I'm taking my toys and going home

"Mine!"

The good old U.S. of A. has decided that sharing the main computers that direct the traffic on the Internet (in other words, the Internet) with the rest of the world is “unacceptable”. The proposal was that the country turn over control of the Internet to the UN. Granted, the UN probably couldn’t handle a lunch order for a party of 4 at the moment, but this is just silly.

So the Pentagon may have been a major force behind the initial development of the Internet, but that was almost 30 years ago. Since then, the Internet has evolved far beyond its original military means. Case and point: you. You are using the Internet right now for social functions right? No, I don’t mean sharing porn. I mean reading junk like this, chatting with friends, playing games with people half way across the world, reading international news. Various groups have been lobbying the UN hard to include access to information as an inalienable right under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This is just a slap in the face towards that movement (to which I am a supporter). I agree that all humans should have unrestricted access to information, and the Internet has become that conduit.

So not unlike China, it shouldn’t be too surprising that the US wouldn’t be interested in this notion. Sharing access to the mainframe of the Internet means taking control of the flow, and type, of information on the Internet away from the Americans. Now unless you live in a cave, you’re probably pretty familiar with the way in which CNN, FOX, ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC and all the others love to subtly manipulate the way stories are crafted for American audiences. Test it yourself:

• Find an international story on CNN.com . Pick anything, I suggest a story about “insurgents” in Iraq


• Now head over to BBC.com and find the same story. See a difference?

But I digress.

Is this the case with the Internet? I wouldn’t say so, at least not yet. But they certainly have the power to do so at any time. As the article says “Policy decisions could at a stroke make all websites ending in a specific suffix (e.g. .ca, .de, .org) unreachable”. Again, I wouldn’t necessarily agree that the UN is the best place for this kind of control either. But certainly not with any one country. Not anymore. There should be some supranational body responsible for this sort of thing, directly accountable to us all.

These days, information is the second most precious commodity (oil being the first). Short-sighted decision like this set up decades of barriers to progress both politically and intellectually across the entire world, but I don’t think the US sees that. I think they only see the “threat to American sovereignty” or some merde comme ça. And what do we do about it? We complain in our blogs.

Read Fark. Read Adbusters. Get the truth. Get mad.