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UN Takeover of Internet Must Be Stopped, US Warns
benfrog writes "In a rare show of bipartisan agreement, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle warned this morning that a United Nations summit in December will lead to a virtual takeover of the Internet if proposals from China, Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia are adopted. Called the World Conference on International Telecommunications, the summit would consider proposals including '[using] international mandates to charge certain Web destinations on a "per-click" basis to fund the build-out of broadband infrastructure across the globe' and allowing 'governments to monitor and restrict content or impose economic costs upon international data flows.' Concerns regarding the possible proposals were both aired at a congressional hearing this morning and drafted in a congressional resolution (PDF)."
I am not American, by the way.
The USA government is not perfect. Far from it. The domain seizure (not the entire internet, just the big 3 TLDs) without due process is awful. The wheels of justice turn slowly, and often very slowly in America. As Winston Churchill put it:
"Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing...after they have exhausted all other possibilities."
this is in contrast to most other countries which will stop short. I know mine (UK) will. We have a shadowy organisation (the IWF) responsible for blocking child pronography. The list of blocked sites has not yet been leaked, but in every other country where a direct analog list has been leaked it's turned out that there's plenty more than just child pronography on that list. I doubt that our blocklist is any better. And they're always looking to expand it to other objectionable content like "hate speech". And the government are now looking to put filters everywhere.
Look at any other European (or Australia) country and it's the same. Look anywhere else and it's worse.
The USA is, frankly, the only organisation that I would trust to any reasonable degree to actually run the internet. They will do it badly, and have long periods of injustice. But they have the strongest free speech protections of anywhere in the world and will almost certainly do it better and with less injustice that anyone else.
Who do you think would do a better job than the USA and why?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I must say that I think exactly like you on this topic. I'm not American - but when I read the list of countries this proposal came from, I nearly had to puke.
The US are not a judicial miracle wonderland - but they are certainly the best option we have.
And *anything* handed over to the UN is bound to finally be controlled by dictatorships in the worst case, or a complete bureaucratic dystopian organization in the best case. Better leave it with the US for now.