What Comes To Pass

How about 'no'?

The UN's task group, set to ascertain what to do about the internet has come up empty.

'Controlling' the internet is of course a slightly dubious pretense from a technical point of view, the internet is simply a bunch of DNS servers that point to each other and has more or less been cobbled together out of acceptance and compliance with standards that people have voted for 'with their feet' so to speak. Why do we use HTTP? Cause lots of people decided it was the best way to go all those many years ago.

Given that most of the catcalls for the UN to obtain some sort of control over the current infrastructure are from tyrannous dictatorships and oppressive autocrats who seek to restrict access to information for their enthralled populations I can't really see this being a good idea.

American companies and the Technocracy of Lesser Geeks are largely responsible for what the net is now and they haven't 'given it up', so it seems a little presumptuous to convene an expensive council to decide whether a bloated autocratic body ought to take control of what is one of the greatest creations of private enterprise in the 20th century (albeit one that ironically owes its conception to studies performed by CERN and the United States Military).

I've spent long enough moaning about the Great Firewall of China. Although the free internet can be a meeting place and means of communication for terrorism in the world today, it is also a great beacon of hope for many. Take a look at the Iranian Students Movement, the political activist blogs that sprung up in china, the Iraqis who had a chance to air their side of the story during the war.

The internet is the most powerful political forum that man has ever seen and ultimately allowing its subjugation to the whim of petty dictators the world over, who already do a decent job of monitoring and restricting access, is really a slap in the face to those who believe in what the internet is and what it could be.

I'll let a UN group 'control' the internet just as soon as the UN enacts directives to stop naming nations like Syria the head of its Human Rights Commission. I honestly don't see why being left of centre implies some sort of slavish devotion to ever increasing regulation by such groups, if a Government is poor we lampoon it and vote it out of office, the way some on 'my' side of the political divide act you'd think the UN was the Glorious Democratic Socialist Party of the Motherland, free of vice and just the sort of people we want running things.

I don't want any government running the net. As an entity it exists only because those who control DNS servers the world over have decided to point their ports in certain directions. It's the closest thing we have to a self-enginered, organically grown, extra-national community and it exists because we choose to have it exist - that gives me hope for the future of man and it makes me despair at the possibility that it may be wrought from the grasp of its creators and maintainers.

The UNternet? No thanks.

Later

John