Slashdot Mirror
Should the UN Replace ICANN?
An anonymous reader writes "Yahoo news has a story on how some developing countries want control of the assignment of network names and numbers turned over to an international body, such as the UN's ITU (International Telecommunication Union)."
Well, if the UN can manage CEB, CTBTO, ECA, ECE, ECLAC, ESCAP, ESCWA, FAO, UNCTAD, HLCM, MA HREF="http://ceb.unsystem.org/hlcp/default.htm">HL CP, IACSD, IANWGE, IAPSO, and about 5 times as many more, I think they can handle one more. :)
UN's record isn't that great IMHO
Oh really? Of the organizations I listed (in alphabetical order), how many are bloated and overbudget? How many have involved scandal of any kind? How many have been largely ineffective? Etc?
Honestly, I think that this is just going to turn into a big OFF-bashing thread.
"Lock and load, Brides of Christ!"
Did you read the summary? They're not suggesting that the General Assembly vote on everything. They specifically mentioned the ITU, which already manages all kinds of technical stuff internationally: satellite orbits, radio spectrum, telecommunications interoperability, etc.
CNN
Um, Oil-for-Food, forced prostitution rings in the Balkans, rape in the Congo, Ruud Lubbers sexually harrasing his colleagues, thousands of unpaid parking tickets issued to diplomatic vehicles in NYC every year, inaction in Sudan, Syria on the human rights committee... Should I continue?
>How about you start by telling us what the heck any of these organizations actually do
l e_on_4/42 16853.stm
You see, there are these magical things called "links". How about you learn the spell for following them?
> Rwanda
Yeah, and when the UN didn't step in, the US stepped right in and took care of things, right? Oh yeah... we were completely ineffective there too.
> money launderer for Saddam.
As if we've done any better:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/fi
BTW, do you know what body of the UN had the authority to block contracts under OFF? It was the Security Council, and it only took one member to act.
"Lock and load, Brides of Christ!"
After reading their web pages:
CEB: I still have no idea what they do. I am guessing this is where high level coordination occurs.
CTBTO: Looks good. I want to see a comprehensive nuclear test ban too, but I am sure the Bush supporters won't like it.
ECA, ECE, ESCAP, ECLAC, ESCWA: These are regional commissions for economic issues regarding regions.
FAO: Food and Agriculture Organization
UNCTAD, IACSD: Sustainability of human development.
HLCM, HLCP: coordination organizations.
IANWGE: Work on promoting gender equality
IAPSO: Procurement for other UN offices.
Note that many of these are support organizations for those who go out and do the real work. Others work on solving economic and social problems.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Sure, continue on, but next time be more statistically valid. Picking out incidents from an entity is not valid; I could equally point to a hundred major scandals in the US from the past decade. A more fair method is to pick organizations in a deterministic fashion (i.e., no hunt-and-peck), and then look at their records.
But, hey, for the heck of it, lets look at your list (feel free to add more!)
> Oil-for-Food
OFF "leaked" by 2-4 billion$ (the other money was from oil smuggling, which never was under the jurisdiction of OFF). US reconstruction money (largely Iraqi oil profits) leaked by 9B$, when dealing with a smaller total. Net result: UN handled money better.
> forced prostitution rings in the Balkans
Perhaps you're confusing NATO with UN? Italian NATO peacekeepers were accused by the Spanish Secret Service of running a prostitution ring. Also, DynCorp (A private US company) was involved in a prostition-ring there; members even filmed the rape of a young girl.
> rape in the Congo
Yes, of the 11,000 UN troops in the congo, there were 150 allegations of rape against about a dozen troops. This is, percentage-wise, about on par with accusations against US troops by Vietnamese during the Vietnam war. And like we have any right to talk after Abu Ghraib and the recently exposed Guantamo details.
> Ruud Lubbers sexually harrasing his colleagues,
Sexual harassment? That's the worst you can come up with? I think you need to have a talk with Janis Karpinski about that in the US. Or perhaps talk with the >60% of female US soldiers who experienced sexual harassment, and the >30% of female US soldiers who experienced rape or attempted rape by their fellow soldiers, over the course of their military careers. 19% of women at the Air Force Academy were raped during their stay; 81% were too afraid to report the rape, and 42% of those who did experienced retaliation for doing so. I could go on and on, on this front.
> thousands of unpaid parking tickets issued to diplomatic vehicles in NYC every year,
*Unpaid Parking Tickets*? Please tell me that I just hallucinated you writing that...
> inaction in Sudan,
Naturally, the US stepped right up to take their place, right? Oh yeah, that's right, we were the leading cause of UN inaction on this front.
> Syria on the human rights committee...
Yes, everyone gets a chance. Like the US is one to speak with Guantanamo, Baghram, Abu Ghraib, Shebargham, and its policy of extrordinary rendition, especially to the very country you just named.
> Should I continue?
Please do. What's next - jay walking?
"Lock and load, Brides of Christ!"
Rwanda
Yeah, and when the UN didn't step in, the US stepped right in and took care of things, right? Oh yeah... we were completely ineffective there too.
Um, you know, the UN did step in in Rwanda. The complaint against them is that they didn't accomplish anything -- if anything, they made matters worse by attracting people to safe-zones that turned out not to be safe.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
True. If by funny you mean the sort of joke that makes you want to throw up... and let's not forget that the CIA under Reagan was the primary organizing force behind the Afghan mujahedin, including certain terrorists of recent renown.
The denigration of the UN, so mindlessly echoed by many on here, is a neocon tactic designed to set up the New American Century. Just look at the smearing of the IAEA (and subsequent total failure of the US to do any better). It's sad when people are so ignorant of history that they forget why the UN was created in the first place, or how Germany and Japan undermined the League of Nations as a critical part of their imperial manouevres in the 30's.
People need to take a minute to think about the agenda behind this constant rubbishing of the UN. Is Empire really what Americans want? Possibly not, but there's no way of knowing: see e.g. Mike Scheuer, former head of CIA's bin Laden unit, who points out that the underlying reasons for Arab terrorism or the implications of America's continued imperial expansion are simply not part of the political dialogue in America right now.
As for bureaucracy, I've worked in many US govt labs and the idea that America is somehow less bureaucratic is another of those jokes that makes you want to hurl. People, turn off your TV, it's lying to you...
I would add that up until the invasion of Kuwait, the former Bush Administration was selling arms to Saddam. Additionally, most of the WMD raw materials including bioweapons cultures came from Saddam's good buddies in the US. So it is really funny to watch all this criticism of the UN when it was the Regan Administration (and later the first Bush administration) who gave active support to Saddam's WMD ambitions.
The U.S. did sell arms to Iraq in the 80's, however when you look at the amounts, you can see that these were miniscule compared to what they received from the USSR, France, and China. Even at its largest in 1988, U.S. sales only accounted for only 5% of Iraq's arms purchases. In fact based on these numbers, France has a lot to answer for.
Also the 'bioweapons cultures' that you refer to were most likely plain anthrax spores which were quite easy for anyone to order from a catalog back in the 80's. These have legitimate use for agricultural research and are not particularly dangerous unless they are 'weaponized' i.e. finely ground up, mixed with other substances to keep the spores viable, and mixed into an aerosol - a non-trivial task.
Darfur Crisis Causes U.S. To Stumble Over Opposition To International Court" U.S. Stubborn On Sudan
The basic problem is that the US doesn't want to back up the ICC (which the Bush administration opposes). Thankfully the administration is now supporting a security force (they weren't when the majority of the crimes were being committed), and this year is leading the effort to help get peacekeepers there. They're still causing rifts by trying to keep the ICC out of it, though.
"Lock and load, Brides of Christ!"
By the "biggest member", I assume you mean the most populous: India. Or maybe China. Or maybe you mean the largest: Russia. But I suspect that you mean the country that pays 22% of the UN's budget: the US. As far as I know, our dues are completely up-to-date. What genocide are you referring to? It can't be Rwanada, Kosovo, or the Sudan. After all, according to the UN those weren't genocides. Granted, the Clinton administration's handling of Rwanda was shameful, but no less shameful than the UN (and for that matter, the EU's) handling of all three; and at least they stood up in Kosovo. Yeah, the US has a veto. Let's look at the current genocide in the Sudan, who's blocking action on that? I'll give you a hint: it's not the one power that has actually come out and said that crimes in the Sudan ARE genocide. Try France, Russia, and China. Of course, I'm sure it has nothing to do with their oil intrests - only the US is interested in oil! "Get a clue." People in glass houses... By the way, your earlier "insighful" post makes the claim that spam was "entirely" invented in the US. Maybe. But if the US has that as a strike against it, do we get credit for other inventions? Like for instance, the Internet? Or the UN? Look, the UN has it's good points and it's bad points. Frankly, I don't think it would be a good organization to manage the registry. (The ITU makes more sense.) They do a lot of good in the world, but they have SERIOUS problems. Trying to pass the buck to the US, who is one of 188 member nations, and 1 of 5 veto-weilding security council members, doesn't do anyone any good. In fact, the main problem the UN has is that it's not accountable to anyone.
Did ICANN?
This hardly seems a relevent argument in the context of the proposal.
Most of what the UN does is utilitarian stuff, like ITU creating standards or the WHO stomping on disease outbreaks. It all ticks along quietly because it's a long way from the politicians.
On the other hand most of the things the UN gets criticism for are either clearly outside it's power (how could the UN, which has no armed forces, have prevented genocide in Rwanda? Sent in some clerks to threaten everyone with really bad paper cuts?), or political schemes which were never supposed to work (eg oil for food, which was a propoganda tool for the western nations who set up the sanctions on Iraq, and so was immune to any kind of oversight, audit or normal management until it's propoganda use was over, it's supprising it wasn't a lot more corrupt than it was).
Like the EU, one of the main purposes of the UN is to be a front behind which governments can do things they can't be seen to do directly. The upside is that it's existance for that purpose means that some useful stuff gets done too.
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
"I remember attending the Politics of Code conference in the UK in 2003 and hearing Richard Hill from International Telecommunication Union giving a very odd speech about the ITU and international regulation of the Internet etc. At the time I thought it was a coded land-grab for the transfer of control of ICANN to the ITU.
ICANN was also still in a confusing semi-democratic phase at the time (this seems to be steadily decreasing) and also weirdly self-imploding. Ester Dyson also gave the most contentless speech I think I have ever heard - no doubt to ensure minimum offense to anyone in the audience.
As with all these things wheels within wheels... but I do wish the call for some form of ICANN democracy would renew rather than lose it to a not very democratic body (i.e. the ITU) or to the corporations (kinda where it is now)."
Bing-go.
Twice in one night I have seen the crystal clear truth ring out and resonate on slashdot. Somebody call Guiness.
There was a cnference in DC in 1997 discussing the ill fated prededcessor to ICANN, namely IAHC. The purpose was to "introduce the concept of IAHC to people" The Architects of IACH (Bob Shaw, ITU; Albert Tramposch, WIPO; Don Heath, ISOC, the I* boys) were on stage and things were going great those those smug bastards as they continued to pull the wool over the sheep-like eyes of the poor unsuspecting members of corporate Dumbfuckistan until a luminary from the State department, Richard *cough*forgothislastname*cough* gave a passionate articulate tremendously driven speech about how the US had just spent years getting control of it's phone number back from the ITU as a Clinton policy initiative and how the ITU (as an instument of the small number of families than control the Euro phone systems) was about the worst thing you could ever have the within any distance of the Internet. Bob Shaw turned red with anger and looked like somebody had beamed a dead rat into his mouth. He was pissed somebody knew the truth. Tramposch lost his job over this as an embarrasment to WIPO (which is tough to imagine) while Shaw and Heath went on to work behind the scenes to found the ICANN we despise today. They are always in the shadows.
Good call on Estie. Vapid is the term I was thinking of. But, she made her $$$ by investing in the first registrar.
I was a contract whore for NSI at the time, I worked on the diagnostics for the shared registry system (then quit in disgust) and I can tell you that registrar went live before their system was even finished let alone working.
All the time while the public ICANN mantra of "stability of the Internet" was being bleated probably todistract people from noticing they'd hands repeatedly stuffing large wads of cash into their pockets. And you wonder why port 43 whois is broken...
Whenever a county is taken over by a dictator they always say they're doing it for "the stability". Check it out, that really is what they say.
Need Mercedes parts ?
UN staff don't get diplomatic plates (unless Kofi Annan does). Those are ambassadorial staff, direct employees of foreign nations; the UN has no control over them. Same thing happens in every capital city in the world.
The U.S. was officially neutral regarding the Iran-Iraq war, and claimed that it armed neither side. Iran depended on U.S.-origin weapons, however, and sought them from Israel, Europe, Asia, and South America. Iraq started the war with a large Soviet-supplied arsenal, but needed additional weaponry as the conflict wore on.
Initially, Iraq advanced far into Iranian territory, but was driven back within months. By mid-1982, Iraq was on the defensive against Iranian human-wave attacks. The U.S., having decided that an Iranian victory would not serve its interests, began supporting Iraq: measures already underway to upgrade U.S.-Iraq relations were accelerated, high-level officials exchanged visits, and in February 1982 the State Department removed Iraq from its list of states supporting international terrorism. (It had been included several years earlier because of ties with several Palestinian nationalist groups, not Islamicists sharing the worldview of al-Qaeda. Activism by Iraq's main Shiite Islamicist opposition group, al-Dawa, was a major factor precipitating the war -- stirred by Iran's Islamic revolution, its endeavors included the attempted assassination of Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz.)
Prolonging the war was phenomenally expensive. Iraq received massive external financial support from the Gulf states, and assistance through loan programs from the U.S. The White House and State Department pressured the Export-Import Bank to provide Iraq with financing, to enhance its credit standing and enable it to obtain loans from other international financial institutions. The U.S. Agriculture Department provided taxpayer-guaranteed loans for purchases of American commodities, to the satisfaction of U.S. grain exporters.
The U.S. restored formal relations with Iraq in November 1984, but the U.S. had begun, several years earlier, to provide it with intelligence and military support (in secret and contrary to this country's official neutrality) in accordance with policy directives from President Ronald Reagan. These were prepared pursuant to his March 1982 National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM 4-82) asking for a review of U.S. policy toward the Middle East.
One of these directives from Reagan, National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) 99, signed on July 12, 1983, is available only in a highly redacted version [Document 21]. It reviews U.S. regional interests in the Middle East and South Asia, and U.S. objectives, including peace between Israel and the Arabs, resolution of other regional conflicts, and economic and military improvements, "to strengthen regional stability." It deals with threats to the U.S., strategic planning, cooperation with other countries, including the Arab states, and plans for action. An interdepartmental review of the implications of shifting policy in favor of Iraq was conducted following promulgation of the directive.
Freedom is not increased by mere diminuation of government. Anarchy is freedom for the strong and slavery for the weak.