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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)."
The only thing they are worried about is that the US would not control it.
I am not a robot. I am a unicorn.
You all kept saying that nobody could mishandle the Internet worse than the US, and the UN took it as a challenge!
The US is not great. The US does things like seizing domain names based on minimal cause and then spending years before they give them back. A lot of those seized have been over copyright issues and in some cases they haven't even been clearly infringing. This is similar to how many states in the US have assert forfeiture laws which allow police to confiscate large sums of money or cars under minimal suspicion of involvement with illegal drug dealing, and getting them back is difficult.
But the UN would be worse. The UN contains many countries with little conception of free speech. Even allies of the US like Canada and Britain have substantially less free speech than the US does. In the case of Britain libel although being reformed is still very much a danger. In Canada, speech which specifically targets minorities or criticizes religions can be labeled as hate speech with fines given. And most of the world, is much much worse. Consistently a large fraction of the Islamic countries have tried to push through anti-blasphemy regulations in the UN. So far they've failed. But it is easy to imagine what would happen if they could actually block pictures of Muhammad. Similarly. China would slaver at the thought of not having to do its own censorship but simply have no websites discussing Tiananmen Square at all. Letting even weak internet control get in the hands of the UN is a recipe for disaster. Maybe in 20 or 30 years when the free speech situation has improved. But not right now.
America is trying to manhandle the Internet. But the UN could give it the death of a thousand cuts. Of course they will run into the reverse problem when they try and run the US, the fact that almost all of the Internet here is privately owned.
I think the question lies in what you consider worse. Do you fear unlimited, unaccountable, and unbridled surveillance, like the kind that's being proposed in the US, that effectively covers the entire world... or are you more worried about censorship, virtual toll roads that make the doing business more expensive, and totally unrepresented taxation? Not to mention regional fragmentation, which you'll see in some of the proposals. Neither agenda is good, but which is worse? Personally, I don't think either side of this debate understands the internet at all. If the internet is going to be controlled by anyone, it should be the people who work and live in it. It's mine, damn it.
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The US did not make the Internet. Quoting from this history, "The earliest pioneers included a Frenchman, Louis Pouzin, who introduced the idea of data grams and an Englishman, Donald W. Davies, who was one of the inventors of packet-switching. Another of the great pioneers in Britain was Peter T. Kirstein, who went to America at the beginning of the Arpanet in 1969 when it was decided that Davies could not go for reasons of national security." And of course as we all know Tim Berners-Lee, another Englishman, invented the web.
The internet was designed to be open and free. Leave it be.
The internet was designed to be unregulated. Leave it be.
The internet was designed with open access for everyone in mind. Leave it be.
The internet was designed to be unhindered, unfettered, unfiltered, uncapped. Leave it be.
For those bastards who think they have the right and the need to control it, regulate it, tax it, reroute it, filter it, cap it, limit it, contain it - leave it be.
Information wants to be free, it will find a way. The internet, like nature will evolve until it does so.
It's pretty common to believe that no central source can control the internet - and it's true for the most part - with one major exception: IANA ultimately answers to the US Department of Commerce.
In order for the internet to function, there has to be a central authority who determines who gets what IP addresses and domain names. That authority is under the control of the US. Sure you could create your own internets (yes, plural) with your own name and number rules, however if you can't all agree upon who gets what IP address blocks and domain names, you aren't going to have a very cohesive and universal network like the one we have today.
Honestly, I am perfectly fine with the US having control over that, and in fact would much rather they hold the keys rather than the UN. If the UN had their way, that would mean countries who have heavy influence of the UN (e.g. China) would have their way.
So far, the US has done a great job. Sure, we've had talks about filtering the internet (e.g. SOPA) many times, but unlike 90% of the other countries out there (Australia, UK, Germany, China, Iran, just to name a few,) we haven't acted upon any of them. Granted, we have taken extraordinary and unnecessary if not unethical measures, such as taking down megaupload, we didn't do so by ordering IANA to break the infrastructure.
The best thing about the US having control, is that we've never done anything to dismantle the infrastructure in the name of politics. The UN wants control because they plan on doing exactly that.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_protocol_suite
The Internet protocol suite resulted from research and development conducted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the early 1970s. After initiating the pioneering ARPANET in 1969, DARPA started work on a number of other data transmission technologies. In 1972, Robert E. Kahn joined the DARPA Information Processing Technology Office, where he worked on both satellite packet networks and ground-based radio packet networks, and recognized the value of being able to communicate across both. In the spring of 1973, Vinton Cerf, the developer of the existing ARPANET Network Control Program (NCP) protocol, joined Kahn to work on open-architecture interconnection models with the goal of designing the next protocol generation for the ARPANET.
By the summer of 1973, Kahn and Cerf had worked out a fundamental reformulation, where the differences between network protocols were hidden by using a common internetwork protocol, and, instead of the network being responsible for reliability, as in the ARPANET, the hosts became responsible. Cerf credits Hubert Zimmerman and Louis Pouzin, designer of the CYCLADES network, with important influences on this design.
The network's design included the recognition it should provide only the functions of efficiently transmitting and routing traffic between end nodes and that all other intelligence should be located at the edge of the network, in the end nodes. Using a simple design, it became possible to connect almost any network to the ARPANET, irrespective of their local characteristics, thereby solving Kahn's initial problem. One popular expression is that TCP/IP, the eventual product of Cerf and Kahn's work, will run over "two tin cans and a string."
A computer, called a router, is provided with an interface to each network. It forwards packets back and forth between them.[3] Originally a router was called gateway, but the term was changed to avoid confusion with other types of gateways.
Yes the United States did make the internet. You're welcome.
This is all a bit rich, reading the resolution, considering that is is coming from the country which unilaterally seizes domains at will.
Don't forget as well that this is coming from the same government that proposed a kill switch for the Internet. Sounds more like "nobody should control the Internet, unless it is us" (well, this arguably applies to the US part of the Internet).
The resolution also says: "Whereas the world deserves the access to knowledge, ... and the informed discussion that is the bedrock of democratic self-government that the Internet provides;"
I thought that WikiLeaks and cablegate were exactly the kind of things which promote a healthy discussion in a democracy, but I doubt that that's what they had in mind when they drafted this resolution, free access to knowledge and all.
This all seems more like a bit of patriotic posturing. Blah blah land of the free blah blah cannot trust anybody else to be as free as we are blah blah. Seriously, it does not matter one bit what will be proposed at this conference; how exactly are you going to *force* the US to relinquish control? Not going to happen.
As any expert will tell you, none of these pie-in-the-sky proposals about the ITU taxing the Internet or the like have any chance of being pushed through. Even the US government itself doesn't take the risk seriously, except for political purposes like this. This is all just the latest step in a huge beat-up about something that could never happen. The motivation is just to distract from the real Internet governance changes that do need to happen, and that are being discussed much more sensibly in other fora (such as at the WSIS Forum last month in Geneva). That doesn't mean that we need to keep an eye the ITU, because it is true that it's a very secretive and closed organisation, but at least let's be honest about the risks.
Why is it that Americans always use kindergarten proverbs when debating? Just shows how dumb and ignorant you are. .com, .net and .org are supposed to be international, but the USA have given themselves the right to seize domains using these extensions, in effect killing the political neutrality of the web.
The US government has overtaken the Internet when they started seizing domain names without due process.
This is a serious mistakes and the USA deserve to lose their current control of the web over this!
Also, ICANN is corrupt and broken. They're creating new TLDs like it's something amazing, when in fact there's simply no reason not to let anyone name their website whatever they want. And they're charging crazy sums of money for these new TLDs too. .com, .en, .us, .fr, etc. are just part of the name. ICANN just decides each website name has to end in dot-something, and from a technical point of view whether it's .com or .octopus makes absolutely no difference, it doesn't require extra work or extra infrastructure/configuration/whatever. But ICANN just wanted control, they felt it was their job to organize TLDs, and now they want to charge money for giving us the freedom to name our websites.
And I wouldn't worry about China or Russia taking control. If the UN takes control, it means every country will get their say.
And if somehow China manages to pass rules about the web that we don't like, it will be the excuse we've been waiting all these years to nuke these assfucks.
My captcha was "fuck off".
Who cares if anyone can surveil was is sent across the internet. That is rather the point of a public network, and if you don't want others to snoop then you encrypt.
ANY of the other stuff inherently breaks the internet or at least seals it off to a huge portion of the planet.
It's not even close which is why even in the middle of an election season two diametrically opposed parties are dead set against it, in unison.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The US did not make the Internet. Quoting from this history [nethistory.info],
Exactly - glad to see some actual data.
The original research that led to the internet was almost all done in Europe. Saying the "US made the internet" is like saying "the us invented the automobile". It's only seen as true to Americans raised to think the US did everything.
Captcha; elephant
Your quotes don't support your claim. Some Europeans invented a few of the underlying technologies. So what? The first car was made by Karl Benz (yes, as in Mercedes-Benz) in Germany. Would you claim that Germany didn't invent the car because the internal combustion engine was invented elsewhere?
How about US censorship of porn and gambling? Or do you think the .xxx domain will not be used by republicans to make a push in the future to force all porn on to that new domain and then block it everywhere?
How about the DMCA which has been used to censor material considered undesirable by both parties funders?
Censorship comes in many forms. Frankly it is no issue to me if Iranians can't see some stuff, but the DMCA hits everyone in the whole world. The US dictating its laws world wide is far worse then a country dictating its laws to its own people. Let the Iranians get rid of their government if they want an uncensored net. It can be done. But the Iranians can never be rid of the US government and its corporate masters.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Those proposals seem like terrible ideas, but it is no surprise given the countries that proposed them. It is just sad to see what it finally takes for the republicans and democrats to agree on something. Maybe if we tell them that the UN is going to forbid countries from implementing a single-payer health system, then congress will decide to implement it out of spite.
Why can't they just leave us alone?
I mean, why do the governments want to interfere with the Net, a medium whereby people from all corners of the world can share information, and discuss, and plan, and scheme?
Oh, wai ...
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
It's worse than that. It like claiming that Germany invented GPS because they created the V2 rocket.
What I miss in both the summary and the linked articles are two things:
Frankly, all I see right now is the usual anti-UN hit piece written by a lazy American journalist, and a Slashdot audience of complete chumps who fall for it.
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
yeah well, TCP/IP is kinda useless without Maths. so i guess the greeks invented the internet.
i spent five minutes thinking and all i got was this crappy sig
Which is better/worse: The known evil of the US abusing their control power to steal domains and disrupt business for those they do not like (as the result of bribes, misguided politics or plain stupidity), or the possible evil of groups in the UN imposing national politics on the greater Internet?
I personally prefer to deal with the known, and the known is that the US has been grossly abusing their current power on the Internet - and that needs to be stopped.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
If the UN gets control of the Internet, there is a real risk that you won't get to see what Muslim clerics and conservative Christians deem offensive, because together, they control a large number of powerful governments.
Porn and gambling are highly restricted in most places around the world, including parts of Europe. When you compare free speech rights around the world, the US is still better than almost all other places.
Bad as the DMCA is, it is still better than the legal situation that exists in many European countries. Look at France's HADOPI or the ability of Germany's GEMA to restrict music distribution in Germany.
I don't know who to hate now....oh wait I remember....I hate all of you.
Imagine a world run by librarians...all information is free and uncensored but we all have to speak in whisper voices and women have to wear their hair in buns and sensible shoes and tearing pages out of library books would punishable by a year in jail.
The US did not make the Internet. Quoting from this history [nethistory.info], "The earliest pioneers included a Frenchman, Louis Pouzin, who introduced the idea of data grams and an Englishman, Donald W. Davies, who was one of the inventors of packet-switching.
I realise you're quoting, but just in case there's any confusion, Donald W Davies was a Welshman, not an Englishman