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ICANN Troubles At UN Summit On Internet
Internet Ninja writes "The UN/ITU-organized World Summit on the Information Society currently happening in Geneva, and in attendance is Paul Twomey from ICANN, who has been ejected from a preparatory meeting, along with all other non-governmental observers. Obviously Twomey wasn't happy about that, saying: 'At ICANN, anybody can attend meetings, appeal decisions or go to ombudsmen. And here I am outside a UN meeting room where diplomats, most of whom know little about the technical aspects, are deciding in a closed forum how 750 million people should reach the Internet. I am not amused.'" We've previously reported on this meeting, which may help decide governance of the Internet, albeit in the longer-term.
The UN is a waste. How are you going to get a group of people representing every ethnicity, religon and country on earth to agree on anything?
Life in Orange County
Actually I think Michael Moore would be completely in favor of what is going on. After, the 'evil' ICANN who are not the members of any government are being shoved aside by third world dictators under the flag of the UN.
From everything I've seen of his work he would heartily approve (as long as the US is explicitly excluded from any influence in this council of course) After all, once the Internet is under the control of the UN we can finally get rid of all those nasty racist white-man websites that were previously protected under the racist imperialistic document
put together by evil white men.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
As opposed to politicians and diplomats, most of whom know little about anything save how to kiss lobbyist/mafia/dictator ass and keep their job, deciding how billions of people should live their lives?
In the US, have you ever noticed that most of your government representatives are, to quote Dilbert, Dumb As Toast? In one of those strange twists, however, Clinton was a Rhodes scholar and probably one of the best educated presidents we've had in a while. His diplomatic talents are practically without comparison.
As far as dumbest, in recent history- it's a tough choice between Regan and Dubya. Dubya certainly takes the title of Worst Diplomat, save maybe his father, who liked to throw up over foreign dignitaries. His father, however...
could say more than
four words at at time.
God bless
America!
Please help metamoderate.
Give me a break, the US runs the UN and has since it was established.
Unfortunately, the US is about as anti-UN as they come.
No, the UN is anti-UN. The US has tried to salvage it, but the security council has proven itself to be worthless. If it wasn't for the US/UK, who actually give the UNSEC some credibility, it would already be long gone.
"The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom" - George W Bush
What does it matter? Since the goal of the murders in charge of china is to place the entire country behind a massive filtering/logging firewall does it really matter how many they have?
This is pretty much what happens in the US. You can say whatever you wish, as long as it doesn't cause a problem. We have censorship of commercial speech, political speech, and public speech in general. We already have censorship of the Internet. The US already is passing laws to limit what individuals can say. The internet is right now probably much less free than the traditional press.
So, I guess these are the opinions that are developed by listening to random drug addicts.
The reality is that the UN is controlled by countries that are very concerned about the sovereignty and their borders. They want the rest of their worlds to stay out of their business and out of their borders. This is why it so hard to get resolutions past, especially those that would foreign forces inside a sovereign nation. If such a thing is done too often, and without an extreme purpose, it would create a situation in which such actions were the norm instead of the exception.
Because the US does not have worries about another country coming to formally invade, and because it does not sign many of the international treatise, the US pretty much feels free to invade anyone else. But because the US feels the need to obey the 'rule of law', mostly because it uses the 'rule of law' to justify invasions, it tries to get UN to rubber stamp these invasion. Other countries, who do have something to fear, even from the US, are not comfortable with these invasions, and are offended by the US action. The offense is further amplified when the US links funding to extreme Christian beliefs.
As far as borders, it is the US that continuously violates other borders, and thus makes the concept of borders less valid. The violations of foreign boarders is an ongoing US policy. Examples from the past are the encouragement of Panama to revolt against Colombia and the gunboat diplomacy that opened up Chinese ports. This continued with GATT, WTO and NAFTA, all which the US administration strongly supported. These agreements resulted in increasing porous US boarders that result in continuous job loss and trade deficits. That these might have benefits are to be determined. If it were up to the UN, boarders would likely be much more solid and respected. Just to be clear, the UN was created out of WWII. One big issue in WWII was the boundries. They were considered important then, and the UN tries to keep them that way.
It would be good for Europe and Asia to define themselves in positive ways. However, the US makes it very difficult to do this because so much energy is spent protected sovereign nations from US incursion.
Now, to be on topic, the Internet is in theory within boundries, so the UN may not be the best agency. OTOH, the Internet is clearly US-centric, with the US pretty much controlling the .com, .org, and .edu TLD, while giving other countries control over thier single TLD. If we wish to make the Internet more of a wordly network, and we in fact may not, a change has to be made.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
The UN Security Council's "Report of the Group of Governmental Experts on Small Arms" calls for a comprehensive program of worldwide gun control and praises the restrictive gun polices of Red China and France! The UN wants helpless citizens under the thumb of UN stormtroopers and Black Helicopters.
"Reject UN Gun Control" by by Rep. Ron Paul, MD
cpeterso
They demand that the US builds them a new one FOR FREE, because all that money they collect is needed to swim in (or something).
Actually, in this case, I think it would be because the US owes them several decades of back dues and would long since have been kicked out of the organization (and the security council) if the UN HQ wasn't located there. As usual, the US President/Ambassadors signed a treaty and then the Senate/Congress simply forgot to ratify it. Which means, strangely enough, that as far as the US is concerned its completely unenforcable, and can be tossed aside any time they like.
Same thing happened with NAFTA. Which, strangely enough, put the US in an incredibly advantageous position over both Canada and Mexico, even though the treaty was supposed to make all three equal.
Well said!
USAians seem to forget that the whole reason for the creation of the UN was to avoid another situation like WW2.
The first line of the UN charter:
"WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED
to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind"
IMO, they need to be way more anti-US than they have been recently.
Cthulhu loves you.
Unlike the rest of the first world, they refuse to stop using landmines and rarely condemn the occupation of Palestinian land outside Israel's borders. They've also got one of the world's largest caches of
Oh yeah, and they keep prisoners of war in prison camps outside their country for years on end without access to lawyers.
They also could put pressure on Israel to sign the anti torture decree, but don't
+4 Insightful ??? How is this insightful? It is a rant with plenty of SHOUTING. Now consider this, each country of the planet's governments (however they were (s)elected) appoints it's delegates to the UN. ICANN on the other hand holds public elections for positions, doesn't like who it gets, scraps the positions and then appoints whoever it wants instead which is obviously far more democratic. Not forgetting that one of it's public appointees had to sue them to even read neccessary documents!
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
And Americans wonder why they have such a rotten reputation worldwide...
I'm American and we don't wonder why, we just don't care. We believe what we want and fuck the rest of you.
We didn't take over your postal system, we copied it. And your free to copy our internet. However, you are not free to control it. If you don't like how we run it, you're free to disconnect the cable between us at any time.