The U.N.'s Push for Power Over the Internet 326
Omnifarious writes "China (along with other member nations) is trying to push a proposal through a little known UN agency called the International Telecommunications Union (aka ITU). This proposal contains a wide variety of problematic provisions that represent a huge power grab on the part of the UN, and a severe threat to a continued global and open Internet. From the article: 'Several proposals would give the U.N. power to regulate online content for the first time, under the guise of protecting against computer malware or spam. Russia and some Arab countries want to be able to inspect private communications such as email. Russia and Iran propose new rules to measure Internet traffic along national borders and bill the originator of the traffic, as with international phone calls. That would result in new fees to local governments and less access to traffic from U.S. "originating" companies such as Google, Facebook and Apple. A similar idea has the support of European telecommunications companies, even though the Internet's global packet switching makes national tolls an anachronistic idea.'"
Another dupe (Score:5, Informative)
UN Takeover of Internet Must Be Stopped, US Warns [slashdot.org]
Posted by samzenpus on Fri Jun 01, '12 12:30 PM
samzenpus dupes himself with another run at this xenophobic scare piece.
Re:Google vs. Iran (Score:4, Informative)
"Iran: Errr....no, no, we want dollars as our currency isn't worth very much right now."
Must be an old joke. Iran dumped the Dollar for the Euro a couple of years ago.
http://www.dailymarkets.com/forex/2009/09/22/iran-replaces-the-us-dollar-with-the-euroand-so-it-begins/ [dailymarkets.com]
Re:How many atom bombs does the UN have? (Score:5, Informative)
That quote is also attributed to Stalin.
The Pope! How many divisions has he got?
Said sarcastically to Pierre Laval in 1935, in response to being asked whether he could do anything with Russian Catholics to help Laval win favour with the Pope, to counter the increasing threat of Nazism; as quoted in The Second World War (1948) by Winston Churchill vol. 1, ch. 8, p. 105.(wikiquote)
Why Not Talk About Real Threats to the Internet? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:ITU regulations (Score:5, Informative)
In what way are rules forbidding communication with people in countries whose governments object to said communication beneficial to us? How are rules that prevent us from setting up amateur trunked systems beneficial to us? The rules are completely out of date, they hold us back, and they basically guarantee that big businesses that can pay for commercial licenses will dominate wireless communications.
It would be trivial to partition amateur bands into "classic" bands where the old rules apply, and "modern" bands that allow greater freedom. The rules do not have to prohibit all commercial transmissions, they can simply prohibit commercial "services" i.e. radio systems that are run for profit, so that we could set up packet radio systems that are useful and interesting.
Re:Quintuple play (Score:3, Informative)
Sherman antitrust has been almost entirely a tool to prevent the most efficient producers from offering better goods and services to society in order to protect mediocre producers with better political pull. Comcast, cox and the rest would not be targeted in any meaningful way by such laws because they themselves are extremely connected to the state given how protected from competition they are.
Citations:
US telecommunications protectionism - http://mises.org/journals/rae/pdf/RAE9_2_3.pdf
Sherman trust targeting the productive companies - http://mises.org/journals/rae/pdf/RAE6_2_3.pdf
List of dozens of high profile cases of how the sherman act laws are really used - http://library.mises.org/books/Dominick%20Armentano/Antitrust%20The%20Case%20for%20Repeal.pdf
To sum those articles up, what were labeled as trusts were expanding output and dropping prices 4 times faster than the rest of US businesses on average. Those businesses that gained dominance as a result of this legal action(and were found later to have had significant involvement in starting the legal action against the more efficient producers) were on average less able to reduce prices and expand productivity than the rest of businesses(let alone the 'trusts'). Trusts were not monopolistic. Government protected corporations were.
So expecting comcast and the like to be meaningfully allowed to be subject to competition from the rest of society is going to leave you disappointed so long as you turn to the legal system to do it.