Posted on 11/27/2012 6:47:41 AM PST by Kaslin
The United Nations may be useful as a forum for world leaders, but it is not a productive place to develop policy. The international bureaucracy compulsively supports statist initiatives that would reduce individual liberty and expand the burden of government.
And you won’t be surprised to learn that the United Nations also wants to control the Internet. Actually, to be more specific, some nations want to regulate and censor the Internet and they are using the United Nations as a venue.
Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Gordon Crovitz explains this new threat. He starts by describing the laissez-faire system that currently exists and identifies the governments pushing for bad policy.
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.
He then warns about the risk of government control.
Having the Internet rewired by bureaucrats would be like handing a Stradivarius to a gorilla. The Internet is made up of 40,000 networks that interconnect among 425,000 global routes, cheaply and efficiently delivering messages and other digital content among more than two billion people around the world, with some 500,000 new users a day. …The self-regulating Internet means no one has to ask for permission to launch a website, and no government can tell network operators how to do their jobs. The arrangement has made the Internet a rare place of permissionless innovation.
Crovitz identifies some of the specific tax and regulatory threats.
Proposals for the new ITU treaty run to more than 200 pages. One idea is to apply the ITU’s long-distance telephone rules to the Internet by creating a “sender-party-pays” rule. International phone calls include a fee from the originating country to the local phone company at the receiving end. Under a sender-pays approach, U.S.-based websites would pay a local network for each visitor from overseas, effectively taxing firms such as Google and Facebook. …Regimes such as Russia and Iran also want an ITU rule letting them monitor Internet traffic routed through or to their countries, allowing them to eavesdrop or block access.
And he warns that the Obama Administration’s representative seems inadequately committed to advancing and protecting American interests.
The State Department’s top delegate to the Dubai conference, Terry Kramer, has pledged that the U.S. won’t let the ITU expand its authority to the Internet. But he hedged his warning in a recent presentation in Washington: “We don’t want to come across like we’re preaching to others.” To the contrary, the top job for the U.S. delegation at the ITU conference is to preach the virtues of the open Internet as forcefully as possible. Billions of online users are counting on America to make sure that their Internet is never handed over to authoritarian governments or to the U.N.
With all the support Obama got from Silicon Valley and the high-tech crowd, one would think this is an issue where the Administration would do the right thing. And it sounds like the U.S. is on the right side, but the real issue is whether the American representative is prepared to tell the dictators and kleptocrats to jump in a lake.
The moral of the story is that the United Nations should not be a policy forum. The bureaucrats seem to have no appreciation or understanding of how the economy works, perhaps because they live in a bubble and get tax-free salaries.
And I don’t say that out of animosity. The folks I’ve met from the United Nations have all been pleasant and I even participated in a U.N. conference as the token free-market supporter.
But just because someone’s nice, that doesn’t mean that they should have any power over my life or your life. And many of the nations pushing to control and regulate the Internet are governed by people who are neither nice nor pleasant.
P.S. You probably don’t want to know my innermost fantasies, but one of them involved the United Nations.
Since the United Nations has proven for over a year now that it cannot resolve the ‘Slaughter in Syria,’ of what use is the United Nations as a Peace Keeping Force?
The UN wants to run the fricking world.
It’s time to stop.
Time to stop this BS.
Would you want the UN to look over your Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace account?
Would you want the UN to know when the last time you purchased anything to do with ‘firearms’?
Would you want the UN to know when you type such truthful things as Mohammed was a pedophile? Or that Obama had a love affair with a guy in a Chicago bathouse?
One global tax, then 2, then 3.... Then you have global governance by our enemies.
The UN (Useless Nothing) is only good for bashing the United States (conservatives, that is; Marxists are OK with them) and Israel.
Under a different administration we might finally send them packing to Brussels, Paris or Beijing, but as it is we’re stuck with them for four more years (or at least until December 21st!).
UN OUT OF U.S.—U.S. OUT OF UN!
One idea is to apply the ITU’s long-distance telephone rules to the Internet by creating a “sender-party-pays” rule.This is the kind of thing that Net Neutrality forbids. Remember "Net Neutrality"? That was something all good conservatives were supposed to hate because... well, "neutrality" sounds Swiss or something.
Hackers will destroy our cyberspace. Just a matter of time before grids are controlled by other entities.
How do we stop it? I have no idea.
I wasn't older when I was younger so I don't know how older men thought when I was a younger man.
But it seems to me that the older I get, the more insane the (sometimes) younger people are in the normal operation of their daily lives/calling.
The UN is a gathering place for crazy people to discuss under the semblance of normalcy, that which is insane.
Besides acquiring pretty, powder blue helmets and perfecting the rape of the women of the country(s) they're charged with "observing" or "protecting" ... WHAT has the UN done in 60/65 years?
That is why it is referred to as the Useless Nations
And he warns that the Obama Administration’s representative seems inadequately committed to advancing and protecting American interests.
The Obama regime's idea of "American interests" is the ability to monitor and control potential dissent. So I've reworded the paragraph to reflect reality.
…Regimes such as Obama's in the U.S., Russia and Iran also want an ITU rule letting them monitor Internet traffic routed through or to their countries, allowing them to eavesdrop or block access.
Kill the UN.
All of them.
Let them take it over, and it shall wither on the vine as they say. In parallel the internet 2.0 will emerge outside of UN control and led by entrepreneurs.
It’s not theirs to run.
It takes our Congress to stop it.
And it takes an American President instead of this Muslim preferencing ,secret background,Community organising, racist, we have posing as President.
The UN was never set up to rule the world as they are trying to do today. They are usurping powers that they are not authorised to have. As long as they get away with it they will continue to take more and more.Not unlike the weasel we have in the WH.
They already have power over our Parks and now they want power over our guns, Power over the Sea, Power over the air we breathe, Power over the internet,They want to have an Internationa Court. You name it, The UN wants to run it.
Take a look at the member States and you will get an idea where this is all coming from. We have allowed a gathering of Muslim States to gain more and more power over the UN and now want to give more power to the UN.
There was a League of Nations, it is now History, and now it is time to make the UN history.
I cannot remember a single moment in my 6-1/2 decade life that I ever though anything the UN did was good.
This is just another power grab by a cartel of despots.
My feelings exactly. The internet isnt on one big switch and cannot be controlled by the U.N. anyway.
Just as soon as they try, some tech startup will emerge with a workaround for those who want to have a U.N. free network. Probably be an improvement anyway.
“Dark net” and “undernet” offer a solution:
FOIA Documents Show TOR Undernet Beyond the Reach of the Federal Investigators
FOIA Request: silk road anonymous marketplace (DOJ)
Michael Morisy
Activist Post
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Recently released documents detail the federal government’s inability to pursue cybercriminals shrouded by the tricky anonymity tools used by the Silk Road marketplace and other darknet sites - tools which are funded in part by the federal government itself. In this particular case, a citizen reported stumbling upon a cache of child pornography while browsing the anonymous Tor network’s hidden sites, which are viewable with specialized, but readily available, tools and the special .onion domain.
Keep on reading here:
http://www.activistpost.com/2012/06/foi-documents-show-tor-undernet-beyond.html
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