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Eric Schmidt: UN Treaty a 'Disaster' For the Internet
An anonymous reader writes "Internet freedom and innovation are at risk of being stifled by a new United Nations treaty that aims to bring in more regulation, Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt has warned. In a question-and-answer session at Mobile World Congress 2012 on Tuesday, Schmidt said handing over control of things such as naming and DNS to the UN's International Telecommunications Union (ITU) would divide the internet, allowing it to be further broken into pieces regulated in different ways. 'That would be a disaster... To some, the openness and interoperability is one of the greatest achievements of mankind in our lifetime. Do not give that up easily. You will regret it. You will hate it, because all of a sudden all that freedom, all that flexibility, you'll find it shipped away for one good reason after another,' Schmidt said. 'I cannot be more emphatic. Be very, very careful about moves which seem logical, but have the effect of balkanising the internet,' he added, urging everyone to strongly resist the moves."
Another reason why we have to question why we're in the United Nations in the first place. (Let alone funding the whole Keystone Kops outfit)
I'm sorry but a citizen in my country has read and been offended by your first post. In our culture first posts are the devil and are treated as such. We are contacting your government to arrange extradition into the Holy Court.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
The fact is, We the People of the United States of America were first to fund DNS that makes the Internet what it is today. Sorry UN, you can't take it over without paying off some of the national debt your members hold.
Here I thought the day I would ever agree with Eric Schmidt on something was long, long gone!
The question is do you want to be fucked over by the US or by the U.N ?
I'd prefer neither to be honest, but if push comes to shove I'd hope the US were slighty, only slightly less evil than the ITU.
Hello minitel!
Just curious - in what way would that be different from the situation we have now? I didn't RTFA, but IMHO, such a move is long overdue.
IMHO, handing over the governance of the internet to some UN mandated body would probably be a good idea, further removing the net from the influence of a single nation. I'm not sure the ITU would be a good body, since I think they have a history of being a body to regulate in favor of the large telecoms providers (in fact, I think that's what the ITU is made up out of).
Anyone care to shed some light on this?
Ulli
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
This is supposed to be an accident?
They are drooling over the ability to control.
Deleted
I do agree with Eric S. "Balkanizing" is a well-chosen expression. The internet as it is has enough self-organization to not be in need of such pseudo-solutions as the proposed UN treaty seems to suggest.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Entire businesses, business models, infrastructures and architectures are built on the assumption of open-ness. Besides the harm it could to to mandkind, the implementation would not go smoothly to say the least.
Everyone loves to be free. But everyone is also impacted by the actions of their neighbors. Therefore, everyone has an incentive to prevent their neighbors from taking actions that one dislikes. So, everyone has an incentive to deny freedom to their neighbors.
The Internet is a shining example of great freedom, and hence great resistence.
Should you be free to murder me? Obviously not.
Should you be free to post lies about me, visible to the entire world, which motivate people to act in a way that harms me? Probably not. But that rule is *very* hard to enforce without also infringing on other things you *should* be free to do (whether I like it or not).
Google owns the internet!
He is an American running a company based out of America. Of course we want to maintain control. We Americans have run the show pretty well since we invented this medium/protocol/standard.
If it works.... don't break it.
The answer to all your problems
... will be routed around. Regulate DNS and something else will be used. Block IP addresses and new ones will take their place. While governments dictate indefinite ownership of ideas for their corporate owners and prosecute dissent, technology has been pulling society in the other direction. You can outlaw reality, but that doesn't make it go away, anymore than outlawing weeds stops them from growing.
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
Like any political entity, the primary goal of the UN is to consolidate and centralize power into the hands of the few, rather than decentralize power into the hands of the many.
Let's put it this way. There is X amount of political power available in the world, and Y amount of individuals holding that political power. The UN's goal is to lessen Y while maintaining the same value of X. If you like the sound of that, then you'll be glad to know that they have already made significant progress.
He's right, since the UN is the nwo gov.
The DNS system as it is now, in the not too distant future, I suspect will be viewed as little more than a Racket. Domain registration should be effectively free. There is no justification for the current registration fees (let alone the BLATANT racketeering fees for xxx and toplevel domains).
Darknets are the future. Ditch your ISPs DNS server as your primary authority (what timewarner does to unresolvable domains, injecting their advertising makes me want to puke).
Dear United Nations,
The internet is not broken. Please do not fix it.
Thank you.
Proverbs 21:19
Something like Tor, but some steps further, decentralized, untrackable and immune to government control.
If you chase the authority up the line it goes ICANN --> NTIA --> DoC --> US Congress.
Now, how prepared do you think the US congress is going to be to hand their control of the Internet over to China and Russia?
The ITU has been seeking relevance to the Internet since the 90s; in a world where balancing line voltages is no longer important the ITU's role in international telecommunications has been severely dimini$hed.
If you look at any step of the way, Bob Shaw from the ITU has been running around in secret trying to cover his tracks.
When GE Federal Systems used Alternic and posted it was "as good as if not better" than the legacy root servers, who called from the INTERNATIONAL TELECOMMUNICATIONS UNION IN GENEVA (t SOUNDS so impressive, in real terms, it's as impressive as being, say, the LAN administrator for the White House. Not much global policymaking happens in THAT cubicle) and asked them to stop as this was dangerous? Bob Shaw of the ITU. Oh, and he asked that his name be kept of it ("I didn't say this, I was never here" - Dune). Pity he didn't get the secretary to swear to the same secrecy, she told me who it was. Get used to it, maggots.
Who introduced the Government Advisory Comittee ("GAC") into ICANN as a fait d'accompli, drawn up in secret, who meet in secret but only have an advisory role - except where they insist on policy? DING DING DING - Bob Shaw of the ITU again. I held a quick straw poll on the floor of the first ICANN meeting in Berlin (the neo nazi demostration outside was a nice touch) and 13 out of 1000 people thought the GAC was a good idea - this for an organization that is supposed to "measure and implement community consensus" as its charter. The footage is still around on the Berkman Center servers at Harvard, and I have copies.
Who knew the fix was in an the US goverment had already picked an ICANN an ignored the worlds work via IFWP and bragged about it drunk in DC ? Bob Shaw of the ITU. He still owes me money from smoking all my wifes Virgina Slims from that night too.I don't trust him or the ITU with $10, let along the internet. He doesn't get this openness thing and is instead a remnant of old world secrecy.
At any rate, ICANN only has any authority at all at our leisure. If we type different numbers into special places in our computers they pretty much cease to exist in any operational capacity as the net is edge controlled, not centrally controlled. Everybody with a root password controls a little piece of it, and it grows at the edges.
This UN governance thing has been repeating like an onion sandwich for over a decade now. When the ITU couldn't get the IANA contract it upped the ante to use the UN moniker to try to get everyone in the world to rally behind it. Waste of time, they can be safely ignored. Nobody takes them seriously.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Regulation an issue? How about shifting technology in a direction that is harder to regulate? Get ubiquidous encryption going, and someone needs to work on a shift towards a content-addressible network for dissemination. It shouldn't even be difficult.
/SHA1HASHCAN as a special pseudo-directory and query their cache, then every open cache on their network before they tried to HTTP it.
You could encode CDA addresses as 'HTTP://fallback-http-server/SHA1HASHCAN/hash/mime/mime/filename' - that way you'd have backwards compatibility, as any browsers not programmed to first ask their local CDA cache node if it has that data would fall back to HTTP. Those that are programmed for it would recognise
CAN is the solution to so many problems. It'd be substantially harder to censor, substantially harder to trace either source or destination of data, eliminate a lot of congestion-causing demand on the internet infrastructure, be more resilient against faults and dramatically reduce the cost of distributing content ensuring that the individuals and small groups on the internet would be just as able to publish large media files as the big boys who can afford global CDNs.
Yes, I'm rather taken with the idea of a distributed, hash-addressible global public cache right now. Storage is dirt cheap, network capacity isn't.
Governments hate and always have hated the loss of control over their people. A major means of control is control over communication between the masses of people. When the printing press was invented, governments immediately instituted controls. That was not too hard, because printing presses were and still are expensive, as are broadcast stations. Controlling those media outlets is relatively easy because there are so few in comparison to the people on the Internet. Now anyone with a computer and a reasonable Internet connection can make their ideas available to anyone else with an Internet connected gadget. All governments without exception hate this because it lessens their control over their populations.
A sufficiently advanced simulation is indistinguishable from reality.
As someone who has watched as youtube, controlled by google last I heard, has slowly whittled away at these supposed freedoms (this birdsong is copyright douchebag corp, your video offends a muslim in malaysia and has been taken offline, your video offends the catholic clergy and has been removed, etc), I find this deliciously ironic.
Clean up your own house first, Schmidt.
... is that Google might lose its current degree of influence over governance if that governance isn't in the United States. Google would have far less sway with the ITU than with ICANN and the other U.S.-based agencies. Once again it's the 'selfish voice' masquerading as a 'voice of the people'.
...this is true: "UN Treaty a Disaster"
Power elitists win, everyone else loses.
Well, while ITU, or the UN for that matter, aren't the ideal organizations we wanted them to be, US is far from ideal either.
I mean, the US government start wars over oil and kill THOUSANDS of civilians in the process... disrupt democratic governments, do lobby and forces others countries like spain to do your willing. I don't trust the US any of my chilean pesos.
And I think your politics "state of affairs" is very dissapointing or.... how to put it... sh*tty.
I would trust some kind of "P2P" regulation or something where everyone has the RIGHT to build the future of the internet. ICANN has been good, but what if not?
US, or China, or any government is just too simple for the internet. As countries grow more interconnected and intraconnected, classic government loose practical power to do what it meant to do: maintain and improve civilizations.
Anyway, sorry for my bad english. I'm not from the US. Cheers!
The question people should be asking themselves is if they want someone like Bashar Assad or Mugabe or China or the next Pol Pot regime to have a say in what you can and can't do on the internet. Because as soon as you bring it to the UN you give equal footing to regimes that shouldn't have any say. Just like when Kadaffi's Libya was in charge of the UN commission on Human Rights.
The ultimate threat to the Internet is not governments, it's corporations. If a government tries to twist or shape or censor the Internet, there will always be ways around it and in the end, citizens and even other countries and their citizens will bring down the plans of such regimes.
But when corporations take something over, it's gone for good. There will be no Tor, no darknet.
Even with their armies and weapons, governments are much weaker than corporations. Because ultimately, those armies are made up of people, and the ones holding those weapons are people. But there are no tools for people to fight off or take down corporations once they have reached a certain level of power. Finally, the decisions in a corporation are made not by the people who work for the corporation, or even the owners, but by the legal virtual entity that is required to only seek greater shareholder value. Even if the shareholders, or board of directors, or C-level officers decide they want to assign some social good a slightly greater weight in the corporate decision-making process, the corporation is designed to ignore them and only to seek greater shareholder value. No "free market" mechanisms exist that allow for the power of corporations to be reigned in. And now we have shares of corporations owned by other corporations, so there are layers and layers of decision gates that only respond to greater share value. We have corporations that are worth more than all but about 10% of world governments. What possible defense does a country, even a democracy, have against such a single-minded golem that only knows how to feed endlessly.
Greater regulation may well be the last line of defense against a corporate takeover of the Internet. Really, of the world. But it's a small window that's closing. And the wealth of those corporations is being used to obfuscate, confuse, disarm and distract.
It's a shame the United Nations is so weak. So corrupt. The solution is not to regulate the Internet, but to regulate the corporations.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I've said this before and I'll say it again, because people really need to wake up, smell the coffee, and internalize this:
The UN doesn't represent YOU, or any other PERSON. It represents GOVERNMENTS. Governments are their constituents, not humaity.
Let me repeat that: The UN's constituents are GOVERNMENTS, not humanity. If you understand that, you will understand UN policy and why they do things that otherwise seem bizarr or incompetent.
And from the point of view of virtually every government, no matter how "benign" it may appear, the Internet is most certainly broken. Why? Because they cannot easily control it, control the content on it, or control what the people using it see and say. This impacts their ability to govern the way they would like to (and the way they used to) by feeding an official line to the media and have it echoed into every home and automobile, often without much question.
What humanity sees as a working, functioning internet that has democratized information and allowed an unprecedented level of collaboration, cooperation, and exchange of ideas, our governments one and all see as their biggest threat. What better way to reign in that threat than to turn control over to the UN, then agree by treaty how it is to be "governend". What they tried with SOPA and ACTA they'll be able to easily achieve through a simple UN governance mandate.
Sianara Internet, sianara freedom of communication. Welcome your new overlords, same as the olds ones, but with less compunction about smacking you down into place. With perfect political cover to the ostensibly liberal western democracies: to the public: "we regret the UN's decision to implement X, but are bound by treaty to abide their decision. This minor erosion of internet expression won't impact our fundamental freedoms any, and we'll learn to cope", to the Koch brothers (or Soros if you're on the other side of the aisle): "Problem solved. Can I count on your campaign contribution to my superpac next season?" Multiply across every politician, in every political system, in every government, and diversify by whatever means is appropriate to the local political climate, wether it's campaign contributions, secret tribunals, or shells raining down on opposition cities.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Am I the only one who senses that China/Russia are pushing for UN control of the internet because the US overstepped its bounds by enforcing its shitty copyright laws beyond its borders with domain seizures? We need to stop this, and before that happens we may need to force the US government to guarantee that it won't mess with internet infrastructure any more...
At the risk of being labeled a nationalist, I find any proposal from Russia/China/etc concerning human rights to be inherently suspect. The Chinese are well-known in their opposition to any information that does not fit the PRC's narrative of the universe. The Russians are a little more nuanced in that its citizens are free to speak their minds with fear of repercussions so long as it does not interfere with the oligarch's operations or run against any widely popular State policy.
In either case, I don't see how transferring control of the internet from one government sworn to uphold freedom of speech (the United States) to a committee where many of the 193 world-be members have no such obligations can be considered a wise move.
Google has deep pockets, and has been known to do good things for their own sake (no, I don't buy the whole "don't be evil" thing, but there's a decent track record there) Setup or fund existing mesh networking systems to allow a grassroots network (with a new name) that is decentralized completely. I know research is going on in this area for a variety of reasons, put more brains and money on it and make it happen. "Work toward saying to the UN: You can have the Internet, we're done with it now."
The USA does not represent you or your nation and for the informed they know the USA does not represent its own citizens either.
SOPA and ACTA will eventually happen somehow as soon as the public drops the ball long enough on the issue for them to sneak it bye; with or without the UN. At least with the UN it will have even more BS to navigate and given how weak the UN is it will probably not have the impact the USA is today messing with people's domains, pushing around foreign officials like puppets etc.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
So - because there are valid issues with how Google manages it's business, we should completely ignore the valid points Schmidt makes, and let the UN have the internet?
Check your premises.
A global organisation controlling the Internet would seem like a good thing, at least better than the current direction of every nation doing its own censorship fracturing the once global net to pieces. The problem is, the UN is the worst organisation for this job. First, it wouldn't solve the fracturing problem, the oppressive regimes are freely ignoring UN concerns about everything else already. And second, the UN is mainly a collective of corrupt first-world politicians and barbaric thirld-world tyrants. It's not a democratic organisation, and not one I would trust with anything. While the US control over the net is also threatening, they at least seem to listen to their people/corporations once in a while.
Why doesn't UN go after something that everyone hates, the local DMV!?
As someone who has watched as youtube, controlled by google last I heard, has slowly whittled away at these supposed freedoms (this birdsong is copyright douchebag corp, your video offends a muslim in malaysia and has been taken offline, your video offends the catholic clergy and has been removed, etc), I find this deliciously ironic.
Clean up your own house first, Schmidt.
I agree with your point, but I think you have it backwards.
Google is a global private company. The simple fact that Google is "forced" to obey the laws of China if it wishes to operate there is actually a perfect example of Schmidt's point. Currently China has power over Google, but little power over the global internet itself.
He's basically trying to prevent the internet from following in Toutube's footsteps.
Google is Google (and other crap like YouTube). If Google fucks up Google, who really cares. If the UN fucks up the Internet...
Hitler hates pedophiles.
Who needs guns when you've got the genome? I know most /.ers have never had their genome hacked, but believe me it's not a subtle distinction.
Absent government enforcement of civil conduct, corporations would become scary as fast as you can throw money at the dark economy. Let me guess, in your special world, the dark economy doesn't have guns. We agree on one thing though. Most of the worst things in society result from behind the scenes influence of business on government.
It's news like this that makes mortality bearable. I grew up believing in mankind's inexorable upward swing but have been forced to alter my views over the last decade or so. We are a doomed species preoccupied with selling eachother useless trinkets, maintaining status quo, and valuing commerce over intrinstic humanity. Our greatest achievement was landing on the moon, and even that was tainted by Kellogg's. Off topic? Not really.
So if the UN were just a meeting place for diplomacy, that'd be great. An organization where nations can get together and talk shit out. Fine.
However all this world government shit? Ya that is where I have problems. Not only because I don't agree with the idea but because they are so toothless when it comes to shit that actually matters. They want money, troops, etc, and to play at being a government, but then really do a lot of nothing useful (and do shit like Sierra Leon head the human rights council).
So we don't need to get rid of it, but it should be scaled back to just an international forum for diplomacy.
"Internet freedom and innovation are at risk of being stifled by a new United Nations treaty that aims to bring in more regulation, Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt has warned."
That's just crazy talk. Regulation is freedom!
Hitler hates pedophiles.
"the net is edge controlled, not centrally controlled"
That is very true. People seem to have this view of DNS as some sort of evil tyranny where ICANN rules everything at the behest of secret US interest and everyone else is fucked.
No, actually, DNS is 100% a system of trusts and it can change at any time on the end user level. The reason ICANN has power is because all the root-servers.net roots trust them. They get their root zone from ICANN. They don't have to, they could get it from somewhere else if they wanted, ICANN is just who they trust.
The reason they matter is they are who nearly all DNS servers trust by default. The DNS in Windows server, BIND, etc they all use the root-server.net roots by default. The admin can change that any time they like. Hell they can be a root. It is just how things are by default.
Then of course on your system, it trusts whatever DNS servers you tell it to. By default that is whatever DHCP advertises. However you can change it to anything your want, run your own if you like.
So ICANN's power is entirely de facto, not de jure. Not only can there be alternate systems, there are. OpenDNS is one. Different roots, the whole 9 yards. They mirror the ICANN root file, but should ICANN do something they don't like, they can choose to ignore the change.
Any other country or organization can have their own DNS. Hell they might even be able to play nice with ICANN. Say the EU decides to start up their own organization, EUCANN. They get their own root servers and all that jazz. They start off just mirroring the ICANN zone as they get everything set up and running well. They they convince DNS servers to start using their roots. Maybe when you are in the EU, DNS uses their first and ICANN's as backup since they are more geographically concentrated there (though many of the roots are anycast, they are still US heavy). Perhaps I and K switch over from ICANN to EUCANN since they are controlled by EU based groups. Then maybe they contact ICANN and talk about splitting the root zone. EUCANN becomes responsible for the content of EU nation domains, ICANN retains all the rest. They mirror each other.
Life is good.
The problem seems to be that nobody wants to spend the money. They just want the existing systems and infrastructure to be under their control. They want to give the orders, they don't want to build infrastructure.
While ultimately it is Google's choice to take down videos, it is simply because they would prefer to obey the law. Which they did not write. You're well within your rights of free speech to offend anyone you like. You cannot however break the law, nor would any respectful business allow and facilitate that through equipment they maintain, and offer to you to use for free.
None of us know everything. Therefore we're all naïve.
"because all of a sudden all that freedom, all that flexibility, you'll find it shipped away for one good reason after another,"
Eric Schmidt said that? Even if he's right, it's hard to take any wisdom/preaching from him about "freedom" when he has said the following, with a straight look on his face: "If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place..."
Based on that, he sounds like he only cares about freedom when it doesn't benefit him or his interests. I have to wonder what his real "Google" motive or angle is...
On the Internet everyone really is equal, and everyone is free to exchange information and learn, and nobody is is free from criticism or having their thoughts/beliefs critically analyzed/challenged, and having that shoved in their face.
This is an unbelievably great thing, the Internet is the most perfect platform for fighting ignorance, intolerance and corruption in society, by educating and challenging people; this is a direct threat to everyone who holds a disproportionate/unfair amount of power, and some of those people will try to lock things down and censor the Internet to protect their power.
The Internet is massively accelerating change in todays society (in attitudes and societal/political intelligence, among many other things), and the way it is run will directly affect the outcome of society and politics in the future, in ways that affect everyone (and I think it will play a bigger and bigger role over time); the threat of censorship doesn't just threaten freedom of speech on the internet, but it threatens to cause a massive negative impact on the development of society into the future, and so any censorship at all (or even the threat of it, e.g. from a corrupt UN agency), no matter how small, must be resisted.
It really is an all-or-nothing thing, any little bit of censorship (no matter how small) will always escalate, and it is very important that this is driven home to people.
Google don't want to censor videos. Everything they take down is a potential loss in advertising money.
They do it because of the laws.
Well ... let's see. The UN wants : ...
control of energy generation, in particular nuclear and fossil fuel based
control of the telephony system, particularly spying on it (they've got this)
control of military force deployment, in particular control of Jewish defence forces
and now
control of the internet
In trade for these controls they promise individuals positions of power and wealth, for themselves and their children or immediate family/friends (wages of 400-500k USD NET are typical at the UN, high wages are in the millions (all tax-free income, they pay no taxes, yet have more benefits than US senators, largely paid by US taxpayers)).
Starting to see the picture ?
Their direct predecessors, the League of Nations, is often held responsible for causing world-war-2. Looking that the UN's actions, that assessment seems very accurate. Fortunately ... they're also morons. Fortunately the US really goes against them.
(my family was first abandoned to a civil war by UN "peacekeepers", then those peacekeepers were replaced and they attacked the very people they were sent to protect, because they simply attacked anything that was black. Nobody ever so much as admitted a mistake. The UN Katanga mission, the very first military intervention of the freshly renamed UN). Even today, people run away from anything with blue helmets in central africa.
Incidentally, the birdsong video is back online. The thing to keep in mind here is that this system was fully automated. An AI algorithm made a seemingly dumb mistake (I'll bet you it won't be nearly as stupid if you look at how the algorithm works, instead of just feeling superior), and the program ran it's course.
It's a stupid mistake of an automated algorithm. You can blame google for this, but essentially it's a more complex version of the old "sudo nohup rm -Rf /" paste. Apparently google seems to think that the uploaded videos can't be watched by actual people, that'd be too pricey. So if you want to have a free youtube, mistakes like this will be part of the experience. Imho, they're doing pretty fucking well at this.
As for the religious intolerance double standard on google's youtube, essentially allowing muslims to post videos inciting genocide and having a "don't offend" standard for everyone else. Now that is a problem. It is not a problem limited to youtube though, and the source of the problem is that muslims just don't seem to be offended at videos calling for massacres and genocide, resulting in a lot of these videos never getting reported. This is exactly the attitude you find in muslim countries press and it's an attitude that's spreading. The other side of the problem boils down to muslims using violence to suppress any criticism, in their own countries and everywhere else. Often there's organised campaigns on messageboards getting masses of people to "report" videos "they find offensive" resulting in those videos getting taken offline.
Everyone claims that since the enlightenment that attitude "doesn't work", but in my humble opinion, mobs using dumb violence against "enlightened" people, whether atheists or "competing" religions (or even against things like socialism) ... seems to work pretty fucking well to erode our so-called "rights".
Hmm no... what about (paraphrasing) "the copyright holders have reviewed the content in question and have confirmed it's really theirs"? *That* is where google fucked up, by arrogantly assuming their algorithm is right, the complaint is wrong. And if, as you said, having people look at videos costs too much, then the least they could do is change that message to "our automated system blah blah". If you make a robot and set it loose, you're responsible for what it does, because you set it loose. If you drink so much you don't know what you're doing anymore, you are responsible for what you do (even though you don't know what it is), because you drank so much.
Look, honestly, will you all just get with the programme. DNS is DEAD. In fact most of Internet 1.0 is DEAD, deady DEAD. P2PNS and all its related brethren will soon bring about a network that the evils can only shut down *physically*, and they soon after wont even be able to do that. Let them exhaust themselves attacking these worthless targets, in their glacially slow grape-sized-brains way.
I didn't SEE any valid points from Schmidt, only fear-mongering of the idea that anything but US control would be a disaster.
What a shock -- an American seeing loss of US control as a disaster.
You're the bozos who tried to push crap like SOPA on the world and who've been taking down websites without going through proper channels whenever your corporate lobbyists demand it.
The US had their chance to run a free and open internet.
They sold out to the media companies.
At least the ITU doesn't have a history of selling out to media companies who don't know shit about technology.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
It's a stupid mistake of an automated algorithm. You can blame google for this, but essentially it's a more complex version of the old "sudo nohup rm -Rf /" paste. Apparently google seems to think that the uploaded videos can't be watched by actual people, that'd be too pricey. So if you want to have a free youtube, mistakes like this will be part of the experience. Imho, they're doing pretty fucking well at this.
The problem with the birdsong issue was not that the automated system picked it up, it was that the video poster protested the take down, Rumblefish reviewed the claim and still declared themselves to be the holder of the birdsong copyright:
http://boingboing.net/2012/02/27/rumblefish-claims-to-own-copyr.html
You're right that Google isn't the party to really get mad at here, the problem is that there is no penalty for this kind of fraudulent claim by a copyright holder. A fine, at the least, would be appropriate.
A fine, at the least, would be appropriate.
Actually, let me correct myself here - a fine is not enough. Under the DMCA an individual who misrepresents themselves the way that Rumblefish has in this case would be guilty of perjury. No less should be true for a company doing the same.
Wait, Google cares about user privacy? Man, the irony is just oozing out of this article!
Have gnu, will travel.
wtf is sianar??
Perhaps the UN should move out of the USA to North Korea or Iran. That makes disliking UN and UN policies even easier.
The constituent components of the UN are States, not governments. Lacking an alternative, States are personified in the UN by a representative of the national government. This is merely a convention, not an obligation: it is entirely feasible for States to send directly elected individuals to the UN. In fact, the UN charter makes provision for up to 5 representatives per State.
More like The Guild of Calamitous Intent, actually. This is why we don't see David Bowie much these days.
Because in America now, Reagan would be a leftist commie.
Technically,
In the last 50 years, the ITU could have invented, fostered, and governed a world wide data network.
But instead, they they gave us a phone network.
Both networks are nice, but if I had to choose, I think I prefer the Internet.
Politically,
If history is a guide, the future evolution of the internet seems safer in it's current hands.
(Unless of course you don't like what the Internet is now perhaps because it is difficult to control as a source of free information.)
Because the payments only stopped when the dollar dropped against the pound in the new millenium meaning that the money paid by the UK government since 1940's, 60 years later, finally paid off the entire amount.
And therefore, by not adding on any more charges, this counts, to you, as "erasing the debt of the UK by us in the USA"?
I'm sorry, but are you completely insane. We may be the country that introduced SOPA, but we are also the country that, through massive public outcry shot it down. Care to mention how the UN would be in any way, shape, or form MORE beholden to the public than the US goverment?
Don't get me wrong, there is plenty of problems with the US government, but the rise and swift demise of SOPA is one of the great success stories of public vs private good.
The U.S. government is extremely corrupt.
Google is a global private company. The simple fact that Google is "forced" to obey the laws of China if it wishes to operate there is actually a perfect example of Schmidt's point. Currently China has power over Google
Google ceased complying with Chinese demands that Google censor searches for China in 2010.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Are you suggesting that a private company should only obey the laws IT decides are legitimate? I thought your US rule of law was by your government by, for, and of the people?
Instead of simply choosing the laws it obeys company executives with values I agree with should instead lobby for change in a clear and transparent manner. Much like he is doing in this case.
The clear and transparent manner is in contrast to giving millions of dollars to some shadowy SuperPac. Unless of course it is American for for a better tomorrow, tomorrow.
What's that game where you knock down a peg with a wooden mallet, and two more pop up before you have a chance to knock them all down..Is this how it's going to be with endless attempts to control the internet too? Perhaps what we need is an internationally agreed internet "bill of rights and freedoms" with the force of law..although since it's the very same people trying to curb the net that would have to draft and enact this bill, I think it's unlikely we'll ever see it.
It's not just the Internet. Read title 21 which reads like a complete shift to socialism with the elimination of private property, the effect on the Internet, Usurping our Constitution. Go to Wiki and look up UN title 21. It makes for some scary reading. As far as I can see the US has absolutely nothing to gain and a lot to lose with the UN treaty. We already pay 60% of the bill, provide 60% of the materials, and 60% of the manpower. I think it's time to tell the UN and Clinton to take the treaty and stick it where the sun don't shine.
Verisign is a government sanctioned monopoly, they are practically printing money; They will fight this like hell, with the U.S. Gov't behind them.
Good luck, world. You're screwed. The fact that Verisign is still in business should tell you everything you need to know.
I guess that if we are not happy with the internet, then a second internet system could be setup. If you then want the controls, join the first one. If you want freedom and innovation, join the second
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
The article is notably missing any kind of actual source for these supposed 'proposals'. It also doesn't actually quote the question that Schmidt was asked, or make it at all clear whether Schmidt actually raised the topic or whether he was simply blindsided with a question like 'would it be a good idea to transfer control of the internet to the ITU'.
The only actual citation in the original article is to the speech by the FCC commissioner, which similarly didn't provide any actual proof of the claims made, and was vigorously disputed by the ITU itself.
So really - we still don't actually have any clear indication there is any proposal to 'transfer control of the internet to the UN' in the first place. Just the FCC commissioner's assertion, directly rejected by the ITU, that there is such a proposal.