China Hails ITU Internet Takeover By Blowing Its Favorite Trumpet: Distrusting The US

from the one-way-of-looking-at-it dept

This indicated the U.S. decision to retain ultimate control over the global Internet, which enabled it to unilaterally close the Internet of another country. A suddenly paralyzed Internet would definitely cause huge social and economic losses to the country.



More and more countries are beginning to question the U.S. control over the world’s Internet as the international resource should be managed and supervised by all countries together. However, the United States has conducted a pre-emptive strike, and refused to give up control over the Internet in the name of protecting the resource. The refusal reflects its hegemonic mentality and double standards.



The United States controls and owns all cyberspaces in the world, and other countries can only lease Internet addresses and domain names from the United States, leading to the U.S. hegemonic monopoly over the world’s Internet.

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While there's been plenty of talk about the upcoming ITU process, the ITU keeps attempting to downplay what it's trying to do -- and insisting that Russia, China and other regimes aren't looking to use the process to clamp down on the internet. Of course, proposal leaks from Russia suggest otherwise . As for China, Dave Farber points us to an editorial in the People's Daily newspaper in China from back in August that argues that the ITU process is necessary to wrest control of the internet away from the US This is an exaggeration of reality. While ICANN has serious problems -- which we frequently discuss here -- that doesn't mean that dumping it entirely in favor of a ridiculously secretive and bureaucratic process like the ITU makes sense. The article goes on to cite the US apparently turning off the .iq domain for Iraq during the invasion in 2003. Of course, that's an interesting rewriting of history. The issue with the .iq domain wasn't quite as cut and dried as the editorial implies. First of all, .iq wasn't a widely used domain no matter what. But, more importantly, it was entirely managed and controlled by a guy in Texas who was accused of funding terrorists and eventually sentenced to 84 months in jail . It wasn't so much a case of the US government running to ICANN and saying shut down the domain, as it was a criminal investigation into separate issues that happened to scoop up the one guy who controlled the TLD. And, it should be noted that ICANN gave .iq back to the Iraqi government years ago.This kind of stuff indicates the lengths to which the Chinese government seems willing to go to prop up the ITU process for taking over aspects of internet governance: they'll just lie and make up stories when the truth isn't particularly convenient.

Filed Under: china, itu, us

Companies: icann