatives. We gave birth to the TSA for Christ's sake. If anything stands testament to the abuse of authority, it's the fucking TSA.
Then you're insane. It would essentially end democratic control of the internet, as dictatorships and other oppressive regimes (islamic hellholes, communist states, "communist" states like China, ...) essentially control the UN by shear numbers.
You really think they'd be an improvement over the US ? How can anyone in their right mind think like that ?
Re:UN takeover must be stopped? (Score:4, Interesting)
You do realize that governments allowing freedom of expression are a minority at the UN, right ? Dictatorships are by far the majority, both by numbers of people and by numbers of countries. I'm sure they'll all agree that anything slightly controversial is to be kicked off the internet immediately.
Also handing someone a gun because you think them moronically incapable of using it ... strikes me as a level of stupidity that borders on the imbecilic.