Free Republic

A report by a United Nations organization calls for the international body to seize control of information shared over the Internet should the governments of member nations fail to pass sufficient cybersecurity regulations.In the document, called “Trends in Telecommunication Reform: Smart Regulation in a Broadband World,” the UN’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU) points to the specter of an attack on the cyber infrastructure of a country as justification for the world body’s assumption of regulation and monitoring of traffic on the information superhighway.That frightening prospect was first reported by the News Limited Network out of Australia. Paola Totaro and Claire...

Leo Tolstoy once said, “Imagine Genghis Khan with a telephone.” Imagine Genghis Khan, or a gaggle of Genghis Khans, running the Internet, and you have a sense of the ideas that will be percolating in Dubai at the World Conference on International Telecommunications in December. Delegates from 120 countries will gather under the auspices of the United Nations to consider a plan to take administrative control of the Internet away from the United States and hand it over to an international body run by the UN. In short, governance of cyberspace will pass from the country that has kept it...

Next week the United Nations' International Telecommunications Union will meet in Dubai to figure out how to control the Internet. Representatives from 193 nations will attend the nearly two week long meeting, according to news reports. "Next week the ITU holds a negotiating conference in Dubai, and past months have brought many leaks of proposals for a new treaty. U.S. congressional resolutions and much of the commentary, including in this column, have focused on proposals by authoritarian governments to censor the Internet. Just as objectionable are proposals that ignore how the Internet works, threatening its smooth and open operations," reports...

Governance of the Internet could change dramatically following a review of an international agreement on global telecommunications set for this coming December in Dubai. FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell (R) and the State Department's Richard Beaird described the impact of the review during a discussion hosted by the Free State Foundation.

It is expected to be the mother of all cyber diplomatic battles. When delegates gather in Dubai in December for an obscure UN agency meeting, fighting is expected to be intense over proposals to rewrite global telecom rules to effectively give the United Nations control over the Internet.

The Barack Obama Administration has, since its inception, been moving the United States dramatically leftward, trying to (at the very least) make us a western European socialist entity. Ideologically, a full-on participant in – rather than a rational outlier of – the patently absurd United Nations (UN). Perhaps the greatest – and worst – example of President Obama’s UN-ing of America was his Federal Communications Commission (FCC)’s December 2010 illegal Network Neutrality Internet power grab. The Administration going to these unlawful lengths to commandeer control of the ‘Net makes it a little more difficult to persuade international autocrats and dictators...

During the opening ceremony of the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis on Wednesday, delegates from across the globe were amazed when the Swiss president, Samuel Schmid, directly criticised Tunisia for its policy of restricting free speech. "It is, quite frankly, unacceptable for the United Nations to continue to include among its members states which imprison citizens for the sole reason that they have criticised their government on the internet or in the media," he said.

Washington, D.C.-Senator Norm Coleman today submitted a statement into the Congressional Record denouncing a final report issued by the United Nations' Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG) suggesting that the U.N. assume global governance of the Internet. Since its inception and creation in the United States, the U.S. has assumed the historic role of overseeing the Internet's growth and has overseen its development. The U.N. taskforce report suggests that in addition to terminating the U.S.'s leadership role, the authority and functions of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a non-profit organization overseen by the U.S. Department of...

It was five years ago today... A tax on email to improve the lot of those less fortunate than ourselves? It's either a very bright idea or the product of some seriously fantasist thinking: UN proposes email tax By Tony Smith Published Wednesday 14th July 1999 11:46 GMT The United Nations wants email users to subsidise the extension of the Internet to Third World countries, according to a report released by the UN Development Programme earlier this week. Essentially, the report calls on governments to introduce legislation that would require Net users to pay a tax of one US cent...