Slashdot Mirror
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."
I don't know about that. They might be exaggerating a little, but smart people frequently know a lot about many different things. I'm a software engineer, but I still remember plenty of the stuff I studied in high school and college about biology, chemistry, etc.
Of course, one excuse is that ST probably showed the "best and brightest", as Starfleet didn't accept fuck-ups and morons. But where on Earth in modern society do you see anything like that? Nowhere that I can think of. You might have some small collections of 'best and brightest' people here and there, but they don't make much impact because the rest of society is so fucked up, especially the leadership. In ST, Starfleet and the Federation didn't seem to have this problem at all. Maybe getting the Vulcans involved served to eliminate the worst aspects of human society somehow, because here in 2012, it's generally all the very worst people who get to the top in government and the largest corporations.
Direct contact with intelligent extraterrestrial live does seem to have a significant impact on society. In the world of Star Trek, sometime between the 20th century and the 'now' of the 24th century, and likely after first contact, society finally decided that there were better things to do than pushing spreadsheet columns around to make a profit for investors and making cheap, useless, overpriced gadgets imported from third-world sweatshops.