Claudia Rosett
PJ Media
11/24/2012
Here it comes again — another United Nations-sponsored grab to control the Internet. Next month, Dec. 3-14, the UN’s International Telecommunications Union (ITU) is holding a conference in Dubai, at which UN member states will meet to update the ITU treaty arrangements for international communications. The window will be open for everything from proposals for UN-regulated and administered fees to, as The Hill reports, language from China and Iran, which, in an effort to share with the world at large their own domestic practices, “could lead to online censorship and government monitoring of Web traffic.”…
…The UN, in one way or another, has been eyeing the internet for years as a potential font of cash and lever of control. And the UN these days is the kind of place where Iran now chairs the Non-Aligned Movement, which consists of 119 member states plus the Palestinians — and accounts for well over half the membership of the UN General Assembly. All the usual old troubles apply: The UN remains an unaccountable, murky bureaucracy, lending itself to the manipulations of its worst members.
It is devoutly to be hoped that the Internet will escape the clutches of this conference without mortal damage (see: “U.N. Agency Reassures: We Just Want to Break the Internet, Not Take it Over“). If it does not, then is there any comfort to be found?…
The complete article is at PJ Media.
Update: UN To Move Forward With Plan To Seize Control Of The Internet… I know what you’re thinking … what could possibly go wrong?
Who runs the Internet? For now, the answer remains no one, or at least no government, which explains the Web’s success as a new technology. But as of next week, unless the U.S. gets serious, the answer could be the United Nations.
Many of the U.N.’s 193 member states oppose the open, uncontrolled nature of the Internet. Its interconnected global networks ignore national boundaries, making it hard for governments to censor or tax. And so, to send the freewheeling digital world back to the state control of the analog era, China, Russia, Iran and Arab countries are trying to hijack a U.N. agency that has nothing to do with the Internet.
For more than a year, these countries have lobbied an agency called the International Telecommunications Union to take over the rules and workings of the Internet. Created in 1865 as the International Telegraph Union, the ITU last drafted a treaty on communications in 1988, before the commercial Internet, when telecommunications meant voice telephone calls via national telephone monopolies…
