Keep Your U.N. Off My Internet!

Y’all may be familiar with current attempts by the United Nations to hijack the Internet.

It’s a bad idea.

LEARN MORE.

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

5 thoughts on “Keep Your U.N. Off My Internet!”

  1. I think Tim Berners-Lee and other folks at CERN might argue with the authors’ contention that the internet was an American invention. Currently, the World Wide Web Consortium and ICANN, both organizations with international membership, oversee standards. Certainly we don’t need the UN involved — neither should the US government exercise a dominant role.

  2. Yes, we all know that Berners-Lee and CERN invented HTML. What many do *not* know is that hypertext markup language is not the same thing as the Internet. The Internet is a physical thing characterized by computers addressed in a certain way. It was invented in the United States, first beginning life as Arpanet. The World Wide Web, the standards for which are overseen by W3C, is NOT the Internet.

  4. Berners-Lee’s contributions (a little cheeky to simply dismiss it as HTML) turned the Internet from a collection of interconnected computers used by geeks in university and government to something that was navigable by ordinary people across cultures. If we were merely talking about connections between machines, there would be no issue here. The issues of who makes the rules are those that are currently overseen by the consortium and ICANN. The article is clearly talking about the kinds of regulations that are currently overseen by these bodies, as well as regulations that some governments might wish to impose.

  5. Last semester I got into it with someone over this. They think the US has too much control over the internet, bla bla bla, it should be “internationalized,” etc. I’m like wait, we build it into what it is today, because of our good ideas and our resources, and so, to level the playing field, we hand it over to some international organization to manage?? And we’re not talking about the government handing it over… we’re talking about the private and educational institutions that have done the majority of the work on building up the internet. Explain to me again why anyone should ever take initiative, if they’re not going to get to wreap the benefits of their work?

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