WHY THOSE WHO WOULD BE LORDS OF THE INTERNET ARE NOTHING BUT USURPERS, LOOTERS AND ENABLERS OF GAP ROGUE STATE REGIMES [ UPDATED]
The internet is a product of American taxpayer dollars and open-system participation by a billion people across the planet who have built the most amazing scale-free network of communication and commerce in history. Because the system originated in the United States at a time when Americans constituted some 99.9 % of internet users, an American NGO called ICANN ( Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) became the self-regulating authority for internet domain registration, an unglamorous but absolutely necessary chore which it has carried out quietly with few problems since its inception. Naturally, the UN bureaucracy which contributed absolutely nothing to this process feels morally entitled and technically competent to now assume ICANN’s duties.
It is neither. Nor are the motives behind such a move any better than the likely results of giving control of the internet to a corrupt bureaucracy riddled with professional intelligence agents who would like to use an ICANN-like IGO authority to help their member states tax commerce, censor ideas and identify, persecute and murder online dissenters. Why beat around the bush ? The only uses Robert Mugabe and Burma’s military junta have for the UN controlling the internet are undilutedly evil ones.
Aside from that, countries who cannot manage a telephone company or provide their people with even primary schooling have no business making decisions on the future of the internet. These are states that without copious and ongoing Western aid and trade would have no more sophisticated method of long-distance communication than two tin cans and a length of string.
Bruce Kesler at The Democracy Project, has a hard-hitting post that covers the story, the players and the stakes involved. I am posting it here not as an excerpt but rather in its entirety:
“September 29, 2005
The Summit to Suppress Internet Freedom
The World Summit on the Information Society is holding meetings, the ostensible goal to expand Internet access in developing countries but the real agenda to shift control of the Internet to the U.N. from U.S. dominated organizations. As in all things, the countries united to suppress freedom who are the majority at the United Nations, facilitated by cowardly European eunuchs envious of the U.S., pay lip service to the downtrodden as they devise ways to keep them that way.
South African journalist at the Summit, Brenda Zulu, summed up the stakes: “With censorship we can never get anywhere and the marginalized voices will never be heard.”
Reporters Without Borders, among the many cases it tracks, tells us about cyberdissident Nguyen Vu Binh. Nguyen began his fourth year in Vietnamese prison on September 25. He formerly worked for “The Communist Reviews”, an official communist party publication. Among his sins was involvement in an organization fighting corruption, rampant in the workers’ paradise to enrich its ruling elite, and applying to set up a liberal democratic party, that might actually benefit the downtrodden rather than those wearing the boots.
Reporters Without Borders tells us “the 11 commandments of the Internet in China,” announced on September 25 by the state controlled media. As RSF says, “The Chinese authorities never seem to let up on their desire to regulate the Web and their determination to control information available on it ever more tightly.” The RSF report concludes that these moves to filter the Internet are “a sign that the Internet frightens those in power.”
Constructively fighting back, Reporters Without Frontiers just published its downloadable “Handbook for Bloggers and Cyberdissidents.” Global Voices Online calls it “the first truly useful book [for] people who have views and information that they want to share with the world…if you’re in a country where the government might not like what you’re saying, how to avoid getting in trouble when you by-pass the information gatekeepers.”
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