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Links: ICANN, You Can't
Posted by Brian Netter on Sunday, March 28 @ 13:44:27 EST Governance
The United Nations convened 200 government and private-sector representatives this weekend for its "Global Forum on Internet Governance." This isn't new, but a number of countries are complaining about the influence of the U.S. on the Internet through the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), chartered by the Clinton Administration in 1998 as a private non-profit body. In a shocking development, many participants at the United Nations conference suggested that Internet governance should be housed at (gasp) the United Nations!

The Associated Press quotes Sudanese professor Izzeldin Mohamed Osman: "The United Nations would be a good platform for that, because it has legitimacy. The countries are all represented."

If mere representation were enough to legitimate an organization and mere legitimacy were enough to ensure effectiveness, then I can't understand why my high school student council never got us that extra month off.

According to the Reuters story on the conference, the forum is due to result in a report for the United Nations Information and Communication Technology Task Force to be presented at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis in 2005. The drafters of this report must be careful to avoid simplistic resolutions to the complicated problems presented by Internet governance. Much of the success of today's Internet has been achieved by non-traditional peer networks that would be terribly burdened by the implementation of a more-traditional bureaucracy. Don't take the easy way out.

 
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''Democracy in the Digital Age'' Conference Report

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Oi vey... (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Sunday, March 28 @ 17:57:16 EST
As if we didn't have enough jurisdictional issues, we can now have a bloated, irrelevant bureaucracy to put us under the jurisdiction of *all* the laws in the world. Nevermind all the contradictions in law...

The only thing that could be worse is if they were to make themselves more relevant, in the vein of "the best way to expose a bad law is to enforce it" ...

Naturally, I doubt that they have any way to enforce this, exactly (change it over now, or we'll complain some more! and then we'll adopt a provisional resolution! you hear that? that's right, a resolution!!! you're in trouble now!) but it's sad when the most positive thing you can say about any bureaucracy with respect to the internet is that they "left it the hell alone" ...

The internet is already international enough. The only thing they've been changing is to make it more *national* by fencing in their own little corners of it (e.g. as per China, and apparently now, France).

Nevermind the bollocks.


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