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ISOC Hires MPAA Executive Paul Beringer
First time accepted submitter imwilder writes "The Internet Society has hired Paul Beringer to head up its operations in North America. Beringer was formerly Chief Technology Policy Officer for the MPAA, and Executive Director of Internet and Technology Policy for Verizon Corporate Services. Does this challenge the notion that ISOC is a 'trusted, independent source of Internet leadership?'"
Where "independent" and "objective" simply means "giving the bad as much airtime and consideration as the good."
... we now have a case of the fox and a platoon of his buddies guarding the henhouse?
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
:-|
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
When you hire someone, you don't magically become a shill of that person's past employer.
While true. You don't appoint the former CEO of a national beef conglomerate to be head of PETA. You don't appoint a former devil worshipper as pope. You don't appoint a former member of the pirate party as an executive of the RIAA.
The fact that you were a chief executive of an organization such as the MPAA says something about you. And what it says is largely inconsistent with the values of the internet society.
You choose executives whose personal views are consistent with the values of the organization, or who at least are not widely known as having opposite views; such as the scope and capabilities of the internet should be heavily restricted in order to protect media companies.
This. Paul is a personal friend of mine and a professional colleague and I will vouch for him as knowledgeable, fair-minded, and a talented lawyer and technologist. I have no doubt that he will perform admirably in the spirit of everything ISOC has done over the years to promote a free and open Internet. Then again, any article that would repeatedly misspell the name of the person being smeared proves itself uninformed and sloppy.
He was CTPO of the MPAA. You don't work for a group that evil and get to claim that you are a person working for the common good. You cant be fair minded and take the MPAA's money. At best he is a Puyi, and someone that politically naive does not belong belong in this position.
Even if he was trying to change it from the inside the only change that needs to happen at the MPAA is for it to disband and for everyone involved who ever aided in the bribery of politicians to be locked up. Your friend is complicit in the corruption of the United States political system and belongs in a cell, not heading up a North American chapter of ISOC.
Then again, it's not that hard to find quotes with him claiming copying threatens american jobs and that PIPA is a vehicle to deal with that, or the opposition to net neutrality from his stint at Verizon.
Unfortunately I think one gets tainted beyond redemption by even associating with the MPAA not to mention having gotten a paycheck from them. Perhaps he's just saying what his employers want him to, but in that case there would be more appropriate hires with a bit more spine for the ISOC to employ.
Anybody who has seen both Sean Doran's brilliant screed "It Seeks Overall Control" and watched the IAHC committee where ISOC made the deal with the devil for control of the DNS which it then presented to the USG as the final solution, can not be surprised at this.
After the US government threatened to make Jon Postel "go away" for his ideas about expanding the DNS to make NSI "one of many" registires (instead of the current plan to have 10,000 sales agents for .com) per the original NSF cooperative agreement with NSI/General Atomics/ATT, the USG (really Commerce) made their own version of IANA run by intellectual property lawyers, starting at the top with WIPO from Geneva being involved in the earliest secret (!) meetings about the DNS delivered on a platter by ISOC; this was initiated when Don Heath (ISOC) ran into Albert Tramposch (WIPO) and Bob Shaw (ITU) at an OECD workshop in Ottawa at about the time Jon was trying to expand the DNS namespace around the time the Vint Cerf's FNCAC advised the NSF to instruct NSI to began charging for domains.
ISOC, and really any of these organizations that start with an "I" are really a "you scratch my back I'll scratch yours" old boys club - look at their salaries on their organizations tax forms, they're 2 to 5 times for equivalent government work and lets face it if you saw FCC staffers in kayaks at a five star hotel Costa Rica claiming it was "bottom up multistakeholder consensus making" - one of four junkets a year - heads would roll and never mind the FCC has stated the multistakeholder model is rubbish.
But how else can they let the intellectual property crowd and speculators have as much as a say as all those people that actually own and operate nameservers?
Need Mercedes parts ?