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Commerce Secretary: US Wants Multi-Stakeholder Process To Preserve Internet
Ted_Margaris_Chicago writes The United States will resist all efforts to give "any person, entity or nation" control of the Internet rather than the "global multi-stakeholder communities," said Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker in a Oct. 13 speech. "Next week, at the International Telecommunication Union Conference in Korea, we will see proposals to put governments in charge of Internet governance. You can rest assured that the United States will oppose these efforts at every turn," she said in prepared remarks to an Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, meeting in Los Angeles.
Build you're own internet.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Let's see how the practice turns out. Part of a "free, open" internet is making sure that no one can monopolize the pipe. Government isn't the only evil here. There is plenty of private interest in balkanization. In fact most government regulation is for their benefit.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
... or keep. The internet is a network of networks. Any country only controls the parts on its own soil.
so far, just smoke with a cracked mirror
So how many of these countries have already sharded the internet behind their government firewalls, i.e. China/Russia? And we believe that all other governments are less corrupt and self serving than the US? I'm not a fan of the US Panopticon and stranglehold on critical infrastructure, but honestly, it's worked for several decades now why break it up? At least the US influence that conforms with the military influence we already have. It would be great if a multinational panacea existed to control it, but the closest thing we have to that today is the UN. It doesn't have a strong track record for being the most effective governing body out there. Corruption and government go hand-in-hand; one feeds the other.
Continued United States government control
over the Internet is the worst possible scenario,
EXCEPT FOR ALL THE OTHERS.
(Apologies to Winston Churchill)
Considering W made it a point to keep ICANN's governance under the commerce department (censorship by which is banned by the US constitution) and Obama gave it away in a grand gesture of appeasement, you're pretty spot on.
Actually, the US grants much more latitude towards service providers online, in regards to copyright law, than other countries. Compare it to, say, much of non-Anglophonic Europe, which wants Google to be paying royalties for search indexing and news aggregation. Also, the US has the nice law where service providers get off scot free for making what basically amounts to copyright infringement tools, so long as they respond to takedown requests and don't infringe themselves.
Spying is actually impaired by a balkanized Internet. Much of the targets the NSA is actually interested in are foreign - and they benefit politically from the fact that much international traffic goes through US soil. If other countries were to require balkanization - that is, storage of their citizens' data on their soil, and bans on routing data through third-party countries - then the NSA would have to actually ask permission from those countries in order to spy, or engage in actual espionage (e.g. break into data centers). This increases the costs of spying, and the whole point of NSA data grabbing is to make it as quick, painless, and cheap as humanly possible.
This is a bad idea because the stakeholders have the monetary wealth to exert influence over the internet and thus causing even more problems. It must remain regulated by a neutral, objective third party that cannot be co-opted by money, power, or influence - or, at least, not any more than it already has.
But W also used the influence the commerce department has to block the .xxx domain name for political reasons, because the social conservatives were afraid it would legitimise pornography and make it more difficult to ban. .xxx is still a stupid idea, but not for that reason.
Yup, well if you hail from western europe, your democracies aren't in much better shape....
Their democracies just had huge demonstrations in numerous countries protesting your USTR's TTIP efforts.
Your taxes are high.
You don't think your taxes are too high?
... your governments impose themselves make mountains out of mole hills on social issues ...
Do you even bother to think before spouting such nonsense? Have you bothered to read a newspaper recently? I think not. Abortion, gay rights, free speech, your Constitution is used like toilet paper, your military is now in its seventh war in the Middle East, Israel can do no wrong, you can't decide whether to take out Syria's Assad, make Iran glow in the dark, ally yourselves with Turkey, wonder wtf you're doing supporting the Saudis, yada, yada, yada, ... Note that's just one side of the world. Add Pakistan, Afghanistan, Philipines, ...
... and your elections are probably rigged, too
Hey Zeus! Ibid. Hanging chads ring any bells? Your elections have been gerrymandered for decades, your Demopublicans/Republicrats have been selling you all down the river for just as long. You haven't even begun to try to figure out what to do with your former slave population. How do you get Palin, Hillary, Romney, and Obama as your choices and that's it? Add in Snowden's revelations, Obama's persecution of whistleblowers, Holder's pathetic *everything*, the Megaupload clown prosecution, Gitmo, ...
Perhaps ebola will save us from all of you.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
The United States will resist all efforts to give "any person, entity or nation"
other than the US, that is. Because we think our laws are applicable world-wide, our jurisdiction covers Earth and we invented the damn thing (ignore that this is only partially true) so get on your knees and thank us.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
"The United States will resist all efforts to give "any person, entity or nation" control of the Internet"
Unless the Holy Copyright or Holy Patents are at stake of course. Then the US will (ab)use all its power to force their wiew down everyone's throat.
The US has its own internet. It's called: The Internet.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
It seems like most of the time news stories talk about "control over The Internet," they're talking about one of three things: .com and other tlds.
1) Control over DNS, specifically who gets
2) The ability to knock a site they don't like offline so no one can use it.
3) Strong surveillance over all traffic that (usually) crosses their borders or is entirely within those borders.
Difference being that stuff like that can and does change with administrations, but more importantly, is fairly transparent. It's not like you come in to work one morning to your job at wecriticizegovernmentalstupidityforaliving.com and ...what office? what website? It's always been a shuttered building. What boss? What lead reporter? Oh you must be talking about prisoner 24601.
It changes both ways, and that's just the bit we are aware of. Who knows what's going on behind the scenes. Remember ACTA? Negotiated in secret - the public only became aware of it via leaked documents, and this was a legal agreement with potentially more of an effect than an act of congress. Now TRIPS is being negotiated in exactly the same manner. The idea of conspiracies of politicians secretly running the country may sound like the stuff of conspiracy theories, but every now and then it's exactly what happens.
Nowhere in the constitution does it say that treaties can override rights. It's a court challenge waiting to happen. Also, treaties generally aren't voted on in secret, even if they're negotiated that way. In fact, I don't believe congress can legally vote in secret on anything. They can have classified meetings, but they can't pass secret laws.
The vote may be public - but it's also potentially quick. There's an easy political trick that can be used with treaties or laws alike: Speed. Write in secret, negotiate in secret, then rush through the vote as fast as you can. The PATRIOT act, for example, was introduced on October 23 - and passed by the house on the 24th. If the trick is executed properly, any opposition groups just don't have time to rally. By the time they are aware of what's going on, it's already too late.
Also, under the Supremacy Clause, treaties are given a legal weight equal to that of the constitution. It doesn't address what to do in the event of a conflict.