Yesterday We Dogged A Bullet

Hands Off Of The Internet…

Just in case you haven’t thought about it, I'd say that the internet works pretty well for most of us.

I’m one of those people that had access a long time ago when there was really no commercial content. When I started using the internet in the mid 1980’s it was mainly a tool for e-mail and file sharing between universities and government entities.

Beginning in the early to mid 1990’s the retail thing took off, the p0rnograpy started inundating everyone, and the rest is, as they say, history.

Even though the US government is partially responsible for starting the internet, thus far they have had enough sense to keep their stupid, tax grubbing hands off of it. They even created a pseudo private entity, operating under the Commerce Department, called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) that handles registering domain names and coordinating Internet server specifications and traffic direction.

As I said, things to date have worked pretty darn well, but Kofi Annan and his ragtag band of communists and socialist dictators over at the United Nations thinks that it’s time for the US to turn the reins over to the UN. They think that it is unfair for the US to continue running the communication system that we developed and paid most of the money to build.

Riiiiight, that’s a good plan.

After all, the UN’s sterling reputation for ethics and fiscal responsibility (see the UN Oil For Food Program) makes them eminently qualified for the task. Let all of those lovers of freedom and free speech—you know, China, Russia, North Korea, Egypt and most of Africa—take control of the world wide web.

Yeah, and within six months it will be illegal for me to write “Kofi Annan is a big fat, black, slobbering, incompetent fool” on my blog without fearing someone knocking on my door with a search warrant. If I say that the Chinese like being intimate with pigs or that Egyptian towel heads are worse than Saudi Arabian towel heads I’ll run the risk of some swarthy man running me down with his car while I’m walking across the street.

The good news is that we’re safe for the time being because they’ve reluctantly decided to let the US keep running things:

TUNIS, Tunisia (AP) -- A summit focusing on narrowing the digital divide between the rich and poor residents and countries opened Wednesday with an agreement of sorts on who will maintain ultimate oversight of the Internet and the flow of information, commerce and dissent.

The World Summit on the Information Society had been overshadowed by a lingering, if not vocal, struggle about overseeing the domain names and technical issues that make the Internet work and keep people from Pakistan to Canada surfing Web sites in the search for information, news and buying and selling.

Negotiators from more than 100 countries agreed late Tuesday to leave the United States in charge of the Internet's addressing system, averting a U.S.-EU showdown at this week's U.N. technology summit.

U.S. officials said early Wednesday that instead of transferring management of the system to an international body such as the United Nations, an international forum would be created to address concerns. The forum, however, would have no binding authority.

Of course they still have some hope over at the UN, because they are going to revisit the issue again in 2006.

If they think that running the internet is so darn important, let the UN go out and develop the technology and pay to start their own system. Call it Outernet or the Undernet or the Kofi-net or whatever they want.

Why should we GIVE them what is clearly OUR computer network? After all, we already let them connect to it and use it basically for free, they just have to pay to get a dial tone or a cable signal in their home or office and they can happily spam us to death with offers to share in millions of misplaced cash from deceased relatives stored in Swiss bank accounts.

And who besides the UN and some Democrats think that poor people have a RIGHT to internet access anyway? Shouldn’t they be concerned with basic things like reading, writing, and math skills? Shouldn't the UN be feeding these people rather than worrying about hooking them up to E-mail?

The problem is that Internet access requires expensive things like computers and modems and little details like a phone or cable system. Is the UN proposing to provide wireless internet access in an oasis in Egypt or a refugee camp in Somalia? I guess it would help me get a Hertz reservation for a Camel rental in Cairo.

And who’s gonna pay for these luxuries in countries full of civil war battles and starving children dying of AIDS? I suppose that the UN would place a tax on “rich” user’s access in the developed world to pay for their bungling administration of internet access for the tribal elders in Niger.

Yeah, right...I think that the temperature would have to drop substantially in Hell before that happens.