US control of the internet is good for everyone

The internet started as a project to provide the US military with redundant communications. As its scope grew to the giant public network that it is today, our government turned administration of the internet over to an American corporation called ICANN: Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. The Department of Commerce, however, reserved the right to exercise ultimate control, especially over the "root servers" at the center of the web.

The United Nations, in its incessant drive to get its fingers into every pie, has started an initiative that it calls the "Information Society." They are discussing how they want to structure the world's access to information in two "summits" - one in Geneva in 2003, the second in Tunisia in November of this year.

The first conference produced a document called the Geneva Declaration of Principles and Plan of Action. As usual, the declaration is a mind-numbing collection of politically correct platitudes and pronouncements designed to obscure its fundamentally power-grabbing nature. We don't have the space (and I don't have the stomach) to analyze the whole document. The topic of concern right now is found in the section "Enabling Environment." This section solicits proposals for how the UN might set up "internet governance." In other words, how best to move the internet from control by the US to "governance" by the UN.

According to an October 6 article in the British newspaper The Guardian, several governments, including the US and the European Union, held three preparatory meetings to produce a proposal in response to this section of the declaration. The US representative presented a case for retaining the status quo of US administration of the internet.

According to The Guardian, other countries argued that the internet is too important to be administered by one nation. Brazil, for instance, is concerned that the medium through which it collects 90% of its taxes is controlled by the US. Most adamant that the US must cede control to an international coalition were said to be "Brazil, China, Cuba, Iran and several African states."

In spite of the stance of the US representative, the European Union "...took a bold step and proposed two stark changes: a new forum that would decide public policy, and a 'cooperation model' comprising governments that would be in overall charge." Most of the other delegates favored this approach, and that is what will be presented at the November UN summit. The Guardian's writer believes that "faced with international consensus, there is little the US government can do but acquiesce."

Our response to such a coup is important. First, the UN has no power to take control of internet administration from the US. To let them get away with it would tilt the balance of power more in favor of the UN, which is generally a step in the wrong direction. Second, giving the UN a foot in the door of controlling the internet would give them a future pretext for instituting a tax on transactions or other aspects of internet operation.

Most importantly, the US is the country with the most concern about free speech rights. An internet controlled by the UN will inevitably move in the direction of controlling the content of the web. Do we want to use the "hate speech" standards of Canada, for example, for determining what we can post and read on web pages? Remember, that's where people are convicted of hate speech for quoting Bible passages about homosexual behavior. How about Sweden, where Pastor Ake Green was sentenced to jail last year for preaching a sermon against homosexuality? Worst of all, one of the nations behind the proposed changes is the Peoples Republic of China, known for tightly controlling what web sites its people can access. Should that repressive communist government have any say over how the internet is administered?

The internet is safest when administered by the US. Our nation isn't immune to the temptation to control content, but it is the only country which has an unreserved constitutional guarantee of free speech. We should support our government in any efforts to retain control over the internet.