Most recent edit on 2005-12-06 04:45:41 by CarpeDiem
Deletions:
Copyright 2005 National Post
All Rights Reserved
National Post (f/k/a The Financial Post) (Canada)
November 18, 2005 Friday
National Edition
SECTION: EDITORIALS; Pg. A20
LENGTH: 517 words
HEADLINE: No to dictators.org
BYLINE: National Post
BODY:
United Nations reform is one of the great issues of our time. But the UN's
main problem is not complicated. Indeed, it can be summarized in one sentence:
The UN is a club that admits dictators.
This is an important fact to keep in mind when one considers proposals to
give the UN control of the Internet. For among dictators' many unpleasant habits
is the propensity to censor.
Consider the case of Senegal's Amadou-Mahtar M'Bow, who as executive director
of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in the 1980s sought
to establish a New World Information Order that would license all journalists
and vet their stories. (His goal was to destroy the pro-Western bias that he
felt stood in the way of socialism's international triumph.)
Or just look at the site the UN chose for its first World Summit on the
Information Society, which opened Wednesday: Tunisia, a nation criticized last
week by Human Rights Watch for shutting down opposition Web sites and jailing
dissidents.
One of the subjects on this year's agenda is Internet oversight. Some nations
object to the fact that a non-profit U.S. company, the Internet Corporation for
Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), is charged with running the computers that
keep track of which Web sites are assigned to which electronic addresses. ICANN
has done so successfully for more than a decade. There is no reason to believe
the UN would do a better job.
ICANN has never engaged in favouritism or censorship. But if charged with the
task, its UN-supervised replacement might. And if it did, you can bet the UN
wouldn't object. The UN is toothless against autocrats, and even sympathetic
toward rulers in Asia and the Middle East who claim the need to filter their
people's information sources to "protect" them against Western cultural
hegemony.
It is not hard to imagine the UN attempting to control Internet content in
the name of closing the so-called "digital divide" between rich and poor
countries. Or consider a report of the UN's Working Group on Internet
Governance, which listed "respect for cultural and linguistic diversity as well
as tradition [and] religion" and the need for "multilingual, diverse and
culturally appropriate content" on a list of "key principles." Such language
opens the door for global Quebec-style language restrictions, not to mention
politically correct speech codes.
It is a good thing, then, that on the eve of the Tunis summit, European
delegates dropped their objections to ICANN retaining control. There is still a
real threat, however. While ICANN can still continue to run the servers that run
the Internet, delegates in Tunis are expected to place ICANN under a new
international Internet Governance Forum, which could very well be placed under
the auspices of the UN.
Under no circumstance should the Canadian government support this backdoor
subversion of the information superhighway. If there is to be an international
body above ICANN, it must be made up of independent representatives from user
nations that respect the free-speech rights we now take for granted on the
Internet, not UN bureaucrats.
LOAD-DATE: November 18, 2005
Oldest known version of this page was edited on 2005-12-06 04:45:09 by CarpeDiem []
Page view:
Copyright 2005 National Post
All Rights Reserved
National Post (f/k/a The Financial Post) (Canada)
November 18, 2005 Friday
National Edition
SECTION: EDITORIALS; Pg. A20
LENGTH: 517 words
HEADLINE: No to dictators.org
BYLINE: National Post
BODY:
United Nations reform is one of the great issues of our time. But the UN's
main problem is not complicated. Indeed, it can be summarized in one sentence:
The UN is a club that admits dictators.
This is an important fact to keep in mind when one considers proposals to
give the UN control of the Internet. For among dictators' many unpleasant habits
is the propensity to censor.
Consider the case of Senegal's Amadou-Mahtar M'Bow, who as executive director
of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in the 1980s sought
to establish a New World Information Order that would license all journalists
and vet their stories. (His goal was to destroy the pro-Western bias that he
felt stood in the way of socialism's international triumph.)
Or just look at the site the UN chose for its first World Summit on the
Information Society, which opened Wednesday: Tunisia, a nation criticized last
week by Human Rights Watch for shutting down opposition Web sites and jailing
dissidents.
One of the subjects on this year's agenda is Internet oversight. Some nations
object to the fact that a non-profit U.S. company, the Internet Corporation for
Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), is charged with running the computers that
keep track of which Web sites are assigned to which electronic addresses. ICANN
has done so successfully for more than a decade. There is no reason to believe
the UN would do a better job.
ICANN has never engaged in favouritism or censorship. But if charged with the
task, its UN-supervised replacement might. And if it did, you can bet the UN
wouldn't object. The UN is toothless against autocrats, and even sympathetic
toward rulers in Asia and the Middle East who claim the need to filter their
people's information sources to "protect" them against Western cultural
hegemony.
It is not hard to imagine the UN attempting to control Internet content in
the name of closing the so-called "digital divide" between rich and poor
countries. Or consider a report of the UN's Working Group on Internet
Governance, which listed "respect for cultural and linguistic diversity as well
as tradition [and] religion" and the need for "multilingual, diverse and
culturally appropriate content" on a list of "key principles." Such language
opens the door for global Quebec-style language restrictions, not to mention
politically correct speech codes.
It is a good thing, then, that on the eve of the Tunis summit, European
delegates dropped their objections to ICANN retaining control. There is still a
real threat, however. While ICANN can still continue to run the servers that run
the Internet, delegates in Tunis are expected to place ICANN under a new
international Internet Governance Forum, which could very well be placed under
the auspices of the UN.
Under no circumstance should the Canadian government support this backdoor
subversion of the information superhighway. If there is to be an international
body above ICANN, it must be made up of independent representatives from user
nations that respect the free-speech rights we now take for granted on the
Internet, not UN bureaucrats.
LOAD-DATE: November 18, 2005