This is not a reflection of what is currently being considered at the UN which from what I have read I don't support.
What do other international people think?
"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...
I'd say any person in any western nation would think their country is more fair than the others.
I'm not distrustful of the UN I'm not a fan because it's a huge bureaucracy but the US isn't any better, I bet people in the US wouldn't accept Canada being in control of ICANN.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_complaints_against...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_complaints_against...
"The current human rights code allows too many frivolous cases to proceed against citizens, when the Criminal Code already covers hate speech that could generate harm against an individual or group.
Acts of hate speech are serious crimes that should be investigated by police officers, not civil servants, he said, and the cases should be handled by "real judges and real lawyers," instead of a quasi-judicial body such as the human rights commission."
http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/06/07/tories-repeal-sectio...
But we're not talking about your right to be a pirate, we're talking about something much more fundamental - i.e., freedom of speech.
We're talking about your ability to go online and talk shit about your neighbor, your city councilman, your MP, your Congressman, your Governor General, or your Prime Minister.
As a Canadian myself, I can tell you that the US takes a much stronger stance in favor of freedom of speech than Canada (or really, any Westminster system country today) and has consistently erred on the side of preserving speech moreso than Canadians - to the point where some Canadians consider the US stance to be rather extreme (e.g., malicious but truthful attacks are not consider libel nor defamation).
As far as protections for both political expression as well as creative expression (i.e., the arts) the US is one of the strongest (if not the strongest) in the world - and this is coming from a Canadian who's mostly cynical about American politics.
The claim that the US is the most free (in terms of speech) country in the world isn't just typical pompous American exaggeration, there is a lot of meat behind the claim.
But I'd say it evens since the US seems to push the limits of prosecution on free speech and Canadian authorities just don't really seem to bother.
As for the incidents of lawsuits mentioned in other comments I can't say I've ever heard of them not that it matters but what I'm saying is it seems rare for anyone to go to that extreme.
Of all the oddball things to plant that maple leaf of internet freedom on, you picked... downloading illegal[1] copies of movies? Really? That's "freedom" to you guys up north?
[1] Something no one sane disagrees with. Very reasonable arguments can be made about overzealous enforcement, of course, or the lack of acceptable legitimate alternatives. But really: no one thinks that making copies of copyrighted material from anonymous peers on the internet is "OK", even if "everyone" does it.
So copyright enforcement is not an area where it's really possible to take a useful stand.
Other aspects, though, are: consider, say, an internet subject to English libel jurisdiction. Or one subject to some European countries' feelings on religious -- particularly Muslim religious -- content. Or one subject to China's ideas about appropriate political speech.
While there are many things to complain about with respect to the US federal government, and its approach to freedom of speech, it is -- much like democracy is occasionally quipped to be -- the worst, except for all the alternatives.
Just as CALEA continues to be abused in the US against 'downloaders' it will be abused here just as well.
Personally I would prefer Canada continue to maintain its unwillingness to implement these policies and instead wait several years to study the effects of these CALEA-like laws on other nations.
[1]: http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/11/27/canadian-government-...
The U.N. would just take this leftist P.C. nonsense an order of magnitude further.
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.