
U.S. now 'totally unified' in opposition to U.N. Internet governance - brianchu
http://www.zdnet.com/u-s-now-totally-unified-in-opposition-of-u-n-internet-governance-7000008382/
======
beloch
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.

~~~
netcan
_"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
Love cheese and poetic commentary.

~~~
netcan
While I'd love to claim it, the poetic commentary is by Leonard Cohen. The
cheese is me.

------
ChuckMcM
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.

~~~
pyre
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
.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.

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ripperdoc
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:...](https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:hZQFa54QIRsJ:committee.tta.or.kr/include/Download.jsp%3Ffilename%3Dchoan%252F%255B2012-1357%255DY.2770.pdf+&hl=en&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESiYqxbjxfzsPMyrJWF3n4UxZ9ue6GFXfIleBijvnyPhGjSFtzJYljtQEtVFkL0-NsyLgBUgL82X4_vEcab7kjQICiLTDDIHxQPafPMvowZIioo-
Nyk9K7gF96U_Tm61D0pCYWC3&sig=AHIEtbT_Ocax-fYnglRV8MW4LsDBqoqPhg)

------
tvwonline
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?

~~~
fraserharris
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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_the_United_States)

~~~
dhughes
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.

~~~
potatolicious
As a Canadian your freedom to torrent is probably greater than your American
buddies - the legality of downloading is murky, though uploading is most
definitely illegal. Last I checked the two largest ISPs in Canada (Rogers and
Bell) both throttle file sharing protocols, though my information may be out
of date.

But we're not talking about your right to be a pirate, we're talking about
something much more fundamental - i.e., freedom of speech.

We're talking about your ability to go online and talk shit about your
neighbor, your city councilman, your MP, your Congressman, your Governor
General, or your Prime Minister.

As a Canadian myself, I can tell you that the US takes a _much_ stronger
stance in favor of freedom of speech than Canada (or really, any Westminster
system country today) and has consistently erred on the side of preserving
speech moreso than Canadians - to the point where some Canadians consider the
US stance to be rather extreme (e.g., malicious but truthful attacks are not
consider libel nor defamation).

As far as protections for both political expression as well as creative
expression (i.e., the arts) the US is one of the strongest (if not _the_
strongest) in the world - and this is coming from a Canadian who's mostly
cynical about American politics.

The claim that the US is the most free (in terms of speech) country in the
world isn't just typical pompous American exaggeration, there is a lot of meat
behind the claim.

~~~
dhughes
Yes I agree the US has enshrined freedom of speech Canada not so much it's
more an unspoken unofficial agreement.

But I'd say it evens since the US seems to push the limits of prosecution on
free speech and Canadian authorities just don't really seem to bother.

As for the incidents of lawsuits mentioned in other comments I can't say I've
ever heard of them not that it matters but what I'm saying is it seems rare
for anyone to go to that extreme.

------
gavanwoolery
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
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
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.

~~~
freehunter
Better the devil you know.

------
charonn0
The resolution in question is House Concurrent Resolution 127:
<http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2012/roll555.xml>

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

~~~
mtgx
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).

------
fiberguy
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
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.

------
electic
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.

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

~~~
rayiner
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
> The internet is not just HTML anymore.

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

~~~
tptacek
~2 decades.

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

~~~
Turing_Machine
The Senate was also unanimously opposed.

~~~
protomyth
Where is the Senate resolution?

~~~
Turing_Machine
[http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-
bin/bdquery/z?d112:SC00050:@@@L...](http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-
bin/bdquery/z?d112:SC00050:@@@L&summ2=m&);

------
ericcumbee
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
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.

~~~
betterunix
"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."

~~~
colanderman
_the Obama administration [...] has set the record for "most paramilitary
raids on medical marijuana dispensaries."_

That's like saying during the Bush Jr. administration that they had set the
record for the "most paramilitary raids on cloud computing datacenters". The
title is meaningless because the measure _didn't exist_ before that
administration.

~~~
betterunix
First of all, the fact that paramilitary raids on marijuana dispensaries even
happen with the full approval of the Obama administration is bad enough. That
being said, California's medical marijuana program has been in place since
1996, long before Obama even had aspirations to be in the white house.

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quadhome
Is "Internet governance" a synonym for DNS?

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

