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European Union Asks US To Free ICANN
An anonymous reader writes "Viviane Reding, Information Society Commissioner of the European Union, is calling for the United States to hand over control of ICANN (Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers). She said that the organization running ICANN needs be free of control by a single nation, and rather controlled by a private entity and governed by multiple nations. ICANN, headquartered in Marina Del Rey, California, was created in 1998 to oversee a number of Internet related tasks. Reding said, 'In the long run, it is not defendable that the government department of only one country has oversight of an internet function which is used by hundreds of millions of people in countries all over the world.'"
If the dictator Joseph Stalin had not have killed a few million German soldiers and destroyed I think at least 20,000 tanks during the course of the Russio-German war, D-Day would have been awful tough for the United States and Great Britain. What sort of shape would the German army have been in without having endured the winter offensive on Moscow, the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk and then Operation Bagration.
This is my sig.
Even if the Pirate Bay is banned in the United States
I think you're falsely assuming I'm from the US. (English isn't my first language; my using "our lawmakers" in response to "Europeans would [...]" implies I'm European, right?).
I'm from Denmark. When I try to go to thepiratebay.org, I'm faced with this: 84.238.1.5/dom.pdf (in Danish, sorry).
It's a verdict from our second-highest court thing which forces $DANISH_ISP to not allow their customers to access thepiratebay.org (and all its subdomains).
Those were private corporations making those decisions
True. Now, why would they make such decisions? I'd say it's highly plausible they'd make such decisions because they believe it's what the people wants. If they rightfully believe so, then at least you can't say that the American spirit isn't "100% free speech, 0% sensitivity".
Maybe it's 90-10 and Europe is 80-20; maybe it's the other way around. Maybe it's 99-1 and 60-40, I don't know.
What I was trying to say: maybe I'm ignorant, but it's not clear to me that it's safe to a priori assume that European control would be worse than US control. Nor better.
Why am I modded troll?
An Internet troll, or simply troll in Internet slang, is someone who posts controversial, inflammatory, irrelevant or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum or chat room, with the primary intent of provoking other users into an emotional response or to generally disrupt normal on-topic discussion.
Really? I think I'm being on-topic and relevant--I'm discussing particular concerns relating to the relative merits of EU vs. US control over ICANN.
I'm talking about controversial stuff (free speech zone, Mohamed box) but the controversy is whether they're a good thing or not (which I don't talk about), not whether they exist/took place (where I agree with everyone else: they do/did).
The only rude thing I see that I said is "crazy shit goes on in Europe", but that's toward my own people; and I'm being equally rude to US and EU: "I'm not really sure who's worst".
Could someone explain to me why I'm all wrong?
(Or did I just draw the short straw, moderator-wise?)