Five Webloggers Jailed In Iran

Free Speech Geek writes "Reporters Without Borders recently published an article titled 'Five Webloggers Jailed' on their Web site. In this article, they list the names of 5 Iranians who have recently been jailed for no other reason than the fact that they published Web logs that were critical of the government. This story is timely because the UN has recently convened a 'UN Working Group on Internet Governance' and one of their key agenda items seems to be to take over the Domain Name System from ICAAN. One can't help but noting that the Iranian delegate to the UN is on the UN Working Group and conclude that control of the DNS is going to be the next big battleground for freedom of speech." (These arrests follow those reported in mid-October.)

Comments

Interesting conclusions...

[Gadzinka]

I don't see how governing DNS by international body could be any worse than current situation where it is governed by private entity incorporated in US. Remember that PSTN is governed by international body, ITU, and it works.

One way or another, I don't see a connection between jailing bloggers in Iran and the question of DNS governance. I guess, every opportunity is good to sell your agenda.

Robert

PS Is this perhaps something related to "Chewbacca defence"? ;)

PPS Ceterum censeo Karthaginem esse delendam ;)

Re:UN controll over DNS...

[BovineSpirit]

Next thing you know, the Secretary General's son will own your domain name, and you'll have to pay his Swiss lords a monthly fee to use it.
Can you give any examples of similer things happening in the past?

The UN's constituents are governments not people

[FreeUser]

No fucking way.

ICANN sucks but the UN is a corrupt and filled with pompous idiots. Next thing you know, the Secretary General's son will own your domain name, and you'll have to pay his Swiss lords a monthly fee to use it.

I'll take the regular idiots at ICANN, thank you.


I concurr.

The UN as a mechanism to facilitate inter-government communication and consensus is invaluable. But it it a profound mistake for anyone to look to the UN for anything more than occasional, unreliable, passing help on any humanitarian issue, be it prevention of disease (by far their best effort of any), prevention of genocide (Dafur, Ruanda, Kosovo, etc.), or freedom.

People forget that the UN's constituency is governments, not people, and that the majority of those governments are corrupt, repressive, and kill scores of said people. Even if the US were a perfect democracy (it is anything but), its constituents are by and large repressive, corrupt, and often murderous regimes.

Bush's anti-UN stance is terrible -- the UN is the best mechanism for diplomacy and international consensus there is. But as a world government the UN would be far worse than the Bush regime ... or just about any other regime, for that matter. Food-for-oil scandals, the blind eye being turned toward [insert any of several hundred genocidal atrocities committed by member states over the last fifty years], and the empowerment of governments at every level over that of people, human rights' charter notwithstanding, and you get a taste of what will come should the UN begin to control human issues directly, including that of internet speech vis-a-vis the DNS domain name system.