United Nations' Control Of The Internet?

While I’m sitting around happily blogging my thoughts for all to see, and all of you are sitting around clicking your mouse buttons and surfing this thing we call the Internet or the World Wide Web, it’s come to my attention that Kofi Annan and his corrupt pals over at the UN headquarters are quietly working on a proposal to allow the United Nations to take over control of the internet.

My first reaction was…pause….sigh…big breath…WHEN HELL FREEZES OVER!!!

Your first reaction was probably to utter the words…DO WHAT???

You heard me right, the UN has started their Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG) and they have just issued a 24 page report outlining how the UN can do things better than the folks already running things—all of us Yankees and Rednecks here in the US. They’re even having a big meeting in Tunisia this fall on the subject. I suspect that Al Gore (self-proclaimed inventor of the internet) is already packing his bags

Of course the WGIG report is full of all of the expected “feel good” buzz-words like diversity, inclusiveness, empowerment, multicultural, and multi-lingual—things I know that I definitely have a great deal of concern about when I power up my computer and log on to the Internet each day.

Honestly, I was thinking just yesterday how unfair it was that the starving Somali’s rebels busy killing each other in a viscous civil war don’t have a T1 line or a wireless router and a cable modem and how unfair it is that all domain names are assigned using letters from the standard Roman alphabet instead of in some obscure regional gibberish dialect only understood by Tibetan monks and feared by a few pet goats and sheep living in the Himalayan mountains.

Actually I couldn’t care less…I’m such a pig and bigot.

Excerpting from the WGIG Report, I’d like to give you some highlights of this moronic, typically socialistic effort.

Here is their “working definition” of internet governance:

“Internet governance is the development and application by Governments, the private sector and civil society, in their respective roles, of shared principles, norms, rules, decision-making procedures, and programmes that shape the evolution and use of the Internet.”

Can you understand what the heck that means? Please tell me if you do.

Then there are these two little ditties:

15. Administration of the root zone files and system

Unilateral control by the United States Government.

• For historical reasons, the existing system involves only one Government in the authorization of changes to the root zone file.

Lack of formal relationship with root server operators.

• The root zone operators perform their functions today without a formal relationship with any authority.

16. Interconnection costs

Uneven distribution of cost.

• Internet service providers (ISPs) based in countries remote from Internet backbones, particularly in the developing countries, must pay the full cost of the international circuits.

• Absence of an appropriate and effective global Internet governance mechanism to resolve the issue.

See—paragraph 15 tells us that this is all about jealously. The UN can’t stand it that a company in the country (the US) that started the internet still has responsibility for handing out the domain names.

In my opinion that’s a good thing.

The internet in its current form is a result of private enterprise and a good deal of accidental good luck. If the US government meddled in the process more than it did, we would probably have nothing but a slow, broken down crappy computer system with old IBM PC XT's like those that they are suffering with at the IRS, the FAA, and the Social Security Administration.

People like you and me are each partially responsible for the success and continuing evolution of the internet, past present and future. If nobody bothered to buy cable modems and wireless routers, imagine how different things would be today when it comes to web site content (audio, streaming video, etc.) with everyone still using slow dial-up connections. I guarantee you that any involvement by the UN will only serve to screw things up.

Paragraph 16 indicates that Kofi and his gang of merry men once again want to rob from the rich (us here in the US) and give to the poor (probably everybody else but the US, Britain and Japan) in order to make things more “fair” when it comes to internet service.

I have a real problem with this. Am I to understand that now they are proposing to start handing out INTERNATIONAL INTERNET WELFARE?


What Bullcrap…we have to pay the full cost of our internet service in our home—roughly $600 per year, not including the modem, wireless router, and wireless notebook cards.

My mother can’t even get decent high speed DSL or cable service—her only option other than crappy slow dial-up is satellite internet service at a cost of nearly $1000 per year plus equipment costs.

Is Kofi proposing that the UN run cable service or provide cheep satellite service to old white women in rural Alabama that want to watch streaming video of the latest Tom Jones concert from Las Vegas?

I suspect not.

Kofi wants to hand internet to people that can’t successfully feed themselves and their children, let alone stop shooting at each other long enough to develop a stable infrastructure and economic system.

There’s more:

42. One of the main aims of the WGIG is to foster full participation in Internet governance arrangements by developing countries. The WGIG placed this aim in the context of one of the priorities it had identified in the course of its work, namely, capacity-building in developing countries.

43. Such a space or forum for dialogue (hereafter referred to as “the forum”) should allow for the participation of all stakeholders from developing and developed countries on an equal footing. Gender balance should be considered a fundamental principle with the aim of achieving an equal representation of women and men at all levels. Special care should be taken to ensure diversity of participation as regards, inter alia, language, culture, professional background, involvement of indigenous peoples, people with disabilities and other vulnerable groups.

44. The forum should preferably be linked to the United Nations, in a form to be defined. It would be better placed than existing Internet institutions to engage developing countries in a policy dialogue. This would be an important factor in itself, as the future growth of the Internet is expected to be mainly in developing countries.

I have a few final words for “His Excellency” Kofi Annan besides the words HELL NO.

“Hey Kofi, why don’t you pack your black ass up, move from your cushy digs in NY City back to fly infested Africa where you came from, and then if you and your beloved ‘developing countries’ want internet service, you and all of the native tribal warlords have my blessing and permission to ‘develop’ it on your own, at your own expense, just like we did here in the United by Gosh Darned States of America…

You stupid corrupt moron…”