US Resists UN Push For Control Over Internet 266
sl4shd0rk writes "At present, several non-profit U.S. bodies oversee the Internet's specifications as well as DNS. The Unitied Nations, however, has expressed an interest in transferring control of the Internet from the United States. The UN's Dr. Toure says any change to the governance of the internet must be supported by all countries. The U.S. has refused, arguing that 'existing multi-stakeholder institutions, incorporating industry and civil society' will continue to oversee the 'health and growth of the interenet and all its benefits.' According to earlier reports, the push is backed not only by Russia, but China, Brazil and India as well."
At first, I thought UN control might be ok (Score:5, Insightful)
Then I got slapped, and I realized all the crappy things the UN does to try to expand it's own power.
You may make any and all complaints about U.S. control/dominance of the internet, and I accept them. I do not accept that UN control would be better, in fact I'm convinced it would be much worse.
As much as I dislike... (Score:5, Insightful)
the way the US has done things, they're the lesser of evils compared to the UN. Especially when you toss Russia, and China, and other dictatorships, neo-dictatorships into the mix. The best solution in the end will end up being decentralizing the entire thing and keeping it away from any national body.
Re:Maybe... (Score:5, Insightful)
...they should start their own Internet.
That's what will eventually happen. The internet will be balkanized along national boundaries, every country will control their slice however they see fit, and everyone will be happy.
Except the users.
I'd rather have the US than the UN anyway... (Score:5, Insightful)
In general, the US can be browbeaten into keeping things neutral. SOPA/PIPA got shot down when China notified the US that blocking access to one of their sites would be similar to a naval blockade -- an act of war.
However, with the UN, this wouldn't happen. They can block sites at will, with zero recourse. Say someone in the US makes jokes about the Thai rulers. Their website can be dropped off the net. Similar if there is a site pointing out brutality in China or India. Poof, it is history, and there is no way to deal with it. The UN is subject to no law or no checks and balances.
it should be an anarchy (Score:5, Insightful)
No one, the USA nor the UN should "control" the internet. Anyone should be free to set up DNS servers and anyone else free to use any they want.
Anyone having "control" only means that control will be used for evil purposes in time. It's inevitable. The internet is too important for that. Technical standards should be set by an apolitical body of engineers. There should be no other influence of governments or political bodies. No nation's laws should apply outside their borders.
So far the USA has caused some problems, but the UN will cause worse ones as it will grant more control to authoritarian governments which want religious based censorship.
Other countries are free to roll their own... (Score:5, Insightful)
If control is what they want, they should invent, and pay for the development of their own internet equivalent themselves. Right now, all they own is their own servers and communications infrastructure.
Re:Why should the US remain in charge? (Score:5, Insightful)
If I were other countries, I'd ask myself why any one country should be "in charge" of things like DNS.
No one country is in charge of DNS; some important domain names fall under the jurisdiction of the US government, but country-specific TLDs belong to specific countries. IP allocations are a different story, but ICANN is not controlled by the US government, it is just under the US government's jurisdiction.
I know full well that there are countries that do not like the job ICANN is doing. Countries that have national firewalls -- not the weak attempt by ICE (DNS hijacking), but real firewalls that actually inspect packets and kill connections -- want to change the rules to make censorship easier. China would prefer if other countries would just require servers to refuse to give "objectionable" information to Chinese citizens. The reason those sorts of countries are turning to the UN is that unlike the US, the UN actually respects those censorship campaigns (after all, national sovereignty must be respected, even if it violates the UN's definition of human rights) and will try to force everyone else to respect those campaigns.
Re:Why should the US remain in charge? (Score:5, Insightful)
If I were any other country, I would probably ask myself that too. Then, I would look at one of the most corruptible global organizations and reconsider, unless I was one of the countries hoping to corrupt the process to begin with: e.g., Russia, China, India, or any of the Middle Eastern nations.
Re:Maybe... (Score:5, Insightful)
yes .... which is happening already. Try to watch netflix outside the US, the BBC olympic coverage outside the UK, buying certain products from overseas, and so on. Sure, yeah, proxies, but if those are ever used by more than a trivial % of users, they'll be shut down. For normal users, the internet is already balkanized.
Re:UN control would be worse (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes.
The UN is not democratic or even representative of the People it is bossing around. I don't have a gentleman representing me & making my voice heard in the world government. None of us do. The UN running the internet is an illegitimate use of power. (Similarly: This is why I refuse to pay any income or sales tax to a state or country where I do not live/have not set foot inside. No taxation without representation.)
Re:At first, I thought UN control might be ok (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:UN control would be worse (Score:1, Insightful)
All the arguments against the UN could equially be made of the US. Additionally it's not at all clear to me why I have to pay an American company to maintain my .com registration. Certainly there's no indication it was chosen as being the best value for money.
Re:UN control would be worse (Score:2, Insightful)
The fear of a one-world government is unfounded. The UN is not set up to function as such a body, nor could it even cope with such a task if it decided to seize an opportunity. It is a patchwork of bodies, funds, institutions, and loose alliances. It is basically a loose network of international do-gooders, with a completely useless general assembly and an incredibly important security council. That's why there's so much pressure lately to expand the security council to include more countries, rotate countries out, and have them handle more mundane issues like pollution as a "global risk". They're the only body set up to make a resolution then actually back it up.
And, while this may sound a little patronizing to other nations, the UN is at it's most effective when it is aligned with the U.S. It promotes what used to be first and foremost "American values" (real values, like democracy, human rights, an autonomy), which have successfully promoted as just good, fully human values in the past century. It relies on the U.S. for a lot of funding, and almost all of its strength. When the U.S. forgets about the UN, both suffer, because the UN has the unenviable task of taking all the good parts of long-term U.S. policy and convincing other countries to go along with it despite how pissed off they get over the bad parts of short-term U.S. policy. They are the sly left and strong right hands of the same philosophy.
What this is is balkanization by the back-door. The long-feared balkanization of the internet has already happened, with countries like Iran and China essentially experiencing completely different 'nets than other parts of the world. And it will continue to splinter. What the movement in the ITU is about is ameliorating the worst parts of balkanization, when reclusive regimes find that the accidentally broke something they would rather keep. They want to be able to censor gracefully, with someone in their corner to get things fixed when their ridiculous schemes bite them technically. While I can sympathize with countries who don't feel entirely comfortable with the net in American hands, dumping this much power into a relatively new, weak body of the UN can only serve oppressive regimes.
Re:UN control would be worse (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that, good or bad, the US's governance of the Internet is a known quantity. It may not be perfect and may have its own inherent risks, but thus far, the US has been a reasonably good steward. Handing it off to the UN, where some major players are unabashed censors of the Internet and would have considerable motivation to undermine certain aspects of how it works, carries significant risks, and risks we may not even be aware of.
This is a situation where I say better than devil we know than the devil we don't.
Re:At first, I thought UN control might be ok (Score:2, Insightful)
At first impulse I had the same feeling. UN? Eh, why not. Internet's an international thing nowadays. .. Then I was reminded that Russia and China were there. Ha! Fuck no. Sorry.
For all of the fucked up, twisted things we do in the US we're doing an OK job on this one. I don't care how many "issues" we have. We don't need the keys handed to a corrupt human rights abusing dictatorship, and an ex secret police murdering madman with delusions of grandeur.
For all it's failures... (Score:4, Insightful)
The one thing the US does much better is protecting free speech. We can post pornography, hate speech (who defines that, by the way?), how to make bombs, things that our society and often our government both view as repugnant, but somehow, it's still legal. Not that we don't have occasional attacks on that, but our free speech tends to hold up in the end.
There are few places that would be as good as the United States to to host a network of free discourse. It may well be because of that that the most successful such network is based there.
The UN is a constituency of pro-censorship entities. The only reason they want to control the internet is so that they can control the internet.
Churchill (Score:5, Insightful)
Kinda like what Churchill said of Democracy: the worst system, except for all the others.
Re:Why should the US remain in charge? (Score:1, Insightful)
Ok, you can be in charge of IP-addresses (I assume these were included in the networking that DARPA created) while France get to be in charge for all DNS names, HTML and CSS (since that's where the HQ for CERN is, and CERN is where Sir Tim Bernes-Lee worked when he created the WWW).
On a more serious note, the Internet consists of many interoperating techniques and ideas. The hardware is distributed throughout the world, as are the users. Because of the importance of the Internet it's risky to give politicians power over it, regardless of where they happen to live. It is also risky to give corporations or other entities too much power since there is way too much money to be earned, which gurantees corruption.
Re:UN control would be worse (Score:4, Insightful)
All the arguments against the UN could equially be made of the US. Additionally it's not at all clear to me why I have to pay an American company to maintain my .com registration. Certainly there's no indication it was chosen as being the best value for money.
The .com registry (VeriSign) charges $7.85/year for registration at the wholesale level (plus an $0.18 ICANN fee), regardless of if you're Joe Schmoe Blogger or Google. That seems like a pretty reasonable expense for maintaining a registry of 100+ million domain names with 100% uptime since it was founded.
Would it be nice if it cost a bit less? Sure. I'm still not that worried about it -- the fee is less than I paid for lunch yesterday and the savings of a dollar or two in terms of an annual registration are basically not even worth discussing in terms of practical savings.
VeriSign certainly seems to know how to handle the registry side of things pretty well, and I don't really see any technical or financial reasons why I should be concerned. /I never thought I'd be in a position to defend VeriSign, but in this case they seem to be doing a darn good job.
Re:UN control would be worse (Score:4, Insightful)
This is pure and utter FUD.
The comment from the ITU guy himself shows exactly why it SHOULD be the ITU that controls the internet:
""We never vote because voting means winners and losers and you can't afford that," Dr Hamadoun Toure, the ITU's secretary-general told the BBC.
"Whatever one single country does not accept will not pass.""
This demonstrates that ITU control would actually be, without question, much better, because it would mean even things like ICE domain seizures of international domains by the US authorities wouldn't be possible. You're right that the US is a known quantity and that's ultimately the problem, we know that the US censors the global internet via domain seizures, under the ITU this simply wouldn't be possible, and the above demonstrates why. It demonstrates that the ITU requires international consensus over these sorts of things so both Chinese government censorship and US corporate censorship would equally get blocked, and the only things that would pass would be the common sense things - solutions to technical issues and challenges and such. This is exactly what whoever controls the internet should be limited to - the technical aspects of it's growth and nothing more. The US has shown it can't keep to doing just this, whilst the ITU has shown with it's many years of the international telecommunications networks that it can.
Yes, yes, I know I'll get modded down by angry patriotic Americans who feel slighted that anyone dare suggest they shouldn't control something international, and yes, I know I'll get all the arguments about how some random commission at the fringe of the UN has Iran in it which obviously means the whole of the UN is broken, and yes I know I'll even get the new world order kooks telling me how the UN is actually out to take over the world run by a super-secret organisation of elf-magicians who eat pixies for lunch or whatever the conspiracy theorists have cooked up now.
But ultimately it doesn't matter, because the ITU is still the only organisation in the world that has shown it is capable of handling this sort of thing in an objective manner.
Organisations like the ITU really just aren't political, they're technical organisations staffed by some of the most succesful academics in their relevant fields. A lot of people don't get that, they see UN security council failure to act on Syria and assume the whole UN is bad, but that's really just like saying because you met a grouchy Red Cross guy once, they shouldn't be responsible for delivering any kind of aid, ever. Really, the comments thus far in this thread are nothing but 100% fear mongering, they have absolutely no basis in fact, they demonstrate actually no understanding of how the likes of the ITU are governed and act, and who by. They're simple kneejerk reactions to a perceived slight against American internet mismanagement.
Despite this, as is always the case with discussions regarding the UN on Slashdot, bring on the ignorant uninformed nutjobs in 3...2...1...
Re:Another conspiracy (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh no the guns were tracked with Bush but thanks for playing....
That's what I said.
and where the heck are all the supposed gun control laws that are supposed to come out of this conspiracy theory that the obama administration let the guns walk so they could enact gun control laws....nice one zippy.
That's part of the question, especially since the contempt charge was blocked by the democrats. Which means that other avenues are now needed to find out exactly what was going on and where, and exactly what watergatish type BS was going on. And exactly how far the rot goes. Either Holder did this all on his own, or Obama signed off on it as well. In which case there's a lot of stink. There's no conspiracy theory here, only facts, and pretexts. You might have missed the news back about 3 weeks or 4 weeks ago, back before the Aurora shooting of the Dem's wanting to push back in the Assault weapons ban, and several other things all at once "just in time" for the election.
Funny how a lone Canadian occasionally paying attention to your news catches this and you don't.
Re:Maybe... (Score:2, Insightful)
You know, it isn't popular to say that the US does a good job at anything these days. Maybe it's even true, but the fact is we do a better job at running the internet than anyone else would or could.
Imagine an internet with China in control? The only possible outcome there is less freedom.
Fuck the UN. The US has guaranteed security for so much of the world for so long they think it's always been that way and that it happened all by itself as the result of good wishes.
Re:Maybe... (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, you know how it goes. Provide a socialist with a service, and in a week he'll be calling it a human right.