World Summit On The Internet And IT

eegad writes "The Seattle PI reports on the upcoming first phase of the World Summit on the Information Society to be held in Geneva on December 10-12. 192 nations are involved in the effort to set some ground rules for the Internet (a little late, eh?) including ways to deal with spam, a possible "digital solidarity fund" to help developing nations, and discussion of UN regulation. The goal of this phase is to adopt a "Declaration of Principles" and "Plan of Action". Some countries plan on asking for a UN commission to study new ways of running the Internet aimed at the 2005 phase. The official website will provide coverage of the event. How come I wasn't invited?" The Washington Times also has a piece on it, as well. We had covered this a bit before.

Comments

Re:just say NO to the UN

[sheldon]

"Does the UN routinely "bash" Israel? It passes motions condemning its human rights abuses, just as it does for all human rights abusers, but it is hardly anti-semitic."

I think the fact that the UN has issued statements condemning Israel, while repeatedly failing to condemn human rights abuses propogated by the Palestinian Authority, tends to show a pattern of anti-Israeli attitude.

I agree that the United Nations has lost much of it's relevance in this world.

However, I also agree in part that the failure for that is due to a lack of leadership from the United States.

AntiAmerican Behaviour

[popo]

The fact that ICANN was not allowed to be present at this discussion underlies a key undercurrent of the meeting:

Wresting governance of assigned names away from America.

Never mind that the current system isn't remotely broken, or the fact that ICANN *is* an open organization with clearly defined channels for the international community to voice issues, or the even more fundamental fact of: *we fucking built it biyatch* -- this is a good apolitical example of what the United Nations has become: A knee jerk reactionary body whose goal is to counter perceived U.S. unilateralism.

What's so sad about this is that it will result in poorly governed, poorly engineered chaos.

Its ironic that in what is perhaps the only non-political open environment, the global-body which claims to believe in universality and equality is creating political and national partisanship.

Fuckers.