A new iron curtain is replacing the one that fell with the Soviet Union — but this one is in cyberspace. Like the Berlin Wall of old, it’s going to divide free nations from the unfree ones — with America leading on one side, and Russia and China on the other.
Last week, the United Nations announced its side at its World Conference on International Telecommunications in Dubai. Delegates of 89 countries led by Russia and China rushed through a draft resolution giving governments virtual carte blanche to censor their citizens’ use of the Internet.
To their credit, delegates from the United States, Canada, Britain and 52 other countries refused to go along, so how we use the Internet won’t be affected — at least not yet.
But the resolution will make it easier for non-democratic governments to insist that US companies like Google, Facebook and Verizon do their bidding in helping to silence dissent. Eventually, that could have an impact on what we see and download here.
And if you live in Russia or Saudi Arabia or Nigeria, getting access to information your government doesn’t like is going to get a whole lot harder — all with the UN’s blessing.
Given the long UN record of coddling the world’s worst offenders against human rights, this turn of events should surprise no one. Yet liberal media outlets like the UK’s The Guardian dismissed as alarmists those of us who warned that Russia and China aimed to use the Dubai meeting to snatch control of the ’Net — to take it from the US-based International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (or ICANN) and pass it to the UN’s International Telecommunications Union, where the world’s dictators could have an active role in setting the rules.
The fact that Google was leading the charge to keep the Internet free and clear, and had garnered more than 3 million signatures on its online petition against the Dubai agenda, was denounced at the Huffington Post and by Forbes Internet expert Jody Westby as a ploy to protect the company’s profits.
After all, they said, ITU President Hamadoun Touré had publicly pledged that no treaty would be approved that legitimized government censorship. And Mohammed Nasser Al Ghanam, the Dubai conference’s chairman, promised that it would reach decisions by consensus — rather than an up-or-down vote by country, where the thugocrats would have the upper hand.
In fact, both promises were swiftly broken.
In a classic display of Stalinist political timing, Touré and his pals pushed through an unexpected dead-of-the-night vote on a resolution that “all governments should have an equal role and responsibility for international Internet governance.” That’s UN-ese for: Individual nation-states have a right to choke off access to foreign Web sites they dislike and shut down domestic addresses they find annoying — and with the ITU’s nod.
Outraged, the US delegation and those of 54 other nations walked out without signing a final ITU treaty. So the thugocrat victory is nonbinding — for now. But the battle’s just beginning.
The countries that voted for the resolution — including Iran, Saudi Arabia, and of course Russia and China — are positioned to make ’Net censorship part of the ITU’s future agenda. They’ll also renew their push to make the ITU’s the ’Net’s official governing body, and to force American webservers to pay for sending data into their countries — which Google and Yahoo will stop doing if the price is too high.
What’s astonishing isn’t that Touré and the rest want to destroy the Internet as it was founded, with open access to all, and turn it into a tool for tyranny. What’s astonishing is how many people, including so-called Internet experts, believed in the Dubai agenda until the totalitarians finally took off the mask.
Will the free world’s left now wake up, stop trusting Touré and the other international apparatchiks — and join the fight to stop the bureaucrats and tyrants in Turtle Bay from dictating the Internet’s future?
Arthur Herman’s latest book is
“Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War Two,” which The Economist named one of the Best Books of 2012.