U.S. now 'totally unified' in opposition to U.N. Internet governance

I hate it that sentiments like this are so prone to be cliche that thoughtful people completely avoid them. It is absolutely reasonable to say something like this. The internet has shrunk the world, strengthened global solidarity, weakened our illusions of nationalism.

I'll see your hippiness and raise you a poem. Cheesiness be damned.

  We loved the easy and the smart,
  But now, with keener hand and brain,
  We rise to play a greater part.
  The lesser loyalties depart,
  And neither race nor creed remain
  From bitter searching of the heart.
  Not steering by the venal chart
  That tricked the mass for private gain,
  We rise to play a greater part.
  Reshaping narrow law and art
  Whose symbols are the millions slain,
  From bitter searching of the heart
  We rise to play a greater part.

With direct access to the various ISP's that actually carry traffic, the US doesn't need ICANN to do either of these.

Honestly, how would ICANN do any of that anyway?

I'd be more concerned about how the domain seizures have happened basically at the behest of the content industries, with no (appropriate amount of) due diligence done by government officials.

"The legal protections of the First Amendment are some of the broadest of any industrialized nation, and remain a critical, and occasionally controversial, component of American jurisprudence."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_the_Unite...

Let's consider some of the protocols that the ITU has produced: OSI, X.500, X.509, GSM, V.92, etc. The one thing that they all have in common is that they're all orders of magnitude more complex and difficult to implement than they need to be. They're often also covered by a ridiculous number of patents.

The ITU organization doesn't seem to be capable of producing anything that doesn't cost billions of dollars to implement. Just from a purely technical standpoint, the ITU's history does not suggest that putting them in charge would be good for interoperability, competition, or technological progress.

So as much as I would like to see a more international internet gouvernance, I am afraid that the ITU ( with their "old men with pens" influence) would most likely not do a very good job compared to ICANN and W3C. (And besides, never change a running system ;)

The countries in favor are regimes like Saudi Arabia, China, and Russia.

UN control of the Internet means that the governments of China, Russia, and numerous other governments that are far worse than the US government would be in a position to influence Internet policy. Some governments want to add a structure of fees to the Internet, so that visiting websites would involve paying every country through which your packets travel. Some want censorship to be built-in, so that their political dissidents cannot simply use VPNs, proxy servers, or Tor to evade national firewalls.

To put it another way, the US government's approach to censorship of the Internet is mostly a combination of rare and costly raids on server rooms, hijacking domain names, and arresting people who download illegal pornography. China's approach is to have tens of thousands of government workers laboring 24 hours per day to identify websites that go too far in contradicting the Communist party's official policies, maintaining an enormous national firewall, and attacking Tor network connections to prevent people from evading the firewall -- and they also raid server rooms and arrest people who possess the wrong information. Do you really want to let China have any sort of power over the Internet?

I also like that a free and open internet is in the US' interest - the de-facto 'control' over the internet by the US gives it enormous amounts of soft and technological power that they can subtly profit from.

We're basically all locked into the US-paradigm on the internet. That means it's in the US' national interest not to mess with the internet too much - far better to just coast along on the wave you've created yourself.

It also means that Russia and other states are strategically opposed to a free and open internet. Not just for national purposes (censoring speech critical of their autocrats), but also for strategic purposes an open internet is a threat to their international power. They're swimming against the US wave.

So, ideally speaking, yes, everybody should democratically have a say in how to run the internet. Realistically speaking, however, the current situation is a near-optimal solution.

That's not the choice here.

Sure, the US already has a lot of control over the Internet because a huge chunk of infrastructure (including large parts of crucial systems like DNS) is under their jurisdiction. But that's not going to change.

Imagine if it was the Chinese government that was in control, or (for the sake of argument) the British or French government. Would you be ok with that?

However, if they do decide that they need to do this, that is still very very bad for the Internet, even if say US and EU refuse to adopt the proposals. But that means the majority of the countries out there might still adopt them. It would lead to a balkanized Internet, something we feared since SOPA, except with the current proposals, it would be much worse.

Content providers may remain free to distribute their content in EU and US, but they won't be in all the other countries that adopt and ratify ITU's proposals. We could start having the same type of licensing mess we see with books and music all over the world, where some countries have to wait months or years to get that content. Now imagine all of that would happen for just one blog post, or a video, maybe from a smaller service than Youtube.

So it's very important that there is unanimous or at least almost unanimous rejection of these proposals at ITU, because even if US and EU reject it, it would still affect us otherwise, and most importantly, the Internet will cease to be a universal thing for everyone - all in the name of giving more money to some ISP's and aiding some governments to monitor and censor their populations.

Not to mention that if the proposals pass, it means we're losing a battle with the future. It means this trend of making the Internet less free will keep growing, and who knows if next time US and EU will be against it. Maybe they'll see "how well" it works for the other countries to have censorship and whatnot, and they'll decide that maybe it's time for them to adopt all of that, too. This is why I think it's very important to win this battle, too, just like we won with SOPA and ACTA (although unfortunately, 8 other countries didn't, who already adopted ACTA, and India also passed ACTA in bits and pieces through other legislation).

With this said, I think it's best for ITU (and regulators) to keep it handsoff with the internet. ITU has a history of complicated and old-fashioned standardization that would do more harm than good.

It could be better, but when I think of all the things that we could fix, like decentralized DNS, I'm pretty sure any regulators will take it in the opposite direction.

That said, I don't think we particularly need governance on the internet, but more because we have adequate tools to achieve regulatory goals by asserting jurisdiction over meat-space endpoints. E.g. if some phony educational site is scamming people, I think it's adequate to be able to get the operator sitting in Nebraska instead of leveraging regulation on the internet itself.

From the article:

>We need to send a strong message to the world that the Internet has thrived under a decentralized, bottom-up, multi-stakeholder governance model.

While that statement was made by a Republican Congresswoman, I see no reason to think that it doesn't accurately represent the thoughts of most of the House - including Democrats - because, as she points out, it is a multi-stakeholder model. Some of the proposals before the ITU, the very ones the House is united against, would put significantly more power in the hands of the federal government - not less.

Why do Democrats oppose it anyway? Because they aren't fascists. Sorry to be the one to have to tell you.