Slashdot Mirror
US Offers New Plans 1 Month Before UN Meeting To Regulate Web
Velcroman1 writes "Slashdotters have been reading for months about the upcoming ITU conference next month in Dubai, which will propose new regulations and restrictions for the Internet that critics say could censor free speech, levy tariffs on e-commerce, and even force companies to clean up their 'e-waste' and make gadgets that are better for the environment. Concerns about the closed-door event have sparked a Wikileaks-style info-leaking site, and led the State Department on Wednesday to file a series of new proposals or tranches seeking to ensure 'competition and commercial agreements — and not regulation' as the meeting's main message. Terry Kramer, the chief U.S. envoy to the conference, says the United States is against sanctions. '[Doing nothing] would not be a terrible outcome at all,' Kramer said recently."
is going to be bad for the rest of us.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
What is going to happen to me if I write blogs calling for a new government in Dubai? The US might have its problems but they pale in insignificance compared to the UN. It's like having Pat Robertson control the internet.
More to the point, it currently *works*. It's not like the system is broken now, it's just that some other people want pieces of the pie. And they could have that, if they wanted it, by building and maintaining their own infrastructure.
However, they don't want to do that. They just want to make money off of, and regulate, what other people built and bought for them.
is the fact that countries won't ever agree on how to regulate it.
Just like they can't agree on war and peace at the UN.
And thats a Good Thing (tm)
Just as the EU desperately seeks what they call "own resources" so too the UN has long desired the power to regulate and tax. The whole effort behind the Tobin Tax and its European form, the Financial Transactions Tax, has been to acquire the first legal step to full taxation for these bodies and has nothing to do with saving puppies or whatever else they are promising from it.
Now I am not opposed in principle to democratic federations, but the UN can't be one until all the members are democratic too. And if only the democratic members did something like a "UN with regulation and taxes" they'd reinvent the need for a non-binding forum like the UN as a place of discussion with those who are not yet democratic. That's why so many internationalist hopes have been pinned on the European Union as a way of achieving a stepping stone on the way to their ultimate goal. Now, like I said, the ultimate goal isn't actually bad in theory - the Star Trek universe has a world federation after all - but it's extremely bad in practice, or "for the foreseeable future", as anyone who pays attention to how modern politics work in Washington or the UN knows.
It's extremely unwise to let these creeps get a single claw-hold on anything that smells remotely like binding regulation, even more so if it's regulation to do with the freedom of speech or taxes. We really need to start talking seriously about massive cuts to the funding of the UN, cutting them to say 5 or 10% of their current budget, so that they don't have any idle time or resources to come up with these schemes. Aid and development programs have pretty much been shown to be useless now, if not outright scams in most cases especially those of the UN, so we can safely ignore any crocodile tears about UNICEF and puppies when we cut their budget.
It is the collective wishes of the world's governments, most of which are run by crooks, corrupt politicians, and dictators. It is about representative of the people of this world as the Supreme Soviet was representative of the will of the people unfortunate enough to live in the USSR.
The UN was never intended to be a representative or democratic government. It is a body of international diplomacy in which even the worst of the worst have a voice, for the purely practical reason that those people also have guns and bombs.
You're right of course. But instead they've learned to speak English.
Are you entirely sure that's what you want to base your argument on?
So I have a crystal ball that tells me how the rest of this conversation will go. I will introduce many facts detailing exactly how awful US hegemony has been for most of the world. You will bring up the few times this has been positive, but largely rely on nationalistic fervor. The conflation of monologues will end with sentiment to the effect of "Love it or leave it." and other such vaguely ad hominem remarks. We will each leave convinced we have carried the day, and some day far in the future, you or your progeny will be ashamed that, when confronted with evidence of heinous acts, you chose to serve your own tribe and not humanity.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.