Some folks at the U.N. have an idea that they seem to regard as brilliant. The idea is that the U.S., which built the Internet and grew it into the stunning, civilization-changing success that it is today, should cede control of the Internet to . . . (are you read?) . . . (drumroll, please) . . . a U.N. committee.
This is indeed a brilliant idea.
Except for the fact that it isn’t.
Fortunately, the fact that it isn’t a brilliant idea has occurred to others. Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota, for example.
"My probe of the U.N. as Chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations revealed management that was at best, incompetent, and at worst corrupt," said Coleman. "The first priority for the United Nations must be fundamental reform of its management and operations rather than any expansion of its authority and responsibilities. The Internet has flourished under U.S. supervision, oversight, and private sector involvement. This growth did not happen because of increased government involvement, but rather, from the opening on the Internet to commerce and private sector innovation. Subjecting the Internet and its security to the politicized control of the UN bureaucracy would be a giant and foolhardy step backwards."
"Recently, I introduced UN reform legislation with the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations, Senator Dick Lugar (R-IN), known as the Coleman-Lugar UN Reform Bill, to help put an end to a culture of corruption that was exposed by the Oil for Food scandal, peacekeeping sexual abuse scandals, and other instances of organizational failures at U.N.," Coleman said. "Putting the U.N. in charge of one of the world’s most important technological wonders and economic engines is out of the question. This proposal would leave the United States with no more say over the future of the Internet than Cuba or China-countries that have little or no commitment to the free flow of information."
Yeah, that’s what we really need: Giving China U.N. Security Council-level veto power over decisions affecting the Internet. That’ll be really good for the free flow of information and ideas.
Perhaps if China and other countries are not satisfied with the U.S. controlling the Internet that it built and organized then maybe they should build their own Internet.
Heck, do a better job with a second Internet and I’m sure Americans will be trying to book time on it, instead.
That’s the nice thing about competition.
In the meantime,
Boooooo…U.N….Boooooo.
Hey, let’s give the UN control over cable television, too! Then we wouldn’t have pesky upstarts like Fox News expanding into good leftist countries like Canada.
And what about Radio? Clear Channel clearly needs to be reined in, and Kofi Annan is just the guy to do it.
And then there’s this whole cell phone thing…
I wonder if UN control would keep Jimmy’s blog from being blocked in Saudi Arabia?
Jimmy’s blog is blocked in Saudi Arabia?
I think that Jimmy’s response is exactly right — if they want to control the internet, then let them create their own internet.
BillyHW: see http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/saudiarabia/
Abstract: The authors connected to the Internet through proxy servers in Saudi Arabia and attempted to access approximately 60,000 Web pages as a means of empirically determining the scope and pervasiveness of Internet filtering there. Saudi-installed filtering systems prevented access to certain requested Web pages; the authors tracked 2,038 blocked pages. Such pages contained information about religion, health, education, reference, humor, and entertainment. See highlights of blocked pages. The authors conclude (1) that the Saudi government maintains an active interest in filtering non-sexually explicit Web content for users within the Kingdom; (2) that substantial amounts of non-sexually explicit Web content is in fact effectively inaccessible to most Saudi Arabians; and (3) that much of this content consists of sites that are popular elsewhere in the world.
I think it is just as likely that a UN run internet would have more censorship, not less.
It is easy to imagine a UN committee deciding that websites that make negative statements regarding homosexuality would have to be removed under some idiotic international hate crimes law.
Not to sound like one of those people, but…WAKE UP PEOPLE, NEW WORLD ORDER COMIN’ AT YA!
Should be noted that the Internet was never completely administered by the U.S. government. Original ideas and funding for it came from ARPA, but the eventual administration was handled mainly by academic types, who were certainly not all in the US, and were not all working from government funding.
As it stands it would be very difficult to try to assume control of the whole thing. You could try to assume control of things like DNS and address allocation, but there are plenty of ways to bypass that. IPV6 would become very popular very quickly if something like that were to happen.
The Internet is nothing more than a bunch of smaller networks connected together. That’s it. The things that “govern” it are standards and resource allocations, but these things can be changed.
I hope this doesn’t sound arrogant — but I don’t expect diplomats to understand this, especially not UN bureaucrats, so personally, I’m not too worried.
FTR – each country controls its access to the internet. In fact, in order to moderate information, a number of countries actually mirror the internet for their country … but only with “acceptable” content.
The USA controls the root DNS servers (the cool technology that allows networked computers to change http://www.jimmyakin.org into the ip address 66.151.149.10 and thus be able to locate it) and all ip assignments (giving people/entities an ip address or a range of ip addresses).
These are the functions that the U.N. wants … and it is possible for the world to stage a coupe with everyone else agreeing that the U.N. should have it instead of the USA. In fact, a coupe similar to this has occurred already once between entities in the States (with ICANN hijacking the DNS root servers). All you need is to get people to agree about who is control. Of course, the USA would be not happy about all this, would perhaps threaten embargoes and what-not, but in the end, if everyone else just did it … the US would have to do something else, start swimming with everyone else, or sink. If a coupe was staged, the internet would be a very, very messy place for a while … but things would eventually even out, too.
Call me crazy, but lost money aside, I think such a war would be interesting.
The UN censoring content should not be worried about too much. There are a number of technologies that would actually benefit from such a move. Freenet being one of them. I think bittorrent would get a new kind of life as well with something akin to distributed web serving emerging (which is kinda what freenet is about … but not really). I sincerely believe only a small fraction of the power of the technologies possible on the ‘net has been realized. Battles and barriers always bring such new, unrealized technologies to light.
Can anyone name something that has been run better after the UN took control of it than it previously did? Give me an idea of them having a trackrecord of success in this area and then perhaps we can entertain the idea. Until then though, no dice.
“Can anyone name something that has been run better after the UN took control of it than it previously did?”
Perhaps corruption scams?
Didn’t Al Gore invent the internet? Maybe he should have a say.
Oh no! Maybe they might make him the next U.N. Secretary General just for the purpose of taking possession of the internet.
Well, there’s always the Internet2.
I don’t why you guys are so squeamish about this. I mean, all we have to do is hand over this incredibly free source of information to this man in the black cape over here — what’s your name? Bob Evil? Oh yeah, that’s right — hand the internet over to Bob Evil here. What could possibly go wrong?
Oh, and while you are at it. let’s hand over our free will too. Won’t be needing that messy thing now that Bob Evil can handle it for us.
Thanks Bob!
Here’s a bumper sticker idea:
The UN can have my internet when they pry it out of my cold dead hands.
That wouldn’t be staging a coup. The UN would have to set up something for everyone to go to, and then everyone would have to go to it — which would be simple compeitition.
One suspect that they doubt it would work, which is why they want control of what we’ve done.
A bad idea that someone argues to eb a good idea isa bad idea.
I don’t want to upset poor whatever-his-name-is but the internet was invented and developed by the English. Whilst I’m not a fan of the UN, I must say one of the reasons the US is so unpopular around the world is because of this unilateral American ignorance of the rest of the world and this flag waving belief that they are the greatest thing since sliced bread. A bit of self-reflection and modesty mightn’t be a bad thing.
I don’t want to upset poor Richard Crighton, but what developed into the internet was invented by the United States Army back in the 1960s. Perhaps a future display of unilateral ignorance could be avoided by a little fact-checking in advance of any internet comments or mouth openings.
Richard is referring to the http protocol, if I have it right. Anybody remember the Internet before there was http? Yikes.
How many Americans do you know, Richard?