Claudia Rossett: “Find It, Post It”

This is a fitting, but as you will see, only temporary, end to BizzyBlog’s worries over Internet governance for this year. Ms. Rossett, the Oil For Food Scandal reporter extraordinaire, makes perfectly clear what the UN wants from the Internet–control and money (HT Roger Simon):

Any institution brazen enough to hold a “World Summit on the Information Society” in internet-censoring journalist-jailing Tunisia is obviously ready to try anything to get hold of the net. This initiative has been bubbling along since Tunisia first proposed it in 1998, and by now there have been enough conferences, theme papers, working groups and planning sessions so that this UN campaign has put down roots. The WSIS website is already an empire unto itself, packed with stocktaking questionnaires, press releases, a photo library and the outpourings of the Preparatory Committee, abbreviated UN-style as the Prepcom, which sounds like something out of George Orwell, because it is.

….. The UN’s 1945 founding mandate was to promote peace. Sometime during the past six decades of dictator-packed voting blocks, diplomatic privileges, immunities and institutional secrecy, the UN instead got into the business of promoting mainly itself. At today’s UN, that involves the self-interest of two basic groups, and neither bodes well for the internet.

The first UN group is interested mainly in censorship, though they’re also partial to money where they can get it. That would be the General Assembly, made up of the UN’s 191 member states. Unfortunately, that membership includes dozens of repressive regimes, such as China, Cuba, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe and information-summit-hosting Tunisia; in other words, countries whose despots have a common interest in hating and fearing the kind of freedom the Internet might offer their subject fellow citizens.

….. The second group is the UN Secretariat, which is mainly interested in money, though they’re also partial to censorship when they can get away with it – which, since they operate with diplomatic immunity, is most of the time. According to the UN charter, the Secretariat is simply supposed to function as the administrative arm of the UN, run by a Secretary-General whose job is basically to manage the shop. But for quite some time the Secretariat has been evolving into more or less a state unto itself, led by a Secretary-General whose ambitions– on the evidence of his various campaigns, programs and proposals over the past eight years– tend less toward managing the office than running the world.

….. The danger by now is that the UN has two powerfully motivated interest groups, the censors and the taxers, both gunning for control of the net. And the UN has already sprouted a bureaucracy, complete with Prepcoms, to organize the next summit, and the next. The takeover bid failed in Tunis, but with enough time and persistence, it could very well happen.

….. So, what’s a blogger to do? For people who care about freedom and value the internet for all the right reasons, the best answer I can see is to fight back with the best weapon you’ve got— the truth. ….. Find it, post it, The more daylight, the better the chance that the UN will have to either shut itself down, or clean up its act—and back away from the internet.

Read the whole thing. The Internet will never be truly safe until the UN ends.
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Previous BizzyBlog Posts:

• Nov. 13–About That Nov. 16-18 UN Internet Conference in Tunisia (UN-EU takeover attempt)
• Oct. 7–This Had Better Not Be True (US to Give Up “Root Server Control” of the Internet?)
• October 3–The Whining About “Control” of the Internet Continues (Plus the “Gobbled Up” Internet Addresses Canard)
• September 29–Internet Control Stays in the US (I should think so)
• July 5–US Retains Control of Internet Directory: AP Has Hissy Fit