by NTEB News Desk
They will not stop till they do it
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."
Even Google has already come out against the ITU
"The ITU is the wrong place to make decisions about the future of the Internet," says Google.
"Only governments have a voice at the ITU. This includes governments
that do not support a free and open Internet. Engineers, companies, and
people that build and use the web have no vote."
"The ITU is also secretive. The treaty conference and proposals are confidential," adds Google. source - Weekly Standard
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