Basically, the UN wants to take control of the internet from ICANN and move it to a U.N. body made up of government leaders. Here’s what is happening:
FOX NEWS – An international meeting started Monday in Dubai that could radically change how you use the Internet.
The goal of delegates there is to grab control of the World Wide Web away from the United States, and hand it to a UN body of bureaucrats, the International Telecommunications Union or ITU. It’ll be the biggest power grab in the UN’s history, as well as a perversion of its power.
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Pushing the Dubai agenda are Russia and China. Their plan is to take away control over the Internet’s rules from the Los-Angeles-based non-profit Internet Corporation for Assigned Numbers and Names or ICANN, which has worked hard to keep the ‘Net as free and widely accessible as possible–something thugocrats around the world want to halt.
The ITU, by contrast, is run by delegates appointed by their national governments instead of by professional engineers and Internet companies. That means governments like China, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and the Sudan get to decide whether ICANN should help them censor ‘Net content and eliminate domain names and IP addresses of dissidents–or groups in the United States trying to help them.
The Dubai delegates even want US-based websites like Google, Facebook, and Yahoo to pay local networks for the right to send material to foreign countries. That could make it too expensive to send data or documents to users in remote Third World countries–again, something the totalitarians gathering in Dubai won’t mind. […]
The U.S. says that they are trying to stop this internet takeover from happening, and while they don’t have veto power in the Dubai meeting, they do have the ability not to implement any regulations that are adopted.
FOX NEWS – A U.N. conference that kicked off today in Dubai has sparked fear of Internet censorship in the U.S. — something U.S. Ambassador Terry Kramer said he is doing everything in his power to prevent.
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“Candidly, we were very concerned with the Russian proposal. I think it was the most stark in nature of all the proposals that have been put out, because it basically is proposing Internet governance managed either by the ITU or the national government. There are traffic routing proposals in there that would open the door to potential censorship, which obviously we don’t agree with,” Kramer said.
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Kramer discussed the U.S. delegation’s strategy in opposing any Internet regulation.
The U.S. does not have veto power over resolutions adopted at this U.N. conference, but it does have the right not to implement regulations that are adopted.
“We always have the sovereign right to implement as we need to, but we live in a global environment, so we want to make sure we’re influencing effectively so that we have a good global outcome here,” Kramer said.
Kramer said it was too early to tell how the conference as a whole would vote.[…]