U.S. now 'totally unified' in opposition to U.N. Internet governance

http://www.zdnet.com/u-s-now-totally-unified-in-opposition-of-u-n-internet-governance-7000008382/

by brianchu • 14 years ago

119 69 14 years ago

charonn0• 14 years ago

The resolution in question is House Concurrent Resolution 127: http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2012/roll555.xml

ericcumbee• 14 years ago

Not surprising the Democrats do not want to hand over power from the federal government. While the Republicans (myself included) do not trust the federal government to oversee the internet, but they certainly do not trust the U.N. to do it either.

bluedanieru• 14 years ago

Wow, what a disingenuous, bullshit comment you've made here.

From the article:

>We need to send a strong message to the world that the Internet has thrived under a decentralized, bottom-up, multi-stakeholder governance model.

While that statement was made by a Republican Congresswoman, I see no reason to think that it doesn't accurately represent the thoughts of most of the House - including Democrats - because, as she points out, it is a multi-stakeholder model. Some of the proposals before the ITU, the very ones the House is united against, would put significantly more power in the hands of the federal government - not less.

Why do Democrats oppose it anyway? Because they aren't fascists. Sorry to be the one to have to tell you.

betterunix4• 14 years ago

"Why do Democrats oppose it anyway? Because they aren't fascists"

Let's not get ahead of ourselves. The Democrats are just as quick to throw millions of people in prison as the Republicans are, and it is the Obama administration that has set the record for "most paramilitary raids on medical marijuana dispensaries."

alan_cx• 14 years ago

So, for you, are the words "internet governance" not necessary in the subject?

rhizome• 14 years ago

ICANN, ITU, etc., on the other hand...

ericHosick• 14 years ago

What kinds of governance are even required on mediums used to communicate information?

pulledpork• 14 years ago

Whatever they can get away with would be my guess

noarchy• 14 years ago

I think that this is what most government default to on most things.

rayiner• 14 years ago

That's a bit of a disingenuous charaterization. The internet is not just HTML anymore. It's a platform for commerce, education, entertainment, etc.

That said, I don't think we particularly need governance on the internet, but more because we have adequate tools to achieve regulatory goals by asserting jurisdiction over meat-space endpoints. E.g. if some phony educational site is scamming people, I think it's adequate to be able to get the operator sitting in Nebraska instead of leveraging regulation on the internet itself.

derleth• 14 years ago

> The internet is not just HTML anymore.

Nor has it ever been, seeing as how it predates HTML by over a decade.

moistgorilla• 14 years ago

If the UN decided to apply new regulations to the internet would they even have the power to do so?

mtgx• 14 years ago

Probably not, as they are not a "world government", and the decision would have to be ratified by each country.

However, if they do decide that they need to do this, that is still very very bad for the Internet, even if say US and EU refuse to adopt the proposals. But that means the majority of the countries out there might still adopt them. It would lead to a balkanized Internet, something we feared since SOPA, except with the current proposals, it would be much worse.

Content providers may remain free to distribute their content in EU and US, but they won't be in all the other countries that adopt and ratify ITU's proposals. We could start having the same type of licensing mess we see with books and music all over the world, where some countries have to wait months or years to get that content. Now imagine all of that would happen for just one blog post, or a video, maybe from a smaller service than Youtube.

So it's very important that there is unanimous or at least almost unanimous rejection of these proposals at ITU, because even if US and EU reject it, it would still affect us otherwise, and most importantly, the Internet will cease to be a universal thing for everyone - all in the name of giving more money to some ISP's and aiding some governments to monitor and censor their populations.

Not to mention that if the proposals pass, it means we're losing a battle with the future. It means this trend of making the Internet less free will keep growing, and who knows if next time US and EU will be against it. Maybe they'll see "how well" it works for the other countries to have censorship and whatnot, and they'll decide that maybe it's time for them to adopt all of that, too. This is why I think it's very important to win this battle, too, just like we won with SOPA and ACTA (although unfortunately, 8 other countries didn't, who already adopted ACTA, and India also passed ACTA in bits and pieces through other legislation).

politician• 14 years ago

A UN resolution provides plausible justification for members' internet crackdowns and censorship activities.

ripperdoc2• 14 years ago

Wait a minute. ITU is composed of the national regulators and interested companies. ITU cannot regulate, they can simply recommend that each regulator goes home (in US case, FCC), and proposes some regulatory change, which has to pass normal due process. So this it not a matter of UN or ITU applying regulations.

With this said, I think it's best for ITU (and regulators) to keep it handsoff with the internet. ITU has a history of complicated and old-fashioned standardization that would do more harm than good.

electic• 14 years ago

Wow. I am really happy with Congress. On a side note, I think we should add the phrase "United Nations Internet Governance" to every bill so that both parties come together to solve challenges in the future.

tvwonline• 14 years ago

In principal, as a non-US citizen, why would I want the US to control the internet as opposed to the UN?

This is not a reflection of what is currently being considered at the UN which from what I have read I don't support.

What do other international people think?

fraserharris3• 14 years ago

The US has stronger protections of freedom of speech than (any?) other countries.

"The legal protections of the First Amendment are some of the broadest of any industrialized nation, and remain a critical, and occasionally controversial, component of American jurisprudence."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_the_Unite...

dhughes2• 14 years ago

As a Canadian I bet I have far more Internet freedom than a US citizen does I don't have to fear being flagged as a downloader of movies by media corp swat teams.

I'd say any person in any western nation would think their country is more fair than the others.

I'm not distrustful of the UN I'm not a fan because it's a huge bureaucracy but the US isn't any better, I bet people in the US wouldn't accept Canada being in control of ICANN.

Turing_Machine3• 14 years ago

It's not just the U.S. The E.U. is also unanimously opposed to this. Also Canada, Australia, and numerous other countries.

The countries in favor are regimes like Saudi Arabia, China, and Russia.

yk• 14 years ago

Because the US have a rather good track record concerning internet gouvernance. By contrast the main drivers for ITU involvement are gouverments with rather dubious motivations, like Russia.

So as much as I would like to see a more international internet gouvernance, I am afraid that the ITU ( with their "old men with pens" influence) would most likely not do a very good job compared to ICANN and W3C. (And besides, never change a running system ;)

spindritf• 14 years ago

> why would I want the US to control the internet as opposed to the UN?

That's not the choice here.

Sure, the US already has a lot of control over the Internet because a huge chunk of infrastructure (including large parts of crucial systems like DNS) is under their jurisdiction. But that's not going to change.

dlitz• 14 years ago

Free-speech issues aside, there's also the question of whether you want the IAB/IESG/IETF engineers to continue define Internet standards, or whether you want a group of telephone monopoly bureaucrats to take it over.

Let's consider some of the protocols that the ITU has produced: OSI, X.500, X.509, GSM, V.92, etc. The one thing that they all have in common is that they're all orders of magnitude more complex and difficult to implement than they need to be. They're often also covered by a ridiculous number of patents.

The ITU organization doesn't seem to be capable of producing anything that doesn't cost billions of dollars to implement. Just from a purely technical standpoint, the ITU's history does not suggest that putting them in charge would be good for interoperability, competition, or technological progress.

mcpie• 14 years ago

I personally feel the US has been doing a rather good job.

I also like that a free and open internet is in the US' interest - the de-facto 'control' over the internet by the US gives it enormous amounts of soft and technological power that they can subtly profit from.

We're basically all locked into the US-paradigm on the internet. That means it's in the US' national interest not to mess with the internet too much - far better to just coast along on the wave you've created yourself.

It also means that Russia and other states are strategically opposed to a free and open internet. Not just for national purposes (censoring speech critical of their autocrats), but also for strategic purposes an open internet is a threat to their international power. They're swimming against the US wave.

So, ideally speaking, yes, everybody should democratically have a say in how to run the internet. Realistically speaking, however, the current situation is a near-optimal solution.

betterunix4• 14 years ago

"why would I want the US to control the internet as opposed to the UN?"

UN control of the Internet means that the governments of China, Russia, and numerous other governments that are far worse than the US government would be in a position to influence Internet policy. Some governments want to add a structure of fees to the Internet, so that visiting websites would involve paying every country through which your packets travel. Some want censorship to be built-in, so that their political dissidents cannot simply use VPNs, proxy servers, or Tor to evade national firewalls.

To put it another way, the US government's approach to censorship of the Internet is mostly a combination of rare and costly raids on server rooms, hijacking domain names, and arresting people who download illegal pornography. China's approach is to have tens of thousands of government workers laboring 24 hours per day to identify websites that go too far in contradicting the Communist party's official policies, maintaining an enormous national firewall, and attacking Tor network connections to prevent people from evading the firewall -- and they also raid server rooms and arrest people who possess the wrong information. Do you really want to let China have any sort of power over the Internet?

beloch• 14 years ago

ICANN is ostensibly supposed to run in a democratic fashion based on input from the international community, but I'd be very surprised if the U.S. government wasn't already abusing their influence over ICANN towards at least two purposes:

1. Spying on everyone out of paranoia over terrorism.

2. Doing whatever the RIAA and MPAA's lobbyists want them to do.

That's not so good, but the ITU's express goal seems to be to balkanize the internet into a collection of state-controlled networks. One of the biggest benefits of the internet is that it shrinks the world and grants everyone, regardless of what country they live in, access to the same online community. I probably sound like complete hippie saying this, but I believe the global community created by the internet really is bringing all peoples of the world closer together. Reversing this trend would be far worse than anything ICANN is likely to do in the next decade!

Of course, as bad as the ITU's intentions are, the reality would likely be even worse. The internet is so interconnected that the power one state is granted over the internet in its own jurisdiction would likely translate into power they wield over everyone.

ICANN is, by far, the lesser of two evils at present. I am very concerned about the decline of respect for privacy in the U.S., but things simply haven't gotten bad enough yet to make the ITU look good by comparison.

wmf• 14 years ago

ICANN's regulations and most of its deliberations are public, and they're not doing 1 or 2. They are totally captured by the "domain industry", but I agree that sounds less bad than what ITU is proposing.

secalex• 14 years ago

You clearly have never been to an ICANN meeting. The best part of that organization is that it is way too dysfunctional and inefficient to lead any kind of conspiracy.

netcan2• 14 years ago

"I probably sound like complete hippie saying this, but"

I hate it that sentiments like this are so prone to be cliche that thoughtful people completely avoid them. It is absolutely reasonable to say something like this. The internet has shrunk the world, strengthened global solidarity, weakened our illusions of nationalism.

I'll see your hippiness and raise you a poem. Cheesiness be damned.

  We loved the easy and the smart,
  But now, with keener hand and brain,
  We rise to play a greater part.
  The lesser loyalties depart,
  And neither race nor creed remain
  From bitter searching of the heart.
  Not steering by the venal chart
  That tricked the mass for private gain,
  We rise to play a greater part.
  Reshaping narrow law and art
  Whose symbols are the millions slain,
  From bitter searching of the heart
  We rise to play a greater part.

fredericdb• 14 years ago

Love cheese and poetic commentary.

cloudsteam• 14 years ago

that was beautiful thanks

mhurron• 14 years ago

> 1. Spying on everyone out of paranoia over terrorism. > > 2. Doing whatever the RIAA and MPAA's lobbyists want them to do.

With direct access to the various ISP's that actually carry traffic, the US doesn't need ICANN to do either of these.

Honestly, how would ICANN do any of that anyway?

ChuckMcM• 14 years ago

Ya know, I'm all in favor of unity and all but it would have really helped us make the argument that "we" (as in the USA) are doing a good job managing "The Internet" if "we" hadn't been seizing and shutting down domains in foreign countries that someone in the US disagrees with. That particular set of actions is coming back to hurt us.

Now if we could get the Congress to pass a law that says the US registrars cannot take down a domain of an offshore company unless there is a judicial order to do so, from the host country that would go a long way to making amends. But that would not really impress the content folks.

ewillbefull• 14 years ago

So far the U.S. has only been seizing domains on TLDs which are delegated to U.S. companies.

sirclueless• 14 years ago

Yes, that's where they get their legal basis. It's a red herring in this argument though. Many countries would rather the US didn't have carte blanche over the three most critical TLDs. Seizing foreign domains on the basis that their registrar is under US jurisdiction is a sign of bad faith, and probably a diplomatic faux pas.

pyre• 14 years ago

Do you have examples of ccTLDs being taken down? The .com/.org/.net/etc TLDs are designated to the US. Sure, they are the most common TLDs out there, but they are under US jurisdiction.

I'd be more concerned about how the domain seizures have happened basically at the behest of the content industries, with no (appropriate amount of) due diligence done by government officials.

driax• 14 years ago

.com/.org/.net are not desginated to the US. They are generic top-level domains operated by a US company. Go use .us if you want a ccTLD for the US. Or .edu/.gov/.mil which are sponsored TLDs for use by the US.

fiberguy• 14 years ago

This article seems to frame the future-of-the-internet issue in a weird way.

The ITU is the body responsible for most sub-sea fiber communications standards and for international radio spectrum allocations. It seems to represent the interests of international telecommunications companies, while the interests of domain registrars are united under the US-based ICANN.

The reason to oppose UN control over the internet is not because it is the UN, but because historically telecommunications companies (with their profit motives) have been more hostile to the free flow of information than domain name registrars.

bad_user• 14 years ago

The other reason would be that the Internet worked fine until now and is great just as it is.

It could be better, but when I think of all the things that we could fix, like decentralized DNS, I'm pretty sure any regulators will take it in the opposite direction.

bcoates• 14 years ago

The vast majority of telecommunication companies are either openly, or in practice, arms of their respective governments, so increasing telco power is tantamount to centralizing power towards governments.

ripperdoc2• 14 years ago

Here you can read the draft Recommendation ITU-T Y.2770, Requirements for Deep Packet Inspection in Next Generation Networks: https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:hZQFa54QIRsJ:...

gavanwoolery2• 14 years ago

Well, I think the US is actually doing an "ok" job of managing the internet. If you have to hand over control, give it to anybody EXCEPT for the UN. The UN is a joke, full of even more corrupt politicians than in the US (and we have many!).

As usual, research your own propaganda, but here is one bit to digest: http://www.canadafreepress.com/2006/rosett040406.htm

akie• 14 years ago

Well, it's nice if a US citizen would have that opinion... but I'm not a US citizen and I would prefer the Internet to not be under US government control.

Imagine if it was the Chinese government that was in control, or (for the sake of argument) the British or French government. Would you be ok with that?

jQueryIsAwesome• 14 years ago

I (and many people) are in favor of give control to the ones less likely to corrupt/change it; unfourtunaly we dont know who that is so is better to stick with the one already in control to avoid surprises.

gavanwoolery2• 14 years ago

Like I said, I don't mind the US giving up control, just so long as that control does not go to the UN.

quadhome• 14 years ago

Is "Internet governance" a synonym for DNS?

protomyth2• 14 years ago

It's nice the US House did this, but the US Senate approves treaties so it would be better coming from them.

Turing_Machine3• 14 years ago

The Senate was also unanimously opposed.

protomyth2• 14 years ago

Where is the Senate resolution?

U.S. now 'totally unified' in opposition to U.N. Internet governance

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