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The Most Important Meeting You've Never Heard of
An anonymous reader writes "In December the nations of the world will gather in Dubai for the UN-convened World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT – pronounced 'wicket'). The topic of the meeting is nothing less than the regulation of the Internet. Under the auspices of the International Telecommunications Union the governments of the world will review the international treaty known as the International Telecommunications Regulations (ITR). The last review of the ITR was in 1988 when the Internet was just aborning. The remarkable and reshaping growth of the Internet provides the excuse for the new review. What's really afoot, however, is an effort by some nations to rebalance the Internet in their favor by reinstituting telecom regulatory concepts from the last century." At least it's being held in a hotbed of unfettered online communication.
All I ever read about is slavery. Is Dubai just a metaphor for "the rich can control everybody else" or is it a real country?
there's no free internet...
Discussing Unfettered communication" in the UAE is like discussing celibacy in a brothel.
Yeah, but it dovetails with 'how dare those dang foreigners interfere with the US!' narrative,. so it is getting lots of hyperbolic attention and fear that the US will be under UN control. Exceptional-ism is still a pretty strong meme in the US, and anytime a story comes out that someone other then the US might have power or that the US isn't a unilateral power that can do whatever it wants unquestioned, it gets whipped up into an expletive storm.
As a non US citizen, I hope this fails completely and the US maintains control.
As far as I can see, the US can be pretty crap, but they are by far the least worst option. if you think the US is bad look at the free speech protections of every single other country in the world.
Presumably, this meeting won't actually mean anything unuless America decides to cede control. I don't se why they would actually do that.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I'm American and yes treaties aren't popular here. Though in all fairness most Americans in almost all their practices live in a world where on most things the US congress is the final authority. There is no American version of Brussels. Further remember that 1/2 of Americans haven't been out of the country, for many Americans their primary view of foreign countries are the stories about how their family fled and images on news programs emphasizing how much the USA is hated globally. So a large percentage of American population are isolationist. I good deal of the US probably wouldn't mind a US internet, that is loosely connected to other nation's networks; like the telephone system rather than a genuinely global system. Which isn't hypocrisy but rather a deeper desire to move away from empire.
That being said, we also do have foreign policy hawks and then business interests that like US domination rather than US participation.
Ridiculous. The content wasn't regulated, but the nuts and bolts are. Things like TCP/IP and routers and shit. You are confusing the roads for the route.
It only seems stupid to you because it looks made up out of the word born.
There's nothing stupid at all about dusting off a lesser known word and holding it up to see if it should regain some stature.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
How about the US regulate the servers and routers that are in the US, and other countries regulate those in them?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Why not a map weighted by GDP? Why not a map weighted by number of internet users? Why not a map weighted by bytes per capita? Why not a location that reduces the total amount of travel? I'll bet you're from somewhere that doesn't give a shit about carbon footprint. But since this is a Telecommunications Conference, why don't they try teleconferencing?
I'm European and I think you are an idiot for bringing nationalism into a debate about the global net. Like it or not, the Internet has become what it is under American control, they developed it and built it up to a thing that fundamentally changed our lives. That's why I trust them much more than the barbarian-dominated UN. America is still the land of the free and one of the most liberal places in the world, and while I don't like it when they try to force that liberalism on the political or economical systems of other countries, that freedom is crucial for the Internet to function. The Internet is a worldwide thing, and national legislation of it is bullshit and would just fracture it into small subnets, ruining its biggest strength. And while I would love if it was led by a global organisation of professionals, that has exactly zero chance. In the current situation most countries only support the treaty because they want to censor the net and want to introduce tariffs on throughgoing traffic. This is a move to give politicians even more control over the net.
If 5% of the wealthy contain 97% of the wealth, they should be paying 97% of the taxes (hint: that number is wrong, its less). One penny less should be a crime.
The people that get the most out of government money are the ones that own businesses. Those roads your trucks go down: Tax money. Those police that keep your riches safe: Tax money. Those laws that forbid mere private citizens from participating in the arbitrage that made the wealthy and keep them so: Tax money.
There is no respect to be found being an apologist. You don't deserve it.