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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.
192 nations are involved in the effort to set some ground rules for the Internet
I hope Nigeria doesn't have any sort of veto power at this summit.
Trolling is a art,
Stay the fuck away from my Internet.
That said...
It might be nice to encourage people to use bittorrent to download porn. The bandwidth savings would be akin to quadrupling router capacity across the Net.
Or, maybe fix email by requiring everybody to send ciphered messages only. Require/encourage mail servers to permit a user to provide it a gateway public/private key through which all incoming email must satisfy (not the same as your personal public/private key.) Solve spam and nine-tenths of Echelon with one single kick in the balls.
Then, get over this self-inflicted trauma over raw sockets. Raw sockets are cool. Raw sockets + UDP can all but eliminate the nastier p2p problems, like how to work through firewalls, as well as how to send data anonymously. These are good things. Let good people do good things with good technology.
But we can do all of these things through education. We don't need the UN/Geneva/Britney Spears to tell us how this whole thing should work.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
Check out the NYTimes article, it points out a bit of the criticism of the whole process.
Link (reigstration req'd, blah blah)
not really. considering it takes OUR government 10-20 years to recognize technology. i would say this is a rather fast turn around for a body of government set up by bodies of government.
I heard they are going to make Al Gore in charge of the whole meeting.
;)
After all, he did create the thing, right?
The best thing they can do is make it illegal for spammers to get safe harbor anywhere.
Or, failing that, to make sure that spam only gets sent to the country of origin somehow. That would eliminate 90% of my spam, which is from the US.
Probably it will only end up in another treaty the US will refuse to ratify, like Kyoto and the International Court of Justice.
for great justice
There's an interesting article about this at El Reg. I'm pretty worried about what's going on there; for all the failing of ICANN, it's always been sort of emblematic of the prevailing idea in western countries to keep bureaucracy from throttling the Internet. Think what you will about various nations bad handling of Internet traffic and user rights, the over-corporatization of the net, and ICANN's distasteful tactics over domain handling; the Internet as we know it is a far cry from what it might have been had the ITU been allowed to be the driving force behind it.
I don't relish the idea of the type of bureaucrat who brought us WIPO deciding by fiat where the greatest communications revolution in human history is going to go.
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
Isn't this the technological equivolent (time-wise) of the U.N. right now in 2003 trying to decide what to do about this 'Hitler' guy? To quote my favorite Vorlon: The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.
But maybe I'm just pessimistic and jaded...=)
Organizations like the UN, unaccountable by most means in their actions, will only try to leverage further control by government authorities to make sure we're all trackable and monitored for "appropriate behavior". Nothing good will come from this. Kiss the "free" anarchy-style of the Internet goodbye.
I know others ahve already commented about this, but honestly what good can come from this? I don't want any part of the internet under UN control. Right now the internet is mostly apolitical and thats the way it should stay. I cannot believe this could lead to anything good.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Since the U.N. is inherently a governing entity, it will invariably feel the need to regulate everything it can. It is in its very nature to regulate. They even managed to throw in the word "solidarity". Every time I hear that word, my ears perk up.
The goal of this phase is to adopt a "Declaration of Principles" and "Plan of Action".
Person 1: Sounds like it was created by an MBA.
Person 2: Actually, it was a committee.
Person 1: OK, a committee of MBA's.
Person 2: A committee of MBA's who work for the government!
Both: (run away and hide under cubicles)
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
Sorry, but they can't manage anything. The United Nations is a failed idea looking for relevance. Unfortunately anything they take over becomes a mockery of what it is supposed to.
Worse, the UN routinely caves into member states that are notorious violators of human rights. What good can from an organization that has human rights committees comprised of brutal dictatorships? Of disarnament committees run by the same?
Sorry, a UN managed internet would simply give certain 3rd world countries (and some European) a new means to bash or otherwise attempt to restrict prospering Western countries. It would advance anti-Jewish attitudes, probably going as far as to restrict Israel! China would be given free reign to threaten Tiawan and run ramshackle over tibet. Can you imagine what these nations would want to classify as SPAM?
No thank you. ICANN might be annoying but at least we can lay hands on them
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Do not believe the lies my friend. There is only one man for this job. Make no mistake, when I am made Minister of the Information Society the blood of the spammers will flow like wine. Our low price septic tanks will be full of the corpses of the armies of slaughtered spammers. We shall strike them down like the dogs they are. They are superpower of villains. They are superpower of Al Capone. And we shall destroy them.
Former Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf
See the website of this group at http://www.wsis-pct.org/
The Working Group is holding a workshop "Free Software, Free Society" with a group of top speakers, including Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU Project, and Lawrence Lessig.
I'm a programmer working at the W.H.O., which is just down the road from the exibition hall, so I've been looking at the schedule to see what events might be interesting or useful to attend.
Looks like a lot of local linux users (see G.U.L.L) are planning to attend at least the panel with Larry Lessig and RMS on Wednesday. RMS is also speaking on Thursday.
____________________________________
-- I beleve you'll like this -->
Why do developing nations need the Internet?
Isn't that putting the cart before the horse...
By definition maybe what they really need is heavy infrastructure development?
Giving bushmen WWW access isn't going to help any nation develop.
"Spam could be outlawed once and for all worldwide, with harsh penalties for violation."
Should we apply Marxist solutions: gulags (Stalin), death farms (Cambodia) or rape camps (Serbia)?
"An international agreement of standards for content could bring freedom of information to places where there is a lack of information"
Yes. We know that government control always makes things more free!
"Centralized taxation..."
Yes. The greedy ruling class must get a cut!
"Elimination of various objectively hateful websites from the internet, e.g., holocaust denial, neo-nazis, gun merchants"
And, of course, left-wing hate sites (MLM, neo-soviets) all remain uncensored.
This summit is a betrayal of it's original ideals, and especially of the World's poor. Various groups are intending to strongly oppose this travesty; there is more information and here.
Where oh where is freedom of expression in all this? Or is that too much of a threat to the organizations sponsering this summit?
WSIS might sound like a boring bureaucratic exercise, but there's a strong chance that governments are going to walk away from it with new international agreements in their pockets to pass laws in their own countries restricting the free flow of information.
Quoting the "WSIS? We Seize!" press release:
'While the official agenda of this UN/ITU Summit talks about "free access to information", "the digital divide" and "equality of opportunities", in reality its doors are closed, its discussions exclusive and the agendas of those who attend it concealed. What's more, the right to demonstrate and protest has been suspended in Geneva at this time, as the usual parade of despots and tyrants fly in to Switzerland to define policy for their own citizens, and the rest of the world, based on the agendas of corporate multinationals, media conglomerates and infrastructure owners.
Geneva03 is a temporary network of groups and individuals set up to carry out agitational, educational and communications work during both the G8 and the WSIS. Geneva03 considers it critical to show, during such a display of media power and control, that independent groups and people have the ability to create their own media, to share media, self publish, build networks and communicate freely and autonomously. That's why we've titled our events during this time WSIS? WE SEIZE! We do not consider that negotiation and supplication before the altar of the UN will produce information autonomy for all. Instead, we are taking our autonomy now, using the means and technologies at our disposal: the Internet, peer to peer networks, Free and Open Source Software, community wireless infrastructures, pirate television and radio and streamed media. Beyond questions of communications technology, We Seize! seeks to open a wide-ranging discussion on the new social conditions that constitute today's world about which the WSIS has little or nothing to say: media concentration, expansive intellectual property regimes, casualised and immaterial labour and migration.
We insist that this urge to speak, to hear and be heard, is irrepressible. The Geneva03 group returns to Geneva following major attempts at repression during the G8 this year, in which the group were targetted by police whilst running an independent media centre. No charges were brought against the group, because - whatever the establishment would like us to believe - it is still lawful to freely express ourselves. We must, however, continue to exercise this ability, to expand and test it in diverse situations, if we are not to lose the freedom and potential that defines us as people.
Communication, language and information are essential to understanding both control and liberation in this new millenium. They are simultaneously the site of the most repressive and totalitarian suppression and disciplining we have seen since the 1950s and, we believe, the basis of a powerful, growing autonomous movement. Ultimately this movement must cut to the very heart of communication: for what we are able to articulate, we are able to create. We must speak of a new world without fear, and with all the creativity, energy and commitment we can find.'
(end quote)
If you want to know more, here are some useful links:
Good background article on Indymedia Global
WSIS? We Seize!
The World Forum on Communication Rights
Polimedia Lab
Civil Society news centre for the WSIS
Indymedia UK WSIS 2003 section
New rules:
1 - No individual anonymity
2 - No free speech for individuals
3 - No national information sovereignty.
4 - Taxation to pay for enforcement of the new rules
5 - Jails to house all the new criminals.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I read the Draft "Plan of Action" availible. It reads a lot like a polictical document. The scary part is the one about the un taking over control of the internet, but it mostly says that everyone should have access to the internet and it should be geared towards all languages and cultures.
.. giving starving people food and water. That seems like a higher priority than internet access. Furthermore, one of the questions in the Faq is "Will one language or culture takeover the information society?" The answer says that we should encourage people to provide content in all languages. First of all, I think Internet is already heavily US centric perhaps because it was originally its network. Secondly, that is a pipe dream just like everything else in the summit.
Thats great, but I think the UN should be focused on oh I don't know
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Are you sure there are 192 nations participating, and not 192.168 nations? What about the 10.x or the 169.254 nations you insensitive clods?
I hate sigs.
They should start by banning frontpage as a tool to create webpages. Yes that would mean they'll have to recode their official website as well
[alk]
"...Carlos Achiary, national director of Information Technology Argentina, said many governments are frustrated because the Internet is having a tremendous effect in their countries, but they have no place to submit their requests, complaints or suggestions...." /dev/null anyone?
I have family living in B.A. - I visited Arg. for a few weeks last November. After looking at miles of black and white marble columns and hand-worked wrought-iron that enclosed their WATER PROCESSING PLANT in B.A. - I felt no pity for the bureaucrats at this service arm who now cry poor. The unabashed "we are Euro, ergo better than the rest of [south] America, so let's have palacial water plants..." The whole place was shocking. (parts beautiful, yes) But the officials I met.... inept, corrupt, nepitistic, backwards - maybe they should get their house in order before looking to "suggest" some of their 'winning insight' to the rest of us.
(did you hear about the folks of B.A. suing a new (chilean owned) utility that, after months of written warnings removed the power-leacher-wires from the poles? Yep, they had the audacity to sue the company for cutting them off b/c they'd tapped in illegally. It's still in the courts, the folks there think "it is our right to have electricity" - just as it is this guys' "right" to have a say on riding coat-tails.)
build something, contribute, dont' back-street drive.
If she floats, she's a witch.
Heise.de has an article about the interetaccess on this conference: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/jk-08.12.03-00 6/ (in german). The main info: Internetaccess for participants on this conference will cost about 128Euro. Participants from the third world, already having problems to bring up the money to attend, might not be able to afford the Internetaccess on the "World Summit on the Information Society". An attendee from Bulgaria mentioned that in Bulgaria this is about the amount of money you have to live from ... for two months.
Nils