I was just alerted to this information. I didn't know anything about it, and thought it deserved more attention. A lot more attention.
It seems that the Internet has been controlled, as much as it can be, by an obscure non-profit company called Icann.
But it's lease is about to expire.
World leaders are currently meeting in Tunisia to figure out how the Internet will be controlled in the near future.
George Bush is pushing for Icann to become a private company, based in the U.S., under U.S. rules.
How many private corporations are currently under the spell of the GOP? And what does that bode for the internet?
more after the fold
The article is here:
http://news.independent.co.uk/...
The article is quite well-written so I'll just post a few clips from it.
By Daniel Howden
Published: 16 November 2005
Over the next three days a United Nations summit, in the unlikely setting of Tunisia, will attempt to thrash out the future of the internet.
More than 40 world leaders, including Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, are set to attend, and the ownership of the World Wide Web itself is at stake. What the delegates won't discuss is the creeping spectre of censorship.
What began as a military research project at the Pentagon has exploded into the most powerful network in the world and an entity upon which the global economy increasingly relies. Its future character is now in question.
At present, the closest the internet has to a governing body is an obscure American, non-profit corporation called Icann. This quasi-independent body has, for years, quietly regulated domain names and allocated addresses. But its lease is nearly up. And the world's rich and powerful will join battle for control of what they see as a gold mine.
The Bush administration wants Icann turned into a private corporation, on US soil and subject to US controls. Much of the rest of the world objects to that but the loudest opponents are countries with a history of censorship and repression, such as China and Iran. The likely balance of power in that struggle rests with the European Union, whose position is not clear.
(snip)
Already, rights watchdogs say, both Tunisian and foreign reporters covering the summit have been harassed and beaten. Fears of a crackdown have led some civil society groups who plan to hold their own summit on the fringe of the gathering to conceal their plans.
At the weekend, a reporter with the French daily Libération, Christophe Boltanski, who had been investigating the recent beatings of human rights activists in Tunisia, was stabbed and kicked outside his hotel in Tunis. He was not seriously injured.
The Tunisia Monitoring Group has highlighted the cases of seven men now on a hunger strike in the country and estimates that about 500 more have been jailed for expressing opinions.
Robert Menard, secretary general of Reporters Without Borders, has been banned from attending the summit. He said: "Banning the head of an organisation that defends free expression from attending a summit about the information society is absurd and unacceptable."|
The exponential expansion of the internet has been accompanied by staunch resistance from countries anxious to prevent their own people from getting greater access to information. In the two years since the last internet summit, held in Geneva, the rise of filtering technology - deployed by states to control what they don't want people to see - has been dramatic and insidious.
Ben Edelman, an internet researcher at Harvard University, says countries using blocking technologies have found they can cut off web content they dislike, while still obtaining the internet's commercial benefits. "Go to, say, Thailand and request a banned site on politics or pornography. Thanks to blocking technologies like IP filtering, you probably won't get the web page you asked for," he said. "Neither will you get a warning saying 'This content is blocked.' Instead, your browser is likely to say 'host not found'. In fact things are just as the censors intended: the site is working fine, but you can't see it."
In Uzbekistan authorities copy controversial sites, change their content and then repost their own version - all without the users being aware. Countries such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates filter content openly and are proud of doing so. Iran earned notoriety by becoming the first country to imprison someone for the contents of an internet page, or blog.
I'm sure this would NEVER happen in the United States! Censorship? Here? Who would support such a thing ........?
But China remains the benchmark in censorship. Beijing has cajoled major US players such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo into adapting their sites and services to suit the censors. A Chinese web surfer typing the word "democracy" or "freedom" or "human rights" into their server will probably receive an error message announcing: "This item contains forbidden speech."
Brad Adams, Asia director of Human Rights Watch said: "There have been great claims by internet companies that it would be an unstoppable tool for free expression and the spread of democracy. But when companies like Yahoo! Microsoft and Google decide to put profits from their Chinese operations over the free exchange of information, they are helping to kill that dream."
This was the first I had heard of any of this. If it's been posted here before, I missed it.
At any rate, this seems like something we should definitely keep our eye on.
Private American corporate control of the internet?
McNet. Micronet. WalNet. ???
I don't think anybody wants that.
Anybody have any ideas what we can do about this?