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The U.N. As A Threat To Online Speech

Bloggers of all political persuasions rallied online last week to defend their right to speak freely about American political candidates. But on the global question of who should oversee the Internet, an issue with potentially far broader ramifications on free speech, bloggers have been noticeably less vocal.

Internet governance tops the agenda for the World Summit on the Information Society meeting scheduled for next week in Tunisia. The primary focus will be whether to decentralize control over the Internet and give more power to the United Nations.

A report by a U.N. working group outlines four alternatives, three of which would change or eliminate the role of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. The European Union also has proposed a "new international model of cooperation." ICANN currently controls the Web via an agreement exclusively with the U.S. Commerce Department, and the U.S. government adamantly opposes a shift toward global management.

Blog-like tech publications such as ICANN Watch and Slashdot have covered the debate about Internet governance regularly, and tech-oriented bloggers like Andy Carvin of the Digital Divide Network and Steven Forrest at Free2Innovate.net have opined on the topic. Carvin even created WSISblogs, a clearinghouse for reports from bloggers who cover WSIS-related events.

Instapundit Glenn Reynolds also has mentioned Internet governance periodically. But even with the heft of his influential blog, the issue has failed to gain the same traction as the blog swarm against Federal Election Commission plans to regulate the Internet.

Bruce Kesler called for more attention to the issue in a post at Democracy Project, where he decried the European Union for aligning with "such stalwarts of smothering Internet freedom as China, Cuba, Iran and several African states."

"This issue, this outrageous putsch attempt, deserves an uproar heard around the world on the Internet," he wrote.

"I honestly don't know why the bloggers haven't been more active on this one," said Adam Thierer of the Progress and Freedom Foundation, who has covered the topic at PFF Blog. "It's perplexing and frustrating."

The most obvious explanation for the sporadic focus so far is the arcane nature of the topic. Save for occasional debates about online pornography and .xxx Web addresses, Internet governance is not exactly a sexy issue. "Overall, it's a difficult issue, heavy on technical complexities," Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of Daily Kos said in an e-mail interview.

But the same is true of federal campaign finance law, and Moulitsas and other bloggers have been all over that issue.

Reynolds said bloggers might not have rallied against Internet governance because they don't see the United Nations as a threat. "Perhaps it's a mistake, but I don't think that bloggers take the U.N. that seriously," he said in an e-mail that referenced the body's response to human rights abuses in Bosnia and Iraq. "Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam [Hussein] have made fools of the U.N., so bloggers don't think it dangerous."

Kesler added that blogs tend to focus on domestic issues that readers see as more pressing. "The FEC potential regulations are a more immediate threat," he wrote in an e-mail, "but the U.N. interference is of wider import, as there are alternate means of and protections of free speech in the U.S. but not in many sad places abroad."

He also noted that swarms demand consensus. Although most bloggers who have commented on the idea of U.N. oversight of the Web oppose the notion, that view is not unanimous.

"You can see the U.S. conservative spin machine turning this into a battle between the democracy-loving U.S. government protecting the Internet from censorship from the dictators and thugs who run the United Nations," the blog Rikomatic noted last month. "The reality, of course, is more complex."

That complexity includes a general mistrust of the Bush administration when it comes to international relations. One blogger characterized the administration's emphatic dismissal of a global role in Internet governance as another example of poor diplomacy, comparing it with the U.S. attitude in rejecting a treaty on global warming.

Moulitsas argued that the administration's "international belligerence has given the rest of the world little faith that the U.S. will have global interests in mind when regulating what is, in effect, a global medium." He added that the U.S. government's decision earlier this year to warn ICANN against creating a .xxx Internet space exclusively for porn indicated that the administration "will impose its political agenda on Net governance."

"The Internet isn't served well by having it controlled by the political whims of the sitting U.S. government," he said.

Moulitsas has mixed feelings about U.N. Internet governance. He said it is only fair for "the world's lone global authority" to oversee the global medium, and he said some sort of international oversight is inevitable. But he added: "Any kind of global governance will introduce artificial borders to the equation. I can't see any good coming of that."

Although Reynolds said U.N. control of the Internet would have only a marginal impact on bloggers at first, he warned of attempts "to conscript national authorities into enforcing U.N. rules." Some countries would target political speech on blogs, Thierer added, and an even greater threat to bloggers would be the application of other nations' libel standards on Internet speech.

"If we allow the libel standards that most other countries on the globe use to govern online speech, it would mean that many bloggers could suddenly be subjected to defamation suits from far-off places," he said.

Not even Saturday's personal attempt at reassurance from U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan in The Washington Post is enough to put critics at ease. "I remain uncomforted," Reynolds wrote after reading Anan's column.

Posted by | 09:30 AM

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Tracked on November 11, 2005 11:16 AM

Comments

I think bloggers are betting on the U.S. to shield the internet from the U.N.....although admittedly, that hasn't necessarily worked so well in the past with other issues.

Easycure | 11.07.05 10:20 AM

Yeah, I reckon the attitude is that the UN's power base consists of the US military in blue hats. If the US is set against it, the UN can go bark up a tree.

The real threats to the internet come from inside the USA, the censor-regulate-wiretap-and-tax tendency.

Julian Morrison | 11.07.05 10:35 AM

All they're trying to take control of is the root servers for DNS, as far as I can tell. While this causes problems, it wouldn't be terribly difficult to simply replace them with non-government-controlled root servers, from a technical standpoint. From a logistical standpoint it'd be a nightmare, but from a technical standpoint it just requires changing 13 IP addresses in a text file. Were the UN to make registering and maintaining DNS names odious, I have no doubt in the larger ISPs abilities to simply move around them, perhaps going to some of the alternative servers: here.

Jonathan Hawkins | 11.07.05 10:45 AM

I think bloggers on the right don't take the U.N. seriously and trust that with Republicans in office, the U.N.'s only recourse to obtain authority over the internet is to "come and get it." Given the foppish peaceniks among the U.N. elites, no worries.

Bloggers on the left are conflicted, so they stay off the topic. Their visceral rejection of American authority have them tending toward international governance of the internet. But the practical consequences of U.N. authority are too noxious to risk promoting them. Lefty bloggers certainly wouldn't be seen actually advocating for the United States to stand firm against international pressure, so they have nothing to offer.

ss | 11.07.05 10:46 AM

I don't think bloggers are getting very wound up about the issue of the UN wanting to butt in on internet control because so many feel so confident that the US government is going to tell the UN to forget about it.

I can sympathise with foreign nations being uncomfortable and uneasy about leaving the "control" of the internet in the hands of the US; other governments feel powerless to change anything. However, giving control to the UN will only give the illusion of power to affect change because the real power will belong to whatever corrupt and incompetent body the UN forms to handle the internet.

If the UN can't properly handle the comparitively simple process of swapping oil for food, why on earth should I believe the UN can handle such a complex thing as the internet?

Here's what I say to the rest of the world: if it aint broke, don't fix it.

Amelia in Texas | 11.07.05 10:56 AM

Forget the UN, start fighting closer to home where your leverage can make a difference.

The ADL sponsored a conference in New York in October, 2005 to develop closer cooperation with European law enforcement and to work out ways to criminally prosecute Americans for posting "hate speech" on US web sites. Some of the ideas they toyed with were international subpoenas, and keeping lists of Americans to be arrested and tried when they travel to Europe.

What is hate speech? As a start, pretty much anything on LGF about Muslims, anything on Stormfront about Jews, and verbalizing any traditional Jewish, Muslim and Christian beliefs about homosexuality, for a start.

Yeshiva University is sponsoring a conference with extreme leftist European and Anglospheric philosophers, law professors, bureaucrats and activists to compare, contrast and "harmonize" US law with European hate speech law. They want to come up with theoretical foundations for hate speech laws that can trump, bypass, or disembowel the First Amendment.

Go read the ADL press releases (adl.org) about the October, 2005 conference. Go read Yeshiva University's (yu.edu) info on their conference as well.

How serious is this activity? Remember that the ADL is the proud leader in creating University hate speech laws. We are still fighting battles to get rid of their pernicious anti-speech influence across the nation. They would LOVE to spread the same nonsense to the Internet and they champion the arrest and conviction of Americans for violating any other country's hate crime laws by posting on the Internet here in the USA.

God bless 'em, I appreciate the Jews' collective fears after WWII but I do not want to live in a fascist state just to make them feel safe. Perhaps those laws are appropriate for Europe but not here.

So don't keep thinking the UN is the biggest threat, when we have folks right here at home working steadily to gut the First Amendment.

FrankM. | 11.07.05 11:10 AM

My sentiment is similar to that above.

Bloggers, in general, don't care about the UN trying to regulate the internet because bloggers, in general, see the UN as a bumbling institution that wouldn't be able to get water out of a boot if you told them that the instructions to do so were written on the heel.

Jaybird | 11.07.05 11:14 AM

The UN does not want control because it is a Global issue. They want control so they can protect those people who are lining their pockets. The Leaders who Free speech is a virus. Leaders who have to keep their populace in the stupid to continue to steal from them, and give the money to the UN leaders to shut down those web sites. The UN does not believe in Free Speech, even their declaration of human rights, states that you have free speech, as long as it does not violate their tenants. Which in effect is no free speech.

What shocks me to the core is, Leftists. Do they not understand that the UN is not what they want in a Global Government? They stand beside Fascists and Communists alike and defend them to the core.

James Stephenson | 11.07.05 11:16 AM

Keep in mind that the internet was originally developed by the military as a damage-resistant method of communications. This is a big reason why attempts to censor it fail, because the net responds to censorship as it does to damage -- it seeks to route information around missing nodes.

While control attempts can be "locally" successful for a limited time, eventually they all fail, in the same way that water under pressure will find and enlarge any leak in a dam.

Perhaps this explains the blogsphere's relative lack of energy against the UN's efforts. The UN is a sloppy, corrupt bureaucracy, and my hunch is that people are figuring that whatever the UN tries to do, it will be comparatively easy to undermine or circumvent.

Robert Burnham | 11.07.05 11:35 AM

I agree with the above: Yawn.

The UN can have summit after summit and try to do whatever they please. It will never happen.

If it should happen, it will be easy enough to route around; seems like the ideal moment to move to IPv6, actually.

The Internet may fragment (odd thought that, given that the very name "internet" implies fragments), but at least the English language part of it will always be centered in the US: That's where the users are and the money is.

mrsizer | 11.07.05 11:38 AM

For the UN to obtain governance of the Internet, the US (which invented, developed, and funded the internet) would have to surrender and "turn over the keys." Ain't gonna happen.

Besides, no one is compelled to connect to the Internet; it'spurely voluntary. If Syria, Libya, China, et al don't like the way the net is being managed, let 'em build one of their own. See how many people hook up to it.

Albertgator | 11.07.05 11:57 AM

This is not a minor, insignificant matter as some people here seem to think. The Internet *can* be very effectively censored. The Great Chinese Firewall does exactly that, and while a tiny, tiny percentage of the digerati might figure out ways to bypass it, the majority of the population online can easily be censored and taken to the brainwashers. All this "routing around censorship" sounds nice in theory but in practice the censorship in places like Saudi Arabia, China, Russia and even Germany is extremely effective. If those systems are put in place in the US via the back door of "UN governance", then we will all suffer.

Philip Cassini | 11.07.05 12:16 PM

I'm not particularly worried. the "who should oversee the internet" is a non-issue as far as I can see.

Why not ask who should oversee the computer industry? Or who should oversee all trade?

This is something that real nations with real governments sort out between themselves; the UN is a non-entity.

Henry Kissinger once said "You say Europe, but what's the phone number?" Similarly, the UN has pretenses of running things because it waves no single national flag. But that's precisely why it can't run anything; it doesn't bring anything to the table. Nothing is built, designed, manufactured, or packaged in the UN because it is not a country.

For that very reason, I'm completely unconcerned. The UN can't even come out and admit when a country is committing genocide, because if they did they'd have to do something about it and then suffer the embarrassment of demonstrating just how incapable they are of doing anything at all. I'm not too worried about them attempting to seize control of the internet. On what grounds would they do this, and how exactly would they enforce it?

Adam | 11.07.05 01:58 PM

On my blog, (granted nobody actually reads it) I cared enough to offer a solution. I suggested a memo be issued to Kofi Annan informing him that the internet is currently inhabited by a large number of agitated Hutus. My guess is that, with that information, the UN won't get around to doing anything with the internet for decades.

bb | 11.08.05 01:23 AM

Actually I've blogged this more than once. I am up in arms about it, I'm just a small blog with limited readership, that's why there appears to be no reaction. I'm not one of the big bloggers out there.

The evildoers at the UN are not doing this for access, they are doing it for control. The group who's pushing this shows that's the case. Totalitarians want UN control because there are more dictatorships than free countries in the GA and they can outvote those who oppose them. As long as someone in the US administration cares, we can stop it. If an America Hater gets elected next cycle, she will gladly hand over control to the UN. Then it's war.

http://ahshoot.blogspot.com/2005/09/un-confiscates-americans-registered.html

http://ahshoot.blogspot.com/2005/09/america-must-control-internet.html

http://ahshoot.blogspot.com/2005/10/un-tries-to-strong-arm-us-over.html

ScottG | 11.08.05 10:47 AM

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