Next week the United Nations’ International Telecommunications Union will meet in Dubai to figure out how to control the Internet. Representatives from 193 nations will attend the nearly two week long meeting, according to news reports.
“Next week the ITU holds a negotiating conference in Dubai, and past months have brought many leaks of proposals for a new treaty. U.S. congressional resolutions and much of the commentary, including in this column, have focused on proposals by authoritarian governments to censor the Internet. Just as objectionable are proposals that ignore how the Internet works, threatening its smooth and open operations,” reports the Wall Street Journal.
“Having the Internet rewired by bureaucrats would be like handing a Stradivarius to a gorilla. The Internet is made up of 40,000 networks that interconnect among 425,000 global routes, cheaply and efficiently delivering messages and other digital content among more than two billion people around the world, with some 500,000 new users a day. …
“Proposals for the new ITU treaty run to more than 200 pages. One idea is to apply the ITU’s long-distance telephone rules to the Internet by creating a ‘sender-party-pays’ rule. International phone calls include a fee from the originating country to the local phone company at the receiving end. Under a sender-pays approach, U.S.-based websites would pay a local network for each visitor from overseas, effectively taxing firms such as Google and Facebook. The idea is technically impractical because unlike phone networks, the Internet doesn’t recognize national borders. But authoritarians are pushing the tax, hoping their citizens will be cut off from U.S. websites that decide foreign visitors are too expensive to serve.”
Read More at The Weekly Standard . By Daniel Halper.
Please share this post with your friends and comment below. If you haven’t already, take a moment to sign up for our free newsletter above and friend us on Twitter and Facebook to get real time updates.
Follow @WestJournalism
Loading ...
You can kiss my arse if you think anyone can regulate the internet. I am sure it is possible, I am sure those greedy bastrards especially in Dubia want their cut like everything else that is handed to them on a gold platter. all that will happen is there will be a movement forcing the internet underground and you think we have problems with hackers now? I believe some hackers are just playing on the net you do something as stupid as turn the net over to a body of people that can’t wipe their own arse. I am sure that will call for another Computer Czar to Bust into homes and take lap tops from 12 year old girls for trying to download a song, or picture. Maybe the UN needs to be pushed off this land onto their own island so they live out there own fantasies of what reality is. Maybe the citizens of the US have it wrong, its not our gov that fcked up and needs to be replaced but the bastards sitting at the UN that need their own island to stay out of things that they have no right meddling in.