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Comment by a3n | Hacker News Reader

A good thing. The US has squandered its right to lead.

Who says that any single governing national body should ever have the right to be an all-but-unchecked international leader, the way the US has?

To the extent that the US provided technical leadership, resources, stability and benevolent dictatorship, they could hope for the community following them as the best alternative. There is no longer any basis for such hope or expectation.

It's probably been a long time coming, and too bad it had to happen the way it did, but that seems to be the way these days in so many areas of US "leadership." We can't be trusted.

This. We nurtured it, we funded it, and as recently as WCIT-12, I personally had zero desire for international governance, as many other countries have some very 'non-open' ideas about what to do with the Internet. But, as it turns out, so do we.

Exactly the point though, towards the end of the article, they lament the fact that instead of an open and somewhat self-regulating environment, we are getting more "political oversight".

Political oversight is seldom effective, especially when you try to honor the rhetoric that everyone must be on equal footing. With such a plurality of stakeholders, any consensus is extremely difficult to achieve. Instead, you often end-up with a bunch of half-measures and nuisance regulations.

In my own ideal world, governments and their regulations stay within their borders and the "Internet" as a pseudo-entity is not regulated in any way.

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