Dot Disaster

I've pushed Paul's meme as far as possible and this story ruined the mood.

Now that the UN's Iraqi Oil scam is finished they are looking for another cash cow.

The United Nations wants a big piece of the Internet.

U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan set the tone in a speech Thursday, criticizing the current system through which Internet standards are set and domain names are handled, a process currently dominated by the United States, Canada, Europe and Japan. Such structures "must be made accessible and responsive to the needs of all the world's people," Annan said.

Um...has anyone actually explained the concept of W3 to the SecGen? Guess not.

Although the U.N. process is still in its early stages, the result could dramatically reshape the way the Internet is run and put an end to some of the informal, collaborative processes that exist today. The master root servers that serve up addresses for country codes and all other top-level domains, for instance, are operated in part by volunteers instead of through a U.N.-style apparatus.

Dozens of delegates from developing nations echoed Annan's remarks throughout the rest of the day, arguing that their governments do not have a voice in the way the Internet is operated and that more money and investment from richer nations is the only way to end the so-called digital divide. Khalid Saeed, the secretary of Pakistan's Ministry of Information Technology, said his country must "play an active role in all layers" of organizations that control the operation of the modern Internet.

Of course, the French weasels are lying in the weeds,

Many delegates to the Global Forum on Internet Governance appeared to favor the International Telecommunication Union, a U.N. agency, taking over at least part of ICANN's functions. "We don't have to create any new organizations," said Alain le Gourrierec, ambassador from France's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. "We don't have to create any new agencies. The U.N. exists for this reason. The main point is to make sure the developing countries are part of this movement to make the Internet part of society."

The UN exists to steal as much as possible from those who create wealth while contributing nothing.

The few representatives of Internet technical bodies, such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), who participated in the summit were outnumbered but emphatic.

"The IETF has an extremely open process," said IETF Chair Harald Alvestrand. The group, which sets most of the standards that keep the Internet working, is "a place where stakeholders come together...Make sure when you talk about Internet governance, you're talking about things that really need governing."

"We're in danger of overregulating," not underregulating, said Karl Auerbach, a former ICANN board member and a veteran Internet engineer.

VeriSign/NetSol sucks at a task they invented and have the most experience in managing. In a very short order the UN Internet would be totally FUBARed and burning money like a drunken UN diplomat in a French whorehouse.

A UN takeover of ICANN can only result in a two tier Internet. One can imagine English speaking counties in North America, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, India, Japan and a few Southeast Asian countries maintaining the current US-based top level servers.

A tip of the chapeau to Linda at Civilization Calls.

Posted by feste at March 26, 2004 04:09 PM | TrackBack