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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."
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.
It's not, an organisation requiring international consensus is not going to be able to pull off controversal decisions because you'd never get that consensus.
Many years ago, when WIPO was created it swayed towards much more relaxed IP laws than we have currently, this is because African nations wanted things like medicine and technology to come down in price faster so that their countries could experience benefits of western society sooner. The US didn't like the fact it got outvoted so side-stepped WIPO and created the WTO which is less democratic so that it could try and force international IP policies to go it's way. This is evidenced in the fact the US uses a lot of weight to try and force nations into the WTO, to force them to accept WTO rulings against them, yet has largely ignored WTO rulings against it on issues such as lumber, steel, cotton, gambling and so forth.
If the internet was in international hands you'd never get the domain seizures authorised that the US currently allows as you'd never get the political support for what is a US agenda. Similarly though you'd never get Chinese style censorship as there are too many nations that would be against it.
Technical issues would still be resolved just as well, because when technical issues arise there's really little political need or desire to hijack the issue and prevent a resolution passing - things like that are purely technical.
So all in all it'd be a much better situation than the current status quo where the US unilaterally imposes censorship on the internet based on it's ethnocentric vision of gambling and IP law.
Really, for the most part the only people who want it to stay in the US are American nationalists, xenophobes, and those with a vested interest in retaining the power it affords. There's a few folk in between who are ignorant about the UN and don't realise that it's far more than just the security council and that it already handles other international tasks like international mailing, maritime rules, air transport rules, telecomms and so forth perfectly well without any such drama that Schmidt is peddling.