The Washington Times’ report on the Handbook reminds us that, “China has acquired the gear and know-how to engage in censorship so effectively from American companies, as for example Cisco Systems Inc. and Yahoo Inc.” And, don’t forget Microsoft and Google’s willing collusion in suppressing freedom of the Internet. Human Rights Watch, blisters the “trend of major American-based companies assisting the Chinese government in its efforts to censor free expression on the Internet,” reminding us “Google has agreed to exclude from a list of links publications that the Chinese government finds objectionable. Microsoft has capitulated to China by sending an error message to Internet users in China who use Microsoft’s search engine to search for the Chinese words for democracy, freedom, human rights, or demonstration, among others.”
As Human Rights Watch correctly observes, “When companies like Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google decide to put profits from their Chinese operations over the free exchange of information, they are helping to kill that dream.”
Carlos Ramos-Mrosovsky and Joseph Barillari have a succinct yet comprehensive report on the Summit to suppress Internet freedom, full of links, “World Wide (Web) Takeover,” at National Review Online.
Ramos-Mrosovsky and Barillari so well describe this Summit’s attempted putsch to further the take over of this bastion of free thought that its entirety and links is a MUST read. Some brief excerpts:
“Only dictators, and, perhaps, the doctrinaire internationalists who so often abet them, stand to gain from placing the Internet under “international” control. If, for example, the U.N. were to control domain names, its component tyrannies would find it much easier to censor and repress. After all, “internet public policy” is subject to interpretation, and it is hard to imagine international bureaucrats resisting — as ICANN and the U.S. largely have — the temptation to politicize their task.”
Another good point made is that, “Surrendering the Internet might also increase America’s vulnerability to online security threats. It could be difficult to guard against cyber-terrorism or to pursue terrorists online, if the Internet were under the supervision of a body unsure of what terrorism is, but quite sure that it does not like the United States.”
Ramos-Mrosovsky and Barillari conclude: “Although the Bush administration will not relinquish U.S. oversight of the Internet, a future president may be more willing to make this seemingly small concession to curry favor with internationalist elites or supposed strategic partners. As with the Kyoto Protocol or the International Criminal Court, Washington’s refusal to bend to the “international community” over the Internet might be magnified into another gleefully touted example of American arrogance. America’s rivals, less constrained by electoral cycles, tend to view foreign policy over the longer term. They are willing to wait. If we are to preserve the Internet as we know it, the Bush administration must take steps to foreclose the possibility of it ever becoming the plaything of dictators.”
The Associated Press reports today that the “U.S. insists on keeping control of Web,” quoting U.S. Ambassador David Gross, the State Department’s coordinator for international communications and information policy, “ The genius of the Internet is that it has been flexible [and] private sector led.”
The AP failed to note, as the International Herald-Tribune does, that Ambassador Gross comment was “an angry reply” to a last-minute, typical European Union weasel proposal, what Gross called “a very shocking and profound change of the EU’s position,” to “create an intergovernmental forum that would set principles for governing the Internet.” Gross said the “EU’s proposal seems to represent an historic shift in the regulatory approach to the Internet from one that is based on private sector leadership to a government, top-down control of the Internet.”
Lover of free enterprise that I am, we must recognize that many U.S. companies have more love of enterprise than freedom.
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