Big brother will be watching: Proposals for UN control of the Internet would empower tyrants to block foreign and dissident Web sites. (
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Few Americans realize it, but the United Nations is driving to take control over the Internet. You remember, the folks who want a worldwide income tax and who put Syria and Iran on their Human Rights Committee.
And if delegates have their way at next week’s World Conference on International Telecommunications in Dubai, the man in charge of the Web will be a Soviet-trained apparatchik from Cold War days.
Don’t count on the Obama-appointed US delegate to stop the threatened changes in how the Internet works, and how much power governments have to decide what their citizens see on the World Wide Web. Pushing the agenda at Dubai are Russia and China.
And anything China, Russia and the United Nations agree on can’t be good for America — or the cause of freedom.
“The Internet stands at a crossroads,” is how Vint Cerf, one of the ’Net’s founders, put it in a New York Times piece back in May. Events in Dubai, he wrote, could “take away the Internet as you and I have known it.”
Indeed, the meeting could well decide whether freedom or totalitarianism prevails in the 21st century.
The core threat is to change the rules by which the LA-headquartered nonprofit Internet Corporation for Assigned Numbers and Names administers the Web. Since its birth in 1998, ICANN has worked hard to make the Internet as free and widely accessible as possible — raising the ire of dictators around the world.
The thugocrats want key decisions about how the Web works handed over to a UN body, the International Telecommunications Union, where individual countries will have an equal vote on any new rules, regardless of whether their delegates know anything about the ’Net. (Most of the calls made by ICANN are done by engineers who have background in cyber issues.)
What kind of new rules? One is “sender party pays,” which would make US-based sites like Google, Facebook and Yahoo pay local networks for the right to send material to overseas visitors. That could easily make it too expensive for those firms to send data or documents to users in remote Third World countries — again, something their ruling elites won’t mind.
Another would let governments force ICANN to erase domains or IP addresses they don’t like, dumping dissident sites permanently off the Internet.
Still another would compel ICANN and other international custodians like the Internet Engineering Task Force to help governments censor what flows into their country from the Web.
The big backers of this rule change are — no surprise — China and Russia. Their proposed “International Code of Conduct for Information Security” would wreck the ’Net as a source of free and accessible information for people around the world and turn it into one more means by which governments can snoop on their citizens and dictate what they read or see, and when.
But China and Russia have still bigger plans. They see the battle over Internet governance as a way to extend their geo-political reach at the expense of the United States, the chief guardian of the Internet’s libertarian ethos.
China, in particular, has positioned itself as the global champion of censorship. It was no coincidence that when UN delegates met in Tunis seven years ago to discuss these issues, the trade-fair sponsors were Huawei and ZTE — China’s biggest network companies and guardians of Beijing’s Great Firewall that keeps out Western ideas and suppresses dissent.
Then there’s the man who will be in charge of Dubai’s new rules as head of the ITU: Hamadoun Touré, a Soviet-trained graduate of Moscow Tech. That’s about as close to having a KGB plant run the Internet as you can get.
So what is Uncle Sam doing about it? The State Department’s delegate to the conference, Terry Kramer, says the United States won’t agree to handing over control of the Internet to the ITU. But he also says America won’t try to control the agenda: “We don’t want to come across like we’re preaching to others.”
Americans need to tell him: Preach away, dude. If this battle decides whether freedom or totalitarianism rules the 21st century, we need to make sure freedom wins.