US Offers New Plans 1 Month Before UN Meeting To Regulate Web 128
Velcroman1 writes "Slashdotters have been reading for months about the upcoming ITU conference next month in Dubai, which will propose new regulations and restrictions for the Internet that critics say could censor free speech, levy tariffs on e-commerce, and even force companies to clean up their 'e-waste' and make gadgets that are better for the environment. Concerns about the closed-door event have sparked a Wikileaks-style info-leaking site, and led the State Department on Wednesday to file a series of new proposals or tranches seeking to ensure 'competition and commercial agreements — and not regulation' as the meeting's main message. Terry Kramer, the chief U.S. envoy to the conference, says the United States is against sanctions. '[Doing nothing] would not be a terrible outcome at all,' Kramer said recently."
Anything that comes out of the UN (Score:5, Insightful)
Dubai? How ironic... (Score:2, Insightful)
What is going to happen to me if I write blogs calling for a new government in Dubai? The US might have its problems but they pale in insignificance compared to the UN. It's like having Pat Robertson control the internet.
Re:My Plan (Score:5, Insightful)
More to the point, it currently *works*. It's not like the system is broken now, it's just that some other people want pieces of the pie. And they could have that, if they wanted it, by building and maintaining their own infrastructure.
However, they don't want to do that. They just want to make money off of, and regulate, what other people built and bought for them.
What will preserve Internet as we know it (Score:5, Insightful)
is the fact that countries won't ever agree on how to regulate it.
Just like they can't agree on war and peace at the UN.
And thats a Good Thing (tm)
Re:Anything that comes out of the UN (Score:4, Insightful)
And the majority of the world's nations are barbaric. Your point?
Re:My Plan (Score:2, Insightful)
Just as the EU desperately seeks what they call "own resources" so too the UN has long desired the power to regulate and tax. The whole effort behind the Tobin Tax and its European form, the Financial Transactions Tax, has been to acquire the first legal step to full taxation for these bodies and has nothing to do with saving puppies or whatever else they are promising from it.
Now I am not opposed in principle to democratic federations, but the UN can't be one until all the members are democratic too. And if only the democratic members did something like a "UN with regulation and taxes" they'd reinvent the need for a non-binding forum like the UN as a place of discussion with those who are not yet democratic. That's why so many internationalist hopes have been pinned on the European Union as a way of achieving a stepping stone on the way to their ultimate goal. Now, like I said, the ultimate goal isn't actually bad in theory - the Star Trek universe has a world federation after all - but it's extremely bad in practice, or "for the foreseeable future", as anyone who pays attention to how modern politics work in Washington or the UN knows.
It's extremely unwise to let these creeps get a single claw-hold on anything that smells remotely like binding regulation, even more so if it's regulation to do with the freedom of speech or taxes. We really need to start talking seriously about massive cuts to the funding of the UN, cutting them to say 5 or 10% of their current budget, so that they don't have any idle time or resources to come up with these schemes. Aid and development programs have pretty much been shown to be useless now, if not outright scams in most cases especially those of the UN, so we can safely ignore any crocodile tears about UNICEF and puppies when we cut their budget.
you need a reality check (Score:4, Insightful)
It is the collective wishes of the world's governments, most of which are run by crooks, corrupt politicians, and dictators. It is about representative of the people of this world as the Supreme Soviet was representative of the will of the people unfortunate enough to live in the USSR.
The UN was never intended to be a representative or democratic government. It is a body of international diplomacy in which even the worst of the worst have a voice, for the purely practical reason that those people also have guns and bombs.
Re:Anything that comes out of the UN (Score:5, Insightful)
Apparently to shit-talk the US for no particular reason?
Oh, c'mon now, you and I both know that there's plenty of legitimate reasons to shit-talk the US.
Our nation has earned its global reputation; don't be a whiny bitch, own that shit.
Re:Anything that comes out of the UN (Score:5, Insightful)
world food programme? easy target, as it's riddled with nasty unintended consequences
1. people let's say in Africa starve - long story short their environment/tech level can't support that many people. Food from external sources means artificially raised survivability. People multiply, now there are more mouths to feed, and you are back at square 1. Disparity between productivity and needs is even greater which means even greater dependence on external support. Population of Ethiopia (country in more or less perpetual state of famine) grew from 48M to 84M in ~20 years (1990-now).
Feeding Africa is counterproductive: there is a lot of talk how we should reduce global population growth and shit, on the other hand the world subsidizes the very hotspots of rapid unsustainable population growth.
2. dumping free food on developing markets kills any viability of local food producers who can't compete with free/subsidized food from the west. In other words they will be always dirt poor and always dependent on free food because so called humanitarian help takes away their only fishing pole and gives them fish instead. With no way to support from the work of their hands, they will never be able to lay solid foundations for healthy, sustainable economy.
I don't mind disaster relief programs, but perpetual humanitarian help needs to go asap.
Re:Anything that comes out of the UN (Score:3, Insightful)
By way of comparison I don't remember the UN ever calling for the assassination of someone who merely published some factual material, nor did they declare such a person an "enemy of the state" nor are they in anyway implicated in an actual character assassination practiced on that person.
Also worth noting that the UN has never invaded a country on a false pretext and killed a 120 000 people. That is a lot of people. Their bodies make quite a large pile. There is an odd game of priority at play here on /. . Two US citizens get killed by drone strike - that's a travesty. Hundreds of innocent non US citizens are killed by drone strikes - that is merely unfortunate. Some people in a far off land are angry because of a stupid cartoon - that is an attack on our freeeeeeedom. A document reveals that a member of my own Parliament is a CIA informant - I had no right to that information and it should be suppressed from me, the voter.
The UN is by not by any means a perfect organisation - certain countries (e.g the US) arguably carry far more say than they should. But nevertheless they aren't the ones standing on a huge pile of bodies at this point in time. I don't know that they can be fully trusted. I know for sure that the US government cannot.
Re:Anything that comes out of the UN (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Anything that comes out of the UN (Score:4, Insightful)
If we (and by we, I of course mean "our government") didn't give a shit about anything outside our own borders, we wouldn't spend 23 times as much blood and treasure as the next nation showing off how big our (militaristic) dick is.
And while "showing off how big our (militaristic) dick is" we save most of the EU from having to learn to speak Russian and much of the rest of the world from having to learn to speak Chinese, not to mention saving all those countries from having to spend a much larger portion of their GDP on defense, while the people that benefit in those same countries piss and moan about US military might.
I'd be fine with rolling back US military participation with NATO and the UN and drastically reduce our economic support as well. Let the other countries spend their own people's money on their own military...or learn to speak Chinese or Russian.
Strat
Nationalism, ye gods (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right of course. But instead they've learned to speak English.
Are you entirely sure that's what you want to base your argument on?
So I have a crystal ball that tells me how the rest of this conversation will go. I will introduce many facts detailing exactly how awful [wikipedia.org] US hegemony has been for most of the world. You will bring up the few times this has been positive, but largely rely on nationalistic fervor. The conflation of monologues will end with sentiment to the effect of "Love it or leave it." and other such vaguely ad hominem remarks. We will each leave convinced we have carried the day, and some day far in the future, you or your progeny will be ashamed that, when confronted with evidence of heinous acts, you chose to serve your own tribe and not humanity.