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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.
Here I thought the day I would ever agree with Eric Schmidt on something was long, long gone!
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
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).
At least I can complain to my own government and vote out politicians. Where do I go to complain against the UNs policies?
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.
This is a hard truth, but it must be said. The world at large is simply not evolved enough for the Internet. Most of Asia and almost all of the middle east are less able to appreciate the ideals of freedom and tolerance. I say this as an Indian whose government is very keen on controlling what's said on the Internet.
Despite the US's flaws, the first amendment is the strongest protection of free expression in the world. It's an achievement of mankind which the rest of the world is actually just not good enough to appreciate. The Internet is in truth something better than what we humans in our current state of evolution deserve. If you hand it over to the UN, it will become something we actually deserve at this moment in time...and that's not a pretty thing.
We accidentally stumbled upon the Internet as it is today. If people had seen it coming, it would never have been allowed to become what it is. But now that it's here, we have to protect it and treasure it because we've been blessed with something that's too good for us. The UN will reverse that and make it just average since all over unevolved countries will have a say in it.
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
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.
In theory? Also to your government. It's their job to try and keep the UN from issuing bad policies.
In another theory, if you're not a citizen of the US? Well, your government has less weight now than it would if the net were under the UN...
In practice? As another poster said, nowhere - working as intended.
Ulli
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
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.
Where do I go to complain against the UNs policies?
Arms dealers.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
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.
Unfortunately, we here in the US often aren't good enough to appreciate the first amendment either.
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.
What a horribly naive and ignorant statement. European research funding and a Brit invented the web, does that mean they should control the web?
What's debt got to do with anything anyway? It's the US and nations most closely aligned to it that hold far and away the majority of the world's debt whilst those nations in the UN whom the US sees as enemies such as China that hold far and away the largest surpluses. Bringing debt into it makes no sense as the US has far more than anyone else. Sorry if these facts upset your ignorant nationalist world view though.
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...
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.
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
I'm pretty sure the U.S. is currently seizing domain names on a regular basis, shutting down web sites and free speech, with absolutely no due process, and was recently well on its way to codifying this practice in law with SOPA/PIPA. They were killed but the DHS is still seizing domains like they were law.
The U.S. is also aggressively push ACTA on governments around the globe, often using blackmail, which can also be used to suppress free speech.
Especially since 9/11 the U.S. simply hasn't been the bastion of free speech you are trying to make it sound like.
Turning the Internet over to the UN would probably be bad for a host of reasons, but its quite obvious that the U.S. isn't even remotely trust worthy any more thanks to America's two pronged obsessions stopping piracy at all costs, including basic civil liberties, and to a lesser extent obsessing over Islamic extremism and terrorism.
All things considered I would prefer Internet control were passed to a country like Switzerland with a strong history of neutrality, resonable though not perfect free speech laws and a track record of supporting international agencies. It would be a better choice than either the U.S. or the U.N.
@de_machina
> Despite the US's flaws, the first amendment is the strongest protection of free expression in the world.
Is it? I mean it's fairly decent and all, and maybe it is even the best in theory (although I didn't compare US law to any of the other ~200 countries that exist) but given the fact that the US are hardly even near the top of lists such as the Press Freedom Index, perhaps it doesn't really work all that well in practice.
It's called Freenet. No one uses it, because it's slow, because no one uses it.
Ultimately, though, power-hungry governments will simply outlaw encryption (except to whilelisted endpoints) and that really will be the end.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
And where do I go to complain about US policies?
Some of us out here aren't terribly thrilled with the way America handles things that directly affect us.
This is the voice of World Control. I bring you Peace.
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.
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.
This doesn't even make sense. What is the "Internet" that should be in UN hands? IP allocations? DNS roots? RFC process? Well-known port allocations? It seems, from most posts, that DNS is the target. If so, let the UN go ahead and create its own hierarchy and administer it. No one will stop them! Or are you also suggesting that the World be forced to use UN DNS servers over the existing collection?
All you have to do it look at the makeup of the UN's Human Rights Council to realize it would be worse.
Plus China and Russia are pushing for this. As bad is ICE is, they're rank amateurs at blocking the net compared to the Chinese.
Eric is right the idea of the UN governing the Internet is a very very bad idea.
I don't think the UN would consider PIPA or SOPA. See: U.N. Report Declares Internet Access a Human Right
tomorrow who's gonna fuss
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.
There is NOTHING stopping you from setting up a DNS root and running your own DNS system. Go ahead and do it. I don't care. No one else here cares. In fact, not a single person in the World cares. The US won't stop you. They won't even try. Hell, they won't even notice!
Yeah, I was going to post something sorta like that, but you did it first, so thanks! We should be pointing this out whenever DNS's problems come up.
I've worked on a number of projects for which we created our own "root" servers, and added them to the appropriate file in all our systems. It worked fine, and nobody outside our project even noticed.
It's also common for organizations with an internal network (10.*.*.* or 192.168.*.* or whatever) to set up a bunch of internal "root" servers the same way. The DNS system was designed to work this way, and it works fine. I have a couple of DNS servers in my home network, which works fine, and doesn't interfere with anyone's Internet access in the outside world.
Of course, you probably want to define top-level domain names that are different from what the "public" DNS system uses. Most organizations use their own name for this, and that works without problems, too. You can also intercept internal references to the public root domains, if you like, so for instance you can prevent your people from referencing any hosts in the .it top-level domain if you don't want them referencing any Italian sites. You might want to think about this a bit before doing, but again, it won't interfere with (or be noticed by) anyone outside your local network.
We really should be posting explanations of this, whenever we read discussions of the problems with "the DNS system". Just bitching about, say, the US government's random (and unwarranted) takedowns of various organizatios' domain names won't do much to fix the problem. Expanding the DNS system beyond the US so that the US government can't do things like that is a lot more effective. And it's easy enough to do, without permission from anyone.
So we should continue to harp on this at every opportunity.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Internet != WWW
We already did, by erasing the debt the UK owed the US after WW2 from the lend lease program.
No, the UK paid off each and every cent of that debt, the final payment being made in 2007.
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.