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.

Comments

Re:Reading the draft treaty

[jythie]

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.

Well, bollocks to that.

[serviscope_minor]

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.