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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
.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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
We Canadians have fewer protections of freedom speech, specifically hate speech (ie: sections of the Criminal Code of Canada, and the Canadian Human Rights Act).
It's not just that you have fewer protections. It's that someone can file a complaint with the local HRC for free and you'll end up spending thousands defending yourself. It's the perfect vehicle for legal harassment.
This. Here's a story of two Canadian writers who were forced to spend thousands on defending themselves for engaging in politically incorrect Badthink:
The most abused part of the Canadian Human Rights Act, Section 13, was repealed in August. Alberta Conservative MP Brian Storseth, author of the repeal bill, said this at the time:
"The current human rights code allows too many frivolous cases to proceed against citizens, when the Criminal Code already covers hate speech that could generate harm against an individual or group.
Acts of hate speech are serious crimes that should be investigated by police officers, not civil servants, he said, and the cases should be handled by "real judges and real lawyers," instead of a quasi-judicial body such as the human rights commission."
Not to step too far into a nationalist spit war, but:
Of all the oddball things to plant that maple leaf of internet freedom on, you picked... downloading illegal[1] copies of movies? Really? That's "freedom" to you guys up north?
[1] Something no one sane disagrees with. Very reasonable arguments can be made about overzealous enforcement, of course, or the lack of acceptable legitimate alternatives. But really: no one thinks that making copies of copyrighted material from anonymous peers on the internet is "OK", even if "everyone" does it.
Practically every major Western democracy has, or soon will have, roughly equally draconian anti-piracy enforcement, typically in the form of "N Strikes" laws with forced disconnection. Practically every major Western democracy does, or soon will, have ISP-level filtering of sites alleged to infringe copyright.
So copyright enforcement is not an area where it's really possible to take a useful stand.
Other aspects, though, are: consider, say, an internet subject to English libel jurisdiction. Or one subject to some European countries' feelings on religious -- particularly Muslim religious -- content. Or one subject to China's ideas about appropriate political speech.
While there are many things to complain about with respect to the US federal government, and its approach to freedom of speech, it is -- much like democracy is occasionally quipped to be -- the worst, except for all the alternatives.
As a fellow Canadian you should know that Bill C-30 is gaining support, and there is apparent international pressure[1] from US and UK to pass this legislation.
Just as CALEA continues to be abused in the US against 'downloaders' it will be abused here just as well.
Personally I would prefer Canada continue to maintain its unwillingness to implement these policies and instead wait several years to study the effects of these CALEA-like laws on other nations.
Canada and most of Western Europe doesn't have the protection of freedom of speech that is embedded in the U.S. constitution. In particular, things like "hate speech". I believe Canada has the same insidious problem that many western European countries have where if you "deny" something in public, you can go to jail.
The U.N. would just take this leftist P.C. nonsense an order of magnitude further.
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.
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 ;)
"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?
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.
> 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.
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!).
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?
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
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.