Leave Well Enough Alone
With all of its annoyances the current structure of the Internet has been working well, but now the United Nations wants to get into the act and take over the administration.
Yes, it is controlled to a great extent by the US government and US organizations, but that has a lot to do with the birth of the ‘Net, rather than some conspiracy to control the world. It works pretty well because the US has developed a hands-off approach to regulating the ‘Net.
If the control is passed to the International Telecommunications Union, UN Bureaucrats will be making decisions and passing regulations that affect us all. I’m not really interested in having people from the governments of Syria, Iran, China, and Russia determining what can and what cannot appear on the Internet, or to have them decide how it will be paid for.
Consider that they have been discussing a model that involves having content providers billed for the data sent over the ‘Net. This means that a denial of service attack will cost the victim a major amount of money for trying to service all of the requests.
A page has been set up, Stop the Internet Coup, to urge action on the UN move. If some of the things they are proposing go through, you can expect to see a lot of people folding their tents and leaving the ‘Net.
December 1, 2012 6 Comments
