Internet Safe From Globalized Censorship as UN Treaty Fails

[silicon_toad2000]

The doomsday predictions that the internet would become a centralized, globalized tool for governments to suppress and eavesdrop on speech didn’t come to fruition Friday, after a two-week secret meeting between world governments failed to reach a consensus.

The World Conference on International Telecommunications, which opened two weeks ago in Dubai with some 193 nations discussing the global internet’s future, collapsed after Western nations, including the United States, failed to sign onto a global pact that for the first time would have left internet governance in the hands of the United Nations.

“It’s with a heavy heart and a sense of missed opportunities that the U.S. must communicate that it’s not able to sign the agreement in the current form,” said Terry Kramer, the U.S. ambassador to the summit.

The day before, he said “internet policy should not be determined by member states, but by citizens, communities and broader society.”

The discord ranged from human rights, privacy, spam, censorship to who would control the domain-naming system, which is now maintained in the United States.

The idea behind the meetings was to update the International Telecommunications Regulations governed by the International Telecommunications Union, a United Nations agency known as the ITU, that is responsible for global communication technologies.

Hamadoun Touré, the ITU Secretary-General, suggested it was ridiculous to exclude the internet when it comes to global communications policy.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/12/united-nations-internet/

[GhostShip]

What a load of crap

The real story is of course the refusal of the US to part with control of the DNS system, the only web based media sites parroting the "safe from censorship and eavedropping " line are those based in the US, we all know about the NSA having access to all traffic in and out of the US and the ability of the US federal govt to shut down any site at will, legally or not as we have also seen in the last few years.

Lack of real due-process-of-law and zero privacy is what folks are getting in the US and to pretend otherwise is the work of propagandists, as are the biased articles by "wired" and many other US based online news vendors.

Many in the world see the US as a selfish child that stamps its foot when they want something but refuse to share with the other nations when its their turn to gain something, let us hope they grow out of this rather old fashioned selfish mindset before folks stop asking for the opinion of the US in other matters in the future.

And before I hear from any "uber patriots" , please look carefully at your politicians actions rather than their words as whilst many speeches go down well in the United States those same speeches are not the ones heard by the rest of the world.