UN meeting focusing on ‘censor’ and ‘fines’ for Internet
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 UN agenda details.
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“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. …” – WSJ
“The US is concerned that proposals by some other governments could lead to greater regulatory burdens being placed on the international telecom sector, or perhaps even extended to the internet sector,” Terry Kramer, US’s ambassador to the conference wrote in August.
a submission from Russia suggesting the ITU could become responsible for allocating at least some of the internet’s addresses as well as the “determination of the necessary requirements”.
President Vladimir Putin has signaled Russia’s final submission could go further. In 2011 he said he was keen to discuss “establishing international control over the internet using the monitoring and supervisory capabilities of the International Telecommunication Union”.
The Russia Today news service has since reported that China and India had backed this stance.
