Posted on 03/29/2005 10:17:09 AM PST by minus_273
The International Telecommunication Union is one of the most venerable of bureaucracies. Created in 1865 to facilitate telegraph transmissions, its mandate has expanded to include radio and telephone communications.
The ITU, a United Nations agency, would like to change that. "The whole world is looking for a better solution for Internet governance, unwilling to maintain the current situation," Houlin Zhao, director of the ITU's Telecommunication Standardization Bureau, said last year. Zhao, a former government official in China's Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications, has been in his current job since 1999.
Though Zhao is far too diplomatic to state it directly, the ITU's increasing interest in the Internet could presage a power struggle between ITU, ICANN, and perhaps even the U.S. government, which retains some oversight authority over ICANN and appears content with the current structure.
In a series of speeches over the last year, Zhao has suggested that the ITU could become involved in everything from security and spam to managing how Internet Protocol addresses are assigned. The ITU also is looking into some aspects of voice over Internet Protocol--VoIP--communications, another potential area for expansion.
"Countering spam is just one of many elements of protecting the Internet that include availability during emergencies and supporting public safety and law enforcement officials," Zhao wrote in December. Also, he wrote, the ITU "would take care of other work, such as work on Internet exchange points, Internet interconnection charging regimes, and methods to provide authenticated directories that meet national privacy regimes."
CNET News.com recently spoke with Zhao about the ITU's increased interest in the Internet and its involvement in a series of meetings that will conclude in November with a U.N. World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.com.com ...
Speaking at an event at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston last February, Kerry complained about us and the thousands of others in Internet news. What he said is shocking only if you believe Kerry's words could ever put this new information age back in the bottle.
"We learned," Kerry said to the gathering, "that the mainstream media, over the course of the last year, did a pretty good job of discerning. But there's a subculture and a sub-media that talks and keeps things going for entertainment purposes rather than for the flow of information. And that has a profound impact and undermines what we call the mainstream media of the country. And so the decision-making ability of the American electorate has been profoundly impacted as a consequence of that. The question is, what are we going to do about it?"
What Senator Kerry would like to do about it is to shut us all up. But he can't say that publicly. What he did say publicly, though, is just as shocking. "When fear is dominating the discussion and when there are false choices presented and there is no arbitrator, we have a problem," said Kerry.
In case you missed that, Kerry says the problem is the lack of an arbitrator to control the dissemination of news. He did not say who or what that arbitrator should be, only that we have a problem because there is not one.
The "sub-media" is a problem for Kerry because the mainstream media is no longer in control to silence groups like the Swift Boat Vets by ignoring them and denying them coverage. Or to keep stories quiet like we chronicled about Kerry's lead in outsourcing trade missions to China in the late 1990's in conjunction with a Boston company boasting over 70 outsourcing projects - at the same time we were reporting on this, his preferred news disseminators were dutifully printing Kerry's campaign speeches calling for an end to outsourcing without a word of Kerry's involvement in the very thing he was speaking against.
Surely the problem Kerry sees is that stories run by Dan Rather, The New York Times and the other media giants favorable to him are being knocked down as false by internet newsgroups calling themselves FreeRepublic, Powerline, and Little Green Footballs.
BINGO
he he
The Achilles' heel of the internet is control of the domain registration system and subsequent control of the name to IP resolution.
And I would not trust that system to be managed anywhere outside of the US.
Sort of what the SCOTUS does with its self-aggrandizing legal arguments.
It'll start with "civic minded" universities coordinating their research networks through the UN so that "all may share in the fruits of their research" or some such cr@p.
Well, actually they did buy an ISP. For some reason that one wasn't held up. See PCCW.
PCCW is controlled by one Richard Li. Guess who he's the son of. No joke.
With respect to the ITU: for some reason, having a veneer of legalistic correctness seems to matter to the Chicoms. Rather than simply try to stamp out the Catholic Church in China, they set up their own bogus one. Few dictatorships would go to that much trouble. They love the UN; it serves that purpose. Not surprised to see them playing at ITU. They appreciate diplomatic poker and use it to their advantage.
For more on ITU and the Internet:
See link above.
EU Wants International Control of Internet
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Sep 30, 8:58 AM (ET)
BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) - The European Union insisted Friday the job of Internet traffic cop must be shared by governments and the private sector.
The U.S. wants to remain the Internet's ultimate authority, rejecting calls in a United Nations meeting in Geneva for a U.N. body to take over.
EU spokesman Martin Selmayr rejected American claims the EU had changed direction.
"We are looking for a new cooperation model, a model that allows Internet governance and the laying down of public policy principles in coordination by all countries which are interested in the governance of the Internet because the Internet is a global resource," he said.
"The EU ... is very firm on this position."
The Geneva talks were the last preparatory meeting before November's World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia.
Negotiators said there was a growing sense a compromise had to be reached and that no single country ought to be the ultimate authority over such a vital part of the global economy.
A top U.S. official said the U.S. was "deeply disappointed," with an EU proposal, made Wednesday, which appeared to support wresting control of domain names from the U.S.-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, and placing it with an intergovernmental group, possibly under the United Nations.
"We will not agree to the U.N. taking over the management of the Internet," said Ambassador David Gross, the U.S. coordinator for international communications and information policy at the State Department.
"Some countries want that. We think that's unacceptable."
But Selmayr insisted the EU and U.S. were not that far apart though tensions have sunk any chance of agreement in Geneva this week.
"That doesn't mean they're won't be a result in the end," he said.
"We are very close with the United States on a number of important principles. It is not for governments to control the Internet. We need more private sector involvement and the current working methods of ICANN are very efficient."
The stalemate over who should serve as the principal traffic cops for Internet routing and addressing may derail the November summit which aims to ensure a fair sharing of the Internet for the benefit of the whole world.
Internet governance historically has been the role of the U.S., which created the original system and funded much of its early development.
While this satisfies some, developing countries are upset that Western countries that got onto the Internet first gobbled up most available addresses required for computers to connect, leaving poor nations to share a limited supply.
ICANN now controls the Internet's master directories, which tell Web browsers and e-mail programs how to direct traffic.
Net surfers worldwide use them daily but policy decisions could, at a stroke, make all Web sites ending in a specific suffix essentially unreachable.
Though the computers themselves - 13 in all, known as "root" servers - are in private hands, they contain government-approved lists of the 260 or so Internet suffixes, such as ".com."
In 1998, the U.S. Commerce Department selected ICANN, a private organization with international board members, to decide what goes on those lists. Commerce kept veto power, but indicated it would let go once ICANN met a number of conditions.
But earlier this year, the United States indicated Commerce would keep that control, regardless of whether and when those conditions were met.
A U.N. panel has outlined four possible options for the future of Internet governance, ranging from keeping the current system intact to revamping it under new international agencies formed under the auspices of the U.N.
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