Monday, November 12, 2007

Another Reason Not To Like The UN (as if you needed another one)

Can you imagine the UN--the same organization that puts Libya in control of a human rights commission--in charge of the internet?

Big on the agenda is the UN-based campaign to take away control of the internet from the U.S. The aim, now that U.S. freedoms and resulting creativity (not Al Gore, his own claims notwithstanding) have brought mankind this marvelous gift of the internet, is to confiscate management of the World Wide Web and turn it over to the same grand conclave of UN potentates whose members include the web-censoring likes of dissident-jailing China, monk-murdering Burma, terrorist-sponsoring bomb-making Iran, and 2008 members-elect of the Security Council, Libya and Vietnam.

This current pow-wow in Brazil is the work of the UN-based Internet Governance Forum (IGF), which — with a secretariat now entrenched in an office at the UN’s palatial (BMW-rich) complex in Geneva — has been following up on the UN’s second World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). That internet summit, as you might recall, was held in November, 2005 in internet-censoring Tunisia — initial sponsor in 1998 of this UN bid to cash in on the web.

2 comments:

Ellen K said...

In some countries, their access to the Internet is the only thing that even remotely resembles freedom. And now the UN, that bastion of fairness and understanding based on ethnicity, wealth and political agendas, wants to take away that. Do they honestly think that controlling this is even possible? We can't even keep hackers off of our school's network. And the UN hasn't really shown a great deal of expertise at controlling their own people. It goes back to the can of worms analogy-the only way to put them back is to get a bigger can. What a waste of money, time and effort. And while we are at it, what a blatant attempt to powergrab at one of the few American industries left.

KauaiMark said...

Have the UN put Nigeria on the project.

I hear they a ton of internet savy individuals with lots of excess cash to share.

It's true! I get at least two emails a day requesting help to move it out of the country.