Internet Freedom Won't Be Controlled, Says UN Telcom Chief

wiredmikey writes "The head of the UN telecommunications body, Hamadoun Toure, told an audience at the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT-12) in Dubai on Monday that Internet freedom will not be curbed or controlled. 'Nothing can stop the freedom of expression in the world today, and nothing in this conference will be about it,' he said. Such claims are 'completely (unfounded),' Toure, secretary general of the International Telecommunication Union, told AFP. 'We must continue to work together and find a consensus on how to most effectively keep cyberspace open, accessible, affordable and secure,' UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon said. Google has been vocal in warning of serious repercussions, saying that 'Some proposals could permit governments to censor legitimate speech — or even cut off Internet access,' noted Google's Vint Cerf in a blog post."

Comments

Really?

[Millennium]

If the goal is not to curb internet freedom, then why are the foxes the ones at the forefront of the effort to build a henhouse?

Re:Really?

[icebike]

Exactly!

Dear Mr Hamadoun Toure: If it won't be curbed or controlled why not define attempts to do so as a crime against humanity and access to the internet a human right?

Could it be that you know it is already curbed and controlled and monitored and blocked.

Oh, look, your nose is growing and your pants seem to be on fire.

Re:Really?

[jfengel]

It may be their goal, but they won't get it. It's not what the ITU does and they won't succeed in their ludicrous proposals. They only make those proposals because they have no idea what they're talking about.

In fact, most of it is political theater. The ITU attendees themselves are well aware that these proposals stand no chance of passage. But the religious zealots in their countries are as ignorant of that as they are about everything else, and enjoy being pandered to. So when the proposals fail, the government can claim that they tried to prohibit blasphemy, but those blasphemous bastards in the West defeated it.

It's a dangerous and ugly game, because some of these zealots will take it as an excuse for violence. But as far as the leadership is concerned, as long as it's directed against us rather than them, it's all good.

Re:Really?

[betterunixthanunix]

Why bother with words? Let's look at actions.

The US government is certainly not an organization that values freedom over money. Yet ICANN has not done any of the following things that the ITU has proposed:

1. Unique identifiers for Internet users or their computers
2. Separate "service classes" for servers and client computers
3. A system of fees, surcharges, etc.
4. Special licensing for providing particular kinds of Internet services

These are the sort of things that, despite intense pressure from various industries, we have not seen on the Internet as controlled by ICANN. Sure, we've seen some censorship, but at the end of the day I can still use PGP and I can still run my own mail server, and I can do so without needing to obtain anyone's permission. This morning I ssh'd to my mother's computer to help troubleshoot a problem she was having -- and nothing stopped me, despite the fact that her computer is connected to the Internet through a "consumer grade" cable package.

ITU has a long history of designing communications systems that cement the power of monopoly service providers and which prevent people from hacking or coming up with their own solutions to problems. ITU's approach to the telephone network reflects its mindset; likewise with ITU's approach to radio. Amateurs? Hackers? You're lucky to get a tiny bit of space to play in, but you better not do anything that could threaten the big boys who provide "real" service to consumers.

To put it another way, if ITU had designed the Internet, there would never have been Google, because there would have been too much paperwork to fill out, too many licensing fees, and too many bandwidth fees to make something experimental like that work. The Internet's most important design feature is not packet switching, it is the idea that all computers connected to the Internet can do the same things, limited only by technical things like CPU or connection speeds. ITU doesn't design that sort of network; ITU designs this sort of network:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.25

Here, by the way, is ITU's next generation Internet plan:

http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/gsi/ngn/Pages/default.aspx

Re:Unless you say something negative towards Moham

[Anonymous Coward]

and the camel he rode in on.

Yeah, he probably did.