Re: UN wants internet

On Thu, 16 Feb 2006 18:26:42 -0600, hopeUslide
<hopeUslide.23cm4m@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


Internet
Human Events Online
By RICHARD LESSNER
January 30, 2006



Friends of freedom breathed a sigh of relief last November when the
World Summit on the Information Society held in Tunis came to a close
without control of the Internet being ceded to a collection of foreign
governments under the auspices of the United Nations.


In other words, "being ceded to the European Union under the
guise of it being ceded to the UN". I don't know why they'd think
they're entitled to it anyway. The original name was "DARPANet", and
it was developed in the US to create and interlocking network of
computers that weren't dependant upon a central system in the event of
nuclear attack. Tim Berners-Lee developed hypertext, which made the
network searchable by keyword, etc, but the framework, the software,
etc... everything from the idea to the backbone of what became the net
was US dreamed, designed, and made.


Although the international confabulation was unsuccessful in wresting
control from the U.S.-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers (ICANN) -- a quasi-governmental non-profit organization -- Tunis
was just the opening gambit in the UN?s drive for control. We face a
long, drawn out battle to preserve the freedom and independence of the
World Wide Web.

The opposition of the Bush administration to turning the Net over to
the tender mercies of the UN and such bastions of liberty as Cuba,

Leave Cuba alone. Castro never did anything to the US except
refuse to be a lackey for the CIA and the mafia.

Iran, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia was enough to block the globalist
mischief in Tunis. But the UN bureaucrats and their allies in Europe
and the so-called "developing world" have not folded their tents.
Instead, the summit in Tunis produced a permanent standing body, the
Internet Governance Forum (IGF) to keep the pressure on,

Just an act of defiance, kind of like "Well, if you won't let
us be what we want to be in regard to the net, we'll just say that we
are anyway - so THERE!"

to keep
working to undermine the American position and wrest control of the
Net. The IGF is set to hold its inaugural organizational meeting in
Geneva February 16-17.

I propose that the United States found it's own United
Nations, and that the agreement among the states to do so be fleshed
out, drawn up, and signed between Feb 14th - 15th.

It?s expected to start holding regular
conferences starting this summer in Greece.

Once again, if you're not a real government, the next best
thing is to pretend. Just ask the Palestinians!

The UN, therefore, is
planning on a prolonged campaign to achieve its objective.

It's hardly a mystery why the UN, the EU and their global allies want
to seize control of the Internet. As we are witnessing in China today
with massive government censorship of Google, Yahoo, Cisco and other
Internet companies, repressive governments view the Net with fear and
loathing. The Internet is a revolutionary medium for the free,
unfettered flow of information,

Really? I don't think it's "information" that's flowing on the
Net. Most of it is data, without much information in it. Think of
e-mail, for example. So much of it is now multimedia stuff that, while
funny, doesn't have a lot of information value. It's also been said
that "trying to get information off the internet is like trying to get
a drink of water from a fire hydrant", which is pretty accurate. It's
no longer revolutionary, certainly not unfettered (there's plenty of
fettering going on... trust me), and like I said, while there may
still be plenty of information on it, it's becoming increasingly
drowned out by the useless data that makes up consistently more of the
flow.
It's now being argued by Bell, and the cable companies that
they should be allowed to charge content providers, since those
content providers are now making huge profits themselves. As the CEO
of Bell recently said (I'll paraphrase); "Google's making huge
profits, and they're using my pipes for free, which is ridiculous".
So, they'll charge the content providers more, and the content
providers will have to charge customers more.

a hugely liberating engine of free
speech and commerce.

Commerce, yes. Free speech? Nice try. Not buyin' it, and
neither would the Chinese, the Iranians, etc.

Dictators, autocrats, Islamofacists, Maoist and
Marxist regimes -- all want to control and censor the Net in their
countries, restrict information and access, suppress dissent and
squelch speech.

Others look at the booming commerce on the Internet and salivate for a
piece of the action, longing to tax web-based commercial activity as
the next golden goose to be led to slaughter. The UN in particular
wants to tax the Internet to create the independent stream of revenue

Ah, there you go. *** 'em. They're not a government, since no
one voted them to be, and they have no right to an independant
anything. They exist to serve their member nations, and when they
don't then you have things like the US government not giving them
agreed upon monies, which is the one of the few things that the US
government has been right about.

the bureaucrats at Turtle Bay long have lusted after to free the UN
from having to solicit voluntary contributions from member states.

If they even have the nerve to state that desire in public,
they should all be hung.


Whatever different motives animate these various interests in their
drive to seize control of the Internet, they all have one thing in
common: all resent what they perceive as U.S. "control" of the
worldwide web. The common refrain goes like this: Why should any one
nation control a medium that is truly global in nature? It isn't fair.
The U.S. does not, of course, "control" the Internet. ICANN simply
keeps the cyber trains running on time. ICANN is not a gatekeeper. It
doesn?t pick and choose who gets to go on the Net and who doesn?t. It
doesn?t censor content. ICANN is nominally under the authority of the
Department of Commerce, but the operating agreement expires in November
and the non-profit corporation is likely to be privatized, cutting all
its tenuous ties to the federal government.

Anti-American envy and resentment, rather than any really serious
problems with ICANN?s management, is the driving force behind the UN
campaign to hand control of the Net over to a gaggle of governments run
by a rogue?s gallery of despots, kleptocrats, mullahs and Maoists. As
for the incessant whining about American dominance of the Internet,
ICANN already has significant foreign representation on its governing
board.

The Internet Governance Forum has been set up as the agent to affect
the handover of control to the UN. The UN and its allies were well
aware in the run-up to the summit in Tunis that they could wrest
control from the U.S. in a single coup de main. So they will keep the
issue alive by means of the IGF, which will hold meetings in plush
resort destinations, produce policy papers, maintain a web site wherein
the anti-American mob can massage its imagined grievances, and generally
seek to grind down U.S. opposition. Doubtlessly, the UN forces will drag
things out with a view toward 2008 and the hope that Hillary Clinton
will take up residence in the White House. Since Bill Clinton and his
sidekick Al Gore gave us the World Summit on the Information Society,
from whence all this current mischief issues, President Hillary could
be expected to look more favorably on turning the Internet over to the
global village.

"President Hillary" is not something that you will ever hear
spoken, I'm pretty sure. I think about the only way the Republicans
will win the next election is if the Dems run Hillary, in which case
the worst administration that I personally know of will actually be a
shoe-in to win. Unreal. Surreal. Possible? And don't take my criticism
of the current administration to mean that I'm a Bush hater. I'm not,
and he's got some ("SOME") good people in his administration, but he
couldn't be doing more wrong if he tried, and he's got a lot of crap
in the administration too. A case in point is James Baker III, who
although not in the admin, is still functioning much as if he was, and
who should have been hung back when he committed treason against his
nation by making agreements about the Israeli/Palestinian issue with
his counterpart from the USSR during the Bush Sr. administration.


But it doesn?t take a village to run the Internet. It?s doing just
fine, thank you, without the ministrations of the UN. The U.S. invented
the Internet and generously made the technology available to the world.
Today, more than 1 billion routinely use the Internet and the worldwide
web promises to be nearly as revolutionary as the printing press.
Whatever technical challenges the Internet faces as it enters its
second decade the problems will not be resolved by handing it over the
same crowd that brought us the oil-for-food scandal.




Mr. Lessner, a former executive director of the American Conservative
Union, is an associate of Capital City Partners, a Washington public
affairs firm that represents the Global Internet Governance Alliance.
Mr. Lessner is helping to organize the alliance.

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