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UN Official Says UN Not Taking Over Internet

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the our-hands-are-clean dept.

kaufmanmoore writes "Hamadoun Toure, the new head of the UN's International Telecommunications Union says that he does not plan to take over governance of the internet and leave it up to groups like ICANN. In his statement he says that the ITU will instead focus on bridging the digital divide, internet security and standardize broadband communications. When asked about Chinese censorship Toure said that issue is beyond the mandate of the ITU."

3 of 104 comments (clear)

  1. Re:As has been said before... by Watson+Ladd · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The UN actually works. Remember the Korean War? The ITU does an amazing job of managing radio frequencies. And what about all the successful peacekeeping operations the UN has conducted? Do you see smallpox around? A lot of the UN bashing in America is about how badly the UN works when America doesn't cooperate. And I would prefer to have essential functions under the control of a bueracracy that has no effective leadership when it comes to devisive issues then to a bueracracy that caves to special intrests every single time.

    --
    Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
  2. Re:As has been said before... by parasonic · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Who cares about TLDs, what I want to know is who controls the IPs?
    Yes, but the UN doesn't. For all practicality's sake, they don't even know what an IP is. They don't know how the Internet and Web work, but they certainly think that it shouldn't be something that the originator (the US) shouldn't have control of...for whatever reason. Maybe the UN should peitition the US with a list of grievances of mismanagement in order to have a reason for the whole thing to be handed over. Having control over IP addresses is a much more encompassing leash that IANA has and just like ICANN does not abuse.

    It's all black and white to the UN, two dimensional rather than three, and there are so many levels of ubiquity, ambiguity, and abstraction that they do and will continue to fail to see.
  3. Re:As has been said before... by smilingman · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You're being disingenuous. The modern UN doesn't have the military power to take on any nation. Its only function in nations like these would be to provide humanitarian support and peace keepers after there was a peace to keep. Speaking of which, in all these conflicts, where was the US?