The new world order invades your computer

That Beijing and Moscow are backing the idea is enough to know it’s a bad one. The free flow of information has always been an enemy of thuggish regimes. To them, individual expression and the unlimited exchange of ideas – which the Internet has made possible for some oppressed people for the first time in history – must be stamped out. Such countries view the Internet as a vast intelligence operation, a means of collecting sensitive information on people and preventing freedom of expression through a sophisticated array of censorship tools.

This week, Congress will consider legislation to amend the 1988 International Telecommunication Regulations to give the U.N. extraordinary powers over the Internet. In September, the authoritarian bloc submitted a proposal titled “The International Code of Conduct for Information Security.” In theory, it seeks to systematize and standardize the Internet and establish rules for maintaining cybersecurity. In fact, it will give the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) – a U.N. agency that oversees global telecommunications – vast new powers to regulate and control access to the Internet and information flow in cyberspace.

Imagine if everything you did online was subject to monitoring and control by the United Nations. Powerful authoritarian states, including China and Russia, are spearheading an effort to place the most potent information system in the world under centralized international control. They want the Internet to work with the same efficiency, speed and reliability as the U.N.

Washington Times

More:

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/un-to-regulate-the-internet-house-set-to-examine-bill-next-week/

Here’s the FCC take on standing firm against it: http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2012/db0516/DOC-314117A1.pdf

WE SHOULD REMAIN UNIFIED IN OUR OPPOSITION TO UN/ITU REGULATION OF THE INTERNET.

Finally, all of us should be concerned with a well-organized international effort to secure intergovernmental control of Internet governance. Since being privatized in the early 1990’s, the Internet has historically flourished within a deregulatory regime not only within our country but internationally as well. In fact, the long-standing international consensus has been to keep governments from regulating core functions of

the Internet’s ecosystem.

Unfortunately, some nations, such as China, Russia, India, Iran and Saudi Arabia, have been pushing to reverse this consensus by giving the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) regulatory jurisdiction over Internet governance. The

ITU is a treaty-based organization under the auspices of the United Nations.32 As Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said last June, the goal of this effort is to establish “international control over the Internet using the monitoring and supervisory capabilities of the [ITU].”33

…

Today, however, several countries within the 193 member states of the ITU35 want to renegotiate the 1988 treaty to expand its reach into previously unregulated areas. A few specifics are as follows:

– Subject cyber security and data privacy to international control;

– Allow foreign phone companies to charge fees for “international” Internet traffic, perhaps even on a “per-click” basis for certain Web destinations, with the goal of generating revenue for state-owned phone companies and government treasuries;

– Impose unprecedented economic regulations such as mandates for rates, terms and conditions for currently unregulated traffic-swapping agreements known as “peering;”

– Establish for the first time ITU dominion over important functions of multi-stakeholder Internet governance entities such as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the nonprofit entity that coordinates the .com and .org Web addresses of the world;

– Subsume under intergovernmental control many functions of the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Society and other multi-stakeholder groups that establish the engineering and technical standards that allow the Internet to work; and

– Regulate international mobile roaming rates and practices. These efforts could ultimately partition the Internet between countries that on the one hand opt out of today’s highly successful, non-governmental, multi-stakeholder model to live under an intergovernmental regulatory regime, and on the other hand, those member states that decide to keep the current system. Such a legal structure would be devastating to global free trade, rising living standards and the spread of political freedom. It would also create an engineering morass.