Eric Schmidt: UN Treaty a 'Disaster' For the Internet 346
An anonymous reader writes "Internet freedom and innovation are at risk of being stifled by a new United Nations treaty that aims to bring in more regulation, Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt has warned. In a question-and-answer session at Mobile World Congress 2012 on Tuesday, Schmidt said handing over control of things such as naming and DNS to the UN's International Telecommunications Union (ITU) would divide the internet, allowing it to be further broken into pieces regulated in different ways. 'That would be a disaster... To some, the openness and interoperability is one of the greatest achievements of mankind in our lifetime. Do not give that up easily. You will regret it. You will hate it, because all of a sudden all that freedom, all that flexibility, you'll find it shipped away for one good reason after another,' Schmidt said. 'I cannot be more emphatic. Be very, very careful about moves which seem logical, but have the effect of balkanising the internet,' he added, urging everyone to strongly resist the moves."
In practical terms (Score:4, Interesting)
If you chase the authority up the line it goes ICANN --> NTIA --> DoC --> US Congress.
Now, how prepared do you think the US congress is going to be to hand their control of the Internet over to China and Russia?
The ITU has been seeking relevance to the Internet since the 90s; in a world where balancing line voltages is no longer important the ITU's role in international telecommunications has been severely dimini$hed.
If you look at any step of the way, Bob Shaw from the ITU has been running around in secret trying to cover his tracks.
When GE Federal Systems used Alternic and posted it was "as good as if not better" than the legacy root servers, who called from the INTERNATIONAL TELECOMMUNICATIONS UNION IN GENEVA (t SOUNDS so impressive, in real terms, it's as impressive as being, say, the LAN administrator for the White House. Not much global policymaking happens in THAT cubicle) and asked them to stop as this was dangerous? Bob Shaw of the ITU. Oh, and he asked that his name be kept of it ("I didn't say this, I was never here" - Dune). Pity he didn't get the secretary to swear to the same secrecy, she told me who it was. Get used to it, maggots.
Who introduced the Government Advisory Comittee ("GAC") into ICANN as a fait d'accompli, drawn up in secret, who meet in secret but only have an advisory role - except where they insist on policy? DING DING DING - Bob Shaw of the ITU again. I held a quick straw poll on the floor of the first ICANN meeting in Berlin (the neo nazi demostration outside was a nice touch) and 13 out of 1000 people thought the GAC was a good idea - this for an organization that is supposed to "measure and implement community consensus" as its charter. The footage is still around on the Berkman Center servers at Harvard, and I have copies.
Who knew the fix was in an the US goverment had already picked an ICANN an ignored the worlds work via IFWP and bragged about it drunk in DC ? Bob Shaw of the ITU. He still owes me money from smoking all my wifes Virgina Slims from that night too.I don't trust him or the ITU with $10, let along the internet. He doesn't get this openness thing and is instead a remnant of old world secrecy.
At any rate, ICANN only has any authority at all at our leisure. If we type different numbers into special places in our computers they pretty much cease to exist in any operational capacity as the net is edge controlled, not centrally controlled. Everybody with a root password controls a little piece of it, and it grows at the edges.
This UN governance thing has been repeating like an onion sandwich for over a decade now. When the ITU couldn't get the IANA contract it upped the ante to use the UN moniker to try to get everyone in the world to rally behind it. Waste of time, they can be safely ignored. Nobody takes them seriously.
All Governments hate loss of control (Score:4, Interesting)
Governments hate and always have hated the loss of control over their people. A major means of control is control over communication between the masses of people. When the printing press was invented, governments immediately instituted controls. That was not too hard, because printing presses were and still are expensive, as are broadcast stations. Controlling those media outlets is relatively easy because there are so few in comparison to the people on the Internet. Now anyone with a computer and a reasonable Internet connection can make their ideas available to anyone else with an Internet connected gadget. All governments without exception hate this because it lessens their control over their populations.
UN Gives Everyone say in how it runs (Score:5, Interesting)
The question people should be asking themselves is if they want someone like Bashar Assad or Mugabe or China or the next Pol Pot regime to have a say in what you can and can't do on the internet. Because as soon as you bring it to the UN you give equal footing to regimes that shouldn't have any say. Just like when Kadaffi's Libya was in charge of the UN commission on Human Rights.
Re:Difference to now? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not, an organisation requiring international consensus is not going to be able to pull off controversal decisions because you'd never get that consensus.
Many years ago, when WIPO was created it swayed towards much more relaxed IP laws than we have currently, this is because African nations wanted things like medicine and technology to come down in price faster so that their countries could experience benefits of western society sooner. The US didn't like the fact it got outvoted so side-stepped WIPO and created the WTO which is less democratic so that it could try and force international IP policies to go it's way. This is evidenced in the fact the US uses a lot of weight to try and force nations into the WTO, to force them to accept WTO rulings against them, yet has largely ignored WTO rulings against it on issues such as lumber, steel, cotton, gambling and so forth.
If the internet was in international hands you'd never get the domain seizures authorised that the US currently allows as you'd never get the political support for what is a US agenda. Similarly though you'd never get Chinese style censorship as there are too many nations that would be against it.
Technical issues would still be resolved just as well, because when technical issues arise there's really little political need or desire to hijack the issue and prevent a resolution passing - things like that are purely technical.
So all in all it'd be a much better situation than the current status quo where the US unilaterally imposes censorship on the internet based on it's ethnocentric vision of gambling and IP law.
Really, for the most part the only people who want it to stay in the US are American nationalists, xenophobes, and those with a vested interest in retaining the power it affords. There's a few folk in between who are ignorant about the UN and don't realise that it's far more than just the security council and that it already handles other international tasks like international mailing, maritime rules, air transport rules, telecomms and so forth perfectly well without any such drama that Schmidt is peddling.
Re:Another reason (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Another reason (Score:4, Interesting)
Not to say the UN is justified in wanting it--I'd sooner hand the internet to the mafia than the UN.