Fergie's Tech Blog

Montreal Gazette Editorial: "The Internet just wants to be free"

I feel compelled to present this unsigned editorial here, in it's entirety.

Thanks to Bret Fausett for bringing our attention to this.

Via The Montreal Gazette.

This decade has seen few ideas as bad as the proposal to hand administration of the Internet over to the United Nations, or some new international body. In Tunisia next month, at a UN Summit on the Information Society, this nasty little scheme will be making headlines.

For ordinary users, the Internet is utterly non-hierarchical. But somebody has to manage the address system, and that job was given, early in the Internet era, to something called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. It's a non-profit, public-private partnership set up by the U.S. government, with an international board of directors.

In the words of its website, "ICANN is responsible for co-ordinating the management of the technical elements of the domain name system to ensure universal resolvability so that all users of the Internet can find all valid addresses. It does this by overseeing the distribution of unique technical identifiers used in the Internet's operations, and delegation of Top-Level Domain names (such as .com, .info, etc.)."

"Universal resolvability," a phrase only an engineer could love, means open access to the whole Internet, from wherever your own computer is located. The more nodes a network has, the more useful the network, and under the quasi-anarchistic stimulus of millions of users, all loosely and benignly supervised by ICANN, the Internet has become one of the great assets of mankind.

But the statist busybodies at the UN are determined to get their hands on the Internet.

Laughable as the idea of entrusting anything to the United Nations might seem, in the era of Oil-for-Food and Rwanda and Darfur and in view of incessant UN scandals, inefficiencies and ineptitudes, there's ultimately nothing funny about this. Beneath the endless rhetoric there's an unwelcome real agenda: to give governments more control over where their citizens can go on the Internet.

"Information," the chip-heads like to say, "wants to be free." The spectacular success of the Internet, as a tool of commerce, news, entertainment, information, agitation, education, connection and more, validates that assertion. So when such countries as Iran propose handing it over to the UN, alarm bells should ring. In fact, if you had to choose between the Internet and the UN...

Many governments fear freedom of speech. China, for example, is working hard to control what its citizens can find on the Internet. Fortunately, the U.S. is standing firm in defence of ICANN and the status quo. The meeting in Tunis will, we can hope, produce more rhetoric than change.

(Canada sensibly supports "creating a multi-stakeholder forum to discuss ... policy issues related to the Internet," our government says, but a temporary one only, and one focused on "capacity building" in poor countries. ICANN, Canada adds, is and should be a technical organization.)

The United Nations, where tyrant states shamelessly take turns supervising discussions of human rights policy, is certainly not an organization anyone of good will would want to see getting its hands on the Internet.

"If it ain't broke," the adage says, "don't fix it."

posted by Fergie @ 10/10/2005 03:34:00 PM