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Internet Power Struggle Reaching Climax
Fredden wrote to mention a BBC piece discussing the U.S.'s poor image when it comes to Internet management. From the article: "It has even lost the support of the European Union. It stands alone as the divisive battle over who runs the internet heads for a showdown at a key UN summit in Tunisia next month. The stakes are high, with the European Commissioner responsible for the net, Viviane Reding, warning of a potential web meltdown. " We've previously covered this story.
... having to face Afronet, Amerinet and Eurasianet - hmm, sounds a bit 84 :(
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
The real complaint is the dangerous attitude the US government has shown lately. Everything is fine right now, but the US has made unilateral decisions in the past (Hello world, we'd like to attack Iraq. What do you mean you won't support us? Screw you, we're doing it anyway!). If they decide to do something like that with the internet, there's nothing stopping them. That's scary.
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Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
Seems that the world's biggest democracy should run the worlds biggest, free net.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
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biggest in terms of what? I assume you mean population, but the OP might just as easily have meant economically, or in terms of ground coverage, in which both cases the US is dominant.
I don't think that the ability to overpopulate your country should grant you more rights.
Really, once you allocate the ip numbers what else is needed?
The only part normal people really care about is the DNS system, and you can use any DNS system you want quite easily.
As for which unelected (or at least not by me) group controls it, I don't really care either.
Thanks Bush for being such a dork that even Iran, China, and some African countries to be named later have more pull in the UN that us.....
And that is exactly why the UN has failed as a decision making body. Its great to have a place where every nation can voice its concerns; the open dialog very well may have prevented larger conflics (particularly during the Cold War).
But to actually have the UN vote and try to regulate things is absurd. Nevermind the fact that the UN cannot deploy troops or embargo (thus any 'resolution' is merely a suggestion), it isn't even cose to a real representative democracy. Example: Africa has about 2.5 times the population of the US (not to mention a fraction of the economy and education/human rights/etc), but it gets 54 times as many votes due to the sheer number independent states within the continent. Is it really a suprise that the UN is so anti-US & anti-Israel, and has yet to really achieve anything in regards to improving human rights around the world?
Incidentaly, an antiquidated representative scheme is the reason that the US has that retard in office in the first place. California has 33 million people, 53 reps, 2 senators. Wyoming has a half million people, 1 rep, and 2 senators. Sooooo.... a Californian's representative vote is worth about 67 times less that of a (statisticaly less educated) Wyoming resident's vote in the Senate, and 3.5 times less in the presidental election.
Guess what: it's our ball. You want to play with our ball? Fine, we want that, too (basketball is not much fun one-on-none). Just don't go claiming it's yours.
Sounds like a typical bunch of socialists to me - provide them with a service for two weeks, and they'll figure it's a human right.
Progressivism: Parasites helping parasites to help themselves - to other people's stuff.
The only arguments I ever hear in favor of letting the US in control of the World Wide Web are the following:
First of all, Hitler was doing a great job running Germany too, before he went all crazy and made the jews "lesser human". Sure, the US is doing a great job _now_, but what if there are some frictions between the US and some other country in the future, and the only way the US could hit that country, was to deny it access to the WWW? Would the US do that? It's possible, it's likely, even. You can't compare this to nukes because that country wouldn't be able to do anything back on the same scale. The fear of using nukes is that once you start, it never stops until the whole world is gone.
Second, the US did indeed invent the internet, but the internet would never have become what it is now, if it weren't for us Europeans who invented the World Wide Web. Yes, that's right, we've invented that thing that you're reading from atm. And that's what this discussion is about. It's not about the internet, the internet was designed so it's as redundant as possible. No one would care if the US suddenly dissallowed access to it's internet from outside the US. Well, probably most people would, because most spam received? Yep, 57% originates from the US. So stop the silly "we invented it!!11one" remarks, 'cause you don't. You're just making an ass out of yourself. Stop the spam comments as well.
Free speech? Americans yelling "free speech!" in every discussion is like (World \ Americans) yelling "Iraq!" in every discussion. It's so silly it hurts. You want the US to have a monopoly on the WWW in order to keep "Free Speech"? How does that compute? Of course, it's no solution to hand over control from one country to another, there should be some international organization that takes care of it. And once that's accomplished, your precious "Free Speech" will be even greater than before. Because like I said in #1, the US probably wouldn't be afraid to cut off a portion of the world.
Why does (World / US) want to get control of the WWW out of the US? The same reason why you wouldn't want some other country to control wether your trains, airplanes, etc, arrive at the correct location without you having any say in it.War for oil
Gee, we're getting oil from Iraq? When did that start? If you want to talk about profiting from Iraq's oil, perhaps you should speak to Mr Annan.
Either Annon or France's former UN ambassador, who was just arrested and taken into custody for all the kickbacks taken in the Oil for Food scandel.
You ever notice these people can't back up their claims with any evidence, while there's always plenty to the contrary? "The US had nothing to do with the invention of TCP/IP, Arpanet, NSFNET, Internet, etc." -- WTF? "War for Oil" - try War that cost us plenty of oil (a billion dollars a day would be more than sufficient to pour into converting the world's largest shale oil reserve in the US to a productive resource, allowing us to tell the Saudis and Iranians to go to hell).
And then there's the holier than thou European crap like this: supporting dubious regimes in other nations... I really wish I could drag every socialist college dropout to Rwanda or any of the countless European colonial nightmares and force them to endure watching the horrors their "propped up pals" who run these nations exact on innocent people. There are few non-US westerners who have hands as clean as ours, and don't think for a second we don't know it when you spew this US hatred. As if I need a German to teach me how to respect Judiasm.
Morality doesn't come from being more experienced at tyranny and corruption than anyone else.
*scoove*
"And if we decide to nuke Europe, there's no stopping us there, either. Of course, no one's afraid we're going to do that. "
Really? I'm fucking afraid of that. Im sure im not alone. Disregarding the fact that you just suggested doing it, America will nuke something eventually. its in the character of americans and the american government. america as a country, is a rich ( think new credit card illusionary rich) teenage psychopath.
it doesnt matter how nicely its acting now with domain name delegation. you simply dont know when a psychopath is going to pull a knife on you and stab you in the fucking throat. psychopaths do that kind of shit FOR FUN. Personally, I dont blame the UN one bit.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
I watched with great sadness as people whom I know to have given very generously to things like the tsunami appeal openly refused to donate anything in the aftermath of Katrina, such was their loathing for the current state of affairs across the pond. Outside the US, the tragedy that hundreds of people died and countless thousands were displaced isn't what registers with a lot of people any more; they just see the mighty US get what they thought it had coming.
Doesn't this reflect rather a lot more badly on your acquaintances than on anything at all from America?
The problem with the above is that the rest of the world doesn't believe that [the real world is a rather fucked up place, and the US is probably the least of all evils in this case] any more.
Who fuckin' cares? A lot of morons, shitheads, and the naive thought at various points in recent history that socialism, national socialism, communism, EEC, or some other bland cover for evil would take over the world and show once and for all that their supercilious parochialism was morally good after all (yes, typically failing to explain why taking over the world would show them to be more moral). Get over yourself, the European-style idea is living on borrowed time and will never make a comeback.
In fact, the whole uproar made by people of your disposition is a constant reminder to anyone sane that America is on the right path, or at least the least wrong path, for it to excite the passions of such terrible people. Having the whole world disagree with you is a good thing, when the "whole world" looks like Europe or the UN.
Fuck it
I don't think the majority of the USA gives a rats rear end what the rest of the world thinks of us. We've been cleaning up messes the Euroweenies have been creating for over 70 years! We are sick and tired of coming to everyone elses defense and then, after we get done cleaning it up, have them spit in our face. If the rest of the world wants to make a better internet, fine, go for it. But until you do, get use to the fact that the United States military was the institution that actually started the "internet" way back during the beginning of the cold war. The UN can pass all the resolutions it wants. Maybe they will have better luck with that, than the countless resolutions they've passed over the years against (name just about any mideast country)
Ok, and the towel heads who flew the planes into the buildings where in every country BUT Iraq? Yeah right! As for the WMD things, there have been at least 1/2 dozen stockpiles of the stuff picked up, but thanks to the MSM, you won't hear about it, because it doesn't fit the MSM mold of "anything that is good for Bush isn't worth talking about", but "anything that makes Bush look bad, we'll talk about for a week". I guess you'd rather take on these idiot towel head bomb morons over hear, than over there.