Whew: Internet Escapes U.N. Clutches

With a sigh of relief, it is noted that common sense has triumphed again: The United Nations will not be given the Internet to wreck.

 

Going into The World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis this week, the European Union was endorsing a plan from China, Iran, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and Cuba to “terminate the historic U.S. role in Internet government oversight, relegate both private enterprise and non-governmental organizations to the sidelines, and place a U.N.-dominated group in charge of the Internet’s operation and future.”

 
Press service reporting from the summit -- no, due to what was described as a "clerical error" this reporter was not flown in all-expenses-paid style to cover the event -- said that "negotiators from more than 100 countries agreed late Tuesday to leave the United States in charge of the Internet's addressing system, averting a U.S.-EU showdown."

 
A sop was thrown to the troublemakers demanding U.N. control of the Internet in the form of an international forum created to address "concerns" about management of the Internet. Don't worry, the silly forum, which will be nothing more than an irritating anti-American blather sideshow has no binding authority.

 
The deal means the United States will leave day-to-day management to the private sector, through a quasi-independent organization called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

 
You can identify those who believe the United States government "controls" the Internet, influencing and manipulating as governmental policy what's freely available on the Web as the ones wearing baseball caps lined with tinfoil. It's telling that in demanding to hijack control of the Internet, China, Saudi Arabia et al present absolutely no instances of the United States performing any sort of censorship over the Internet.

 
Indeed, as Kenneth Neil Cukier, who covers technology and regulatory issues for The Economist puts it, "some of the governments calling the loudest for more power, like Iran and China, are the ones least committed to the values of transparency and individual openness that the Internet offers."

 
The summit was originally conceived to address the "digital divide," the gap between information haves and have-nots, by "raising both consciousness and funds for projects. Instead, it has centered largely around Internet governance," the Associated Press reports. In other words, an admirable goal has largely gone by the boards in favor of an attempt for a naked power grab which has now thankfully failed.

 
The French news service AFP tried to whip up anti-U.S. sentiment ahead of the summit, reporting breathlessly that "Robert Shaw of the UN's International Telecommunication Union, said 'since the positions are so polarised we may end up with a fractured Internet.'

 
"Either the search for a 'democratic' international solution prevails, or the Internet could fragment into a multitude of networks before an eventual international coordination mechanism sticks them back together,'" AFP reports him saying.

 
Why anybody thinks a charge led by Saudi Arabia, Iran, Cuba and China would result in democratizing anything is beyond this reporter's comprehension.

 
The reason the Internet works so well for everyone in the world, except for dictatorial regimes such as (see above), is precisely because America does such a good job controlling the Internet -- which is to say not at all.

 

David Sims is contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles please visit David Sims' columnist page