
UN General Assembly adopts record number of resolutions on internet governance - magoghm
https://www.apc.org/en/node/35253
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Postosuchus
Just lovely - that's exactly what world needs: a bunch of countries that can
barely run themselves, let alone innovate, making decisions on policing
innovation and going for virtual land grab!

The only hopeful thing is - it's UN, the biggest bureaucracy in the world! It
will take them 3 years just to duke out the name of the Committee and the
titles of the bigwigs on it.

~~~
arduanika
I was told the ICANN handover was merely a formality?

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asabjorn
Human rights was originally conceived of as negative rights, e.g. you have the
right to pursue happiness in the same way as I do. Negative rights is a sign
of freedom, and positive rights are a sign of the opposite because they
infringe upon others freedom by obligating them to fulfill your rights.

The UN has expanded this greatly to positive rights where someone can obligate
someone to do something as a right, e.g. you have no right to offend my
beliefs.

In general this development is a step towards more centralization, and it is a
sign of the central weakness of any centralized system which is that its
limited in what it can express by the biological limitations of people that
run it.

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mistrial9
.. if you want to convince people of this, I suggest you review your use of
'positive' and 'negative' .. anyway, its not nearly as clear cut as you make
it out there.

~~~
pdabbadabba
Yeah. There's something right about this line of thought, I think, but it
could use a bit more development.

A big part of the conceptual problem is that the distinction between positive
and negative rights is much less clear than people often assume. GP
highlighted a pretty good example: "you have no right to offend my beliefs."
It's a positive right if you call it a "right to go through life without being
offended" but negative if phrased as "you have a right not to be the object of
offensive conduct." And often, preventing something from happening (i.e.,
enforcing a negative right) may impose some sort of affirmative obligation, or
impose seemingly objectionable restrictions, on others.

One somewhat fruitful way to untangle this can be to add another distinction
between acts of the state and acts of private citizens. Thus, under the U.S.
constitution, for example, one typically has negative rights against some
state action or other (e.g., :"Congress shall make no law...abridging the
freedom of speech.")

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asabjorn
"you have a right not to be the object of offensive conduct." is not a
negative right, because the one that has to oblige to act upon it is not the
one with the right. Not only that, for you to have that right the other person
is obliged to figure out what might offend you which is quite an impossible
requirement when speaking to a large crowd.

~~~
vertex-four
“You have a right not to be murdered” is also not a negative right, then.

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asabjorn
I don’t have to do anything to figure out if I should murder you or not. It’s
just wrong and there are only two options. However, I have to do something
active to be obliged to not offend your beliefs as there are as many sets of
beliefs that might offend as there are people. And what offends one might
please another. Big difference.

~~~
pdabbadabba
Totally correct! But this doesn't have to do with whether these are positive
or negative rights. It just highlights the fact that some negative rights are
more easily understood and applied than others.

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renholder
I have to concur that Agenda Item 109[1] (Countering the use of information
and communications technologies for criminal purposes), is vague as feck.

I'm looking forward to the report from the Secretary-General, to get a better
understanding on the scope of their intent: Unlawful as per the UN or unlawful
as per the member nations.

[1] -
[http://undocs.org/A/C.3/73/L.9/Rev.1](http://undocs.org/A/C.3/73/L.9/Rev.1)

~~~
lstodd
What does "unlawful per UN" mean?

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reaperducer
It means if there’s a violation, a bunch of bureaucrats and guys in blue
helmets show up and form committees to decide what color paper should be used
to send a very strongly worded letter.

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mensetmanusman
The west shouldn’t adopt anything to do with internet governance if China is
on any of the committees.

China made their own version of the internet to imprision their citizen’s
communication; let the rest of the world manage the real internet.

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nkkollaw
This makes me very scared.

If the quality of initiatives is as bad as the compat for migration, we're
pretty much fucked.

~~~
sphinxpy
The future looks more and more bleak as more and more authoritarianism is
applied to technology which is supposed to be, to many, as a frontier of
freedom.

~~~
jstanley
There are 2 conflicting forces at work. On the one hand you have politics
trying to take control of the internet, monitor everything, and censor what
they don't like. On the other hand you have people developing decentralised,
anonymous, and censorship-resistant technology like Tor and IPFS.

The more work politics puts in to trying to control the internet, the more
incentive there is to develop tools to work around politics.

Politics has the force of law behind it, cryptography has irrefutable
mathematics. Let's see who wins.

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CodeMage
> _Politics has the force of law behind it, cryptography has irrefutable
> mathematics. Let 's see who wins._

In the end, force wins. Irrefutable mathematics are just a tool. Every right
we have has been won through struggle. Sometimes that struggle is non-violent,
sometimes it's less so, but it's always a struggle. A lot of people tend to
forget that and think that technology will magically solve things. Or if not
technology, something else or someone else will do it.

~~~
alacombe
> In the end, force wins.

Thanks for the 2nd Amendment :-) Force doesn't have to be privatized by
Governments.

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isostatic
The Syrian people were armed, that turned out well.

Your AR-15 isn't much use against the Airforce's F15. The world has moved on
since 1776, local militias can't cope against national military - even one as
an expedition force, and in the U.S specifically entire countries can't cope
against the U.S. military as an expidition force, what hope does a local
militia have against a U.S. based military?

The most you'll get is a guerilla war and terrorism, and that always works out
well./sarcasm

~~~
antidesitter
Then why hasn’t the mighty US military been able to defeat a bunch of Afghan
rebels armed with AKs? You vastly underestimate the power of guerilla war. See
also Vietnam, Iraq, and Syria.

And if the US military ever turned against its own citizens on US soil, you
can bet a huge number would defect and hell would break loose.

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isostatic
Well if your end goal is to reduce your country to the state of Iraq or Syria,
with suicide bombers and destruction of entire cities a daily occurance,
that's fine, I guess it's the price you have to pay for having weekly school
shootings.

~~~
antidesitter
You conspicuously missed the example of Vietnam.

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simula67
> Combating glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other practices that
> contribute to fuelling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination,
> xenophobia and related intolerance

What about communism ?

~~~
ddnb
Communism in itself doesn't advocate racism, racial discrimination and
xenophobia.

~~~
simula67
Those are not the only things that cause needless suffering in this world

