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The UN rears its ugly head again as an international political spat is brewing over whether the United Nations will seize control of the heart of the Internet. By ugly I mean those members of the UN whose rule at home has nothing to recommend them such as Syria, China or Ghana. They claim that the U.S. government has undue influence over how things run online. Now they want to be the ones in charge.
One of the things at issue is who decides key questions like adding new top-level domains, assigning chunks of numeric Internet addresses, and operating the root servers that keep the Net humming.
But this is the bit that opens the knife in my pocket.
Other suggested responsibilities for this new organization include Internet surveillance, “consumer protection,” and perhaps even the power to tax domain names to pay for “universal access.”
I know that there is not much love lost for ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, established to handle some of those topics, but these kind of noises from the UN represent a political challenge as they come from predictable corners. CNET news.com provides excerpts from a transcript of a recent closed-door meeting in Geneva convened by the UN’s Working Group on Internet Governance that offers clues about the plot to dethrone ICANN. Please note the sophistication and understanding of internet and the related issues by the participants:
Syria: “There’s more and more spam every day. Who are the victims? Developing and least-developed countries, too. There is no serious intention to stop this spam by those who are the transporters of the spam, because they benefit…The only solution is for us to buy equipment from the countries which send this spam in order to deal with spam. However, this, we believe, is not acceptable.”
Brazil, responding to ICANN’s approval of .xxx domains: “For those that are still wondering what Triple-X means, let’s be specific, Mr. Chairman. They are talking about pornography. These are things that go very deep in our values in many of our countries. In my country, Brazil, we are very worried about this kind of decision-making process where they simply decide upon creating such new top-level generic domain names.”
China: “We feel that the public policy issue of Internet should be solved jointly by the sovereign states in the U.N. framework…For instance, spam, network security and cyberspace–we should look for an appropriate specialized agency of the United Nations as a competent body.”
Ghana: “There was unanimity for the need for an additional body…This body would therefore address all issues relating to the Internet within the confines of the available expertise which would be anchored at the U.N.”
So the usual ‘control-and-destroy’ approach of the UN scum. Can they do anything about it? Apparently there is the nuclear option .
Beyond the usual levers of diplomatic pressure and public kvetching, Brazil and China could choose what amounts to the nuclear option: a fragmented root. That means a new top-level domain would not be approved by ICANN–but would be recognized and used by large portions of the rest of the world. The downside, of course, is that the nuclear option could create a Balkanized Internet where two computers find different Web sites at the same address.
Declan McCullagh, the author of the article, believes that such an outcome remains remote, but possible, which turns an obscure debate about Internet governance has suddenly become surprisingly important. I hope the US does not let go…
On BBC Radio 4’s “Today” Programme it was announced that Karl Marx was the greatest philosopher of all time and a leading Marxist historian was invited on to the show to explain the ideas of my near namesake. This was not an example of bias – simply a result of people e-mailing the BBC in response to the “In Our Time” Programme asking this question.
Of course, people who listened to BBC Radio 4’s “In Our Time” programme (or any other BBC show) would not have heard a sustained attack on Karl Marx in recent years. And today (July 14) shows this point – on the “In Our Time” programme the presenter (who is a supporter of the Labour party but, by the standards of the BBC, is actually rather fair minded) asked if any of the experts on the show thought that there was a connection between the ideas of Karl Marx and events in Russia, China…
None of three academic “experts” thought that there was. Karl Marx was, in fact, a great supporter of freedom.
A glance at say The Communist Manifesto (1848) would show that Marx favoured (even in the early stages of the revolution) the confiscation of the property of anyone who tried to flee the new regime, and that he also favoured the creation of industrial and agricultural “armies”.
For a man who was normally careful to say he could not describe what the future society would be like, this is quite revealing.
Marx believed in “freedom of speech” for himself – not for anyone else (this is quite clear, both from his doctrines and his life). The academics were simply following the tradition of Plato – that of the “noble lie”.
Is it any wonder that people who were educated by such academics would have a favourable view of Marx?
But we must move on.
On the 1pm. BBC television news we were told that although the bomb in Baghdad had killed 30 children it was really targeted against the Americans (after all one American had died), and that the bomb in September that also killed about 30 children had also really been targeted against the Americans.
So that is OK then, if one supports killing Americans.
Except, of course, it does not make sense. If a bomber waits till a crowd of children has gathered (to get sweets or for any other purpose) and then sets off his bomb, then the target is THE CHILDREN.
By the 1700 Radio Four “PM” programme, things had got truly bizarre.
A “leading astrologer” was interviewed to examine the theory that the evil Americans had altered our destiny by shooting a space probe at a comet.
Most of the questions were respectful (rather than ironic), and the astrologer said that he did not know, but seemed most concerned at the “arrogant” action of the Americans, which might have pushed us into a “parallel universe”.
So we went from Marxism to Islamic fundamentalism, to barking mad mysticism – all in one day.
It would not be true to say that the BBC will support “anything” that has “death to America” at its heart (for example it would not support a return to a strong Monarchy that demanded that the colonists return to loyalty to the Crown), but it will certainly support a lot of rather different anti-American ideological positions.
I remind readers that unlike the “Guardian” or the “New York Times”, people are forced to pay for the BBC – via their television “licence fee”.
It is hard to know what to make of this article, which seems to be pressing for an ID card system for Australia. Australian Prime Minister John Howard seems to be not so keen on the idea, but refuses to rule it out.
More depressing is the quote from the chief of the Australian Defence Association calling for ID cards because terrorists do not like it:
Australia Defence Association chief Neil James said he believed Mr Howard was considering an identity card because it was identified as one of the chinks in Britain’s counter-terror armour. “If you have a look at Europe the terrorists gravitate to Britain because all of the European Union countries have some form of national identity system,” he said.
Unfortunately this is fairly indicative of the quality of debate in Australia regarding security matters.
(Hat tip- Tim Blair)
Watching the news is starting to give me a strange throbbing headache. Most people in Britain realise that just because our enemies are Muslims, that does not mean all (or even most) Muslims are our enemies. Other than in a few shitholes like Oldham, most British folks really do value, or at least accept, the pluralistic tolerant society that largely prevails in these ‘Sceptred Isles’.
Ok? Did you get that Messers Blair, Howard, Kennedy, etc. etc? Most of us understand that and those who think otherwise are not going to listen to you anyway. You will note that synagogues getting vandalized in France are such a regular occurrence that it is hardly even news anymore, whereas a stone through a mosque window in the UK makes the papers. Does that tell you something?
So next time there is some hideous atrocity, be it here in the UK, in the USA, in Iraq, in Israel or anywhere else in the world that Al Qaeda or Hamas have infested, can you kindly resist the urge to say “But Islam is a religion of peace…”. We heard you before and we have not reacted to previous incidents by torching mosques from London to Lanarkshire. Please. PLEASE…just.shut.the.fuck.up.
Thank you.
I do not believe that we have a “No shit Sherlock” category for blog postings here, but maybe we should. Here is the explanation that the Evening Standard was offering today of what made those who committed the atrocities of last Thursday in London decide to become suicide bombers:
This photograph was taken outside Waterloo Station, at about 3pm this afternoon.
To be fair to the Evening Standard, their actual reportage was somewhat more informative, and more up-to-the-minute billboards revealed that one of the bombers was a primary school teacher. That was news, to me anyway.
Now that we know what everyone except Tony Blair suspected (that the suicide bombers were probably British born or at least legal residents), perhaps it is worth noting that had mandatory ID cards been in force, they would have been perfectly entitled to avail themselves of one each.
Yes, I can see how this will help stamp out terrorism. Right? Right?
Here is a project I certainly welcome called We are not afraid. The message is simple, worth repeating and lets you do strange things with a camera.
Harry Hutton and his commenters very quickly became fed up with people going on about the British Stiff Upper Lip, and the Spirit of the Blitz. I know the feeling, and I am sure they speak for many. A lot of this talk is indeed rather self-conscious and theatrical, by which I mean not arm waving and emoting, but just a case of us all deliberately summoning up our inner David Nivens so that the bits of us just above our mouths will look suitably stiff in TV close-up.
Plus, I wonder how stiff our upper lips would now be if three thousand people had died and London had lost two of its most striking buildings.
On the other hand, the father and mother of Philip Russell, the second person on this melancholy list, were briefly on the telly this afternoon. She was silent. He was a model of considered sorrow. There was no out-of-control display of rage, no “why us?” wailing, just calm grief, and quiet words of appreciation for the character of their departed son. If Mr Russell senior is shedding tears he was not showing it to the cameras, and we were spared those hideous, triumphant close-ups of a person showing more feelings to the camera-persons than he intended. To dismiss Mr Russell’s reaction as mere theatricality would be very tasteless, and I would say, mistaken.
But whether you think all this talk of stiff upper lips is a media led posture or the real thing or, as I think, a bit of both, the good news is that it all makes a most refreshing change from the emotional incontinence that greeted the death of Diana Princess of Wales. This, we all immediately realised, is the real thing. Quite enough real people have lost real loved ones whom they actually knew and really liked, without lots of other people piling in with self-indulgent displays of bogus misery concerning people they never knew.
There is also the fact that, whereas the message that all those silly public mourners were sending out when Princess Di died was all about what the Horrid Paparazzi had done, and of What She Meant To Us, blah blah blah, we now all understand that the more we emote about these bombings, the more pleased will the people be who did them, and who helped them, and who are now cheering that they did them. We do not want to give those people any further satisfaction. So yes, it is all a bit theatrical, in the sense that the tone is deliberate. But, good.
Tony Blair, instinctive politician that he is, tuned in to both moods. When Di died, he was on the verge of tears. When these bombs went off, he had already practised a much calmer display, to suit the new, far more serious – far more real – state of affairs.
Emotional continence is not the same as intellectual excellence. A stiff upper lip is no excuse for refusing to use the brain a few inches above it in an intelligent manner. I am not saying that everything Tony Blair and his supporting caste of cabinet ministers and coppers has been correct, just that the tone of voice has mostly been good. What we ought to think – and what we ought to do – is a quite distinct matter from how we should merely feel about all this. (I strongly agree with Johnathan Pearce that last Sunday’s Telegraph leader is an excellent place to start. And if you liked that, you will also like this by Mark Steyn.)
But, with all those caveats duly caveated (or whatever it is you do with caveats), emotional continence is entirely the right emotional atmosphere within which to get stuck into the process of sharpening up our thinking about all these matters, and then acting upon those thoughts. It is, in short, an excellent start.
It is good to know that in these troubled times, when we feel under attack from terrorist nutters, that those considerate folk in the European Commission have refused to take their eye off the ball.
Vitamin supplements will become more expensive and many health food stores will be closed as a result of an EU directive being upheld. I find it depressing, but not the least bit surprising, that Brussels regulators should feel that ordinary folk are too thick to figure out the risks and benefits of vitamins for themselves. It is a setback for people who want to take charge of their health, and must send a funny message to people who are also constantly urged by our regulators and politicians about the dangers of obesity, smoking, booze and driving too fast.
Even if you are a sceptic about the benefits of so-called alternative medicine, it seems a fairly basic point that the substances one chooses to ingest are none of the State’s business. Period.
Sky News and its sister television channel Fox is reporting, along with Channel 4 News, that the bombers last Thursday may heve been killed in the act of detonation. I am watching a police press conference as I write. A number of police raids are going on in Yorkshire, northern England.
I don’t believe in the existence of Hell, but if there is such a place, may the mass murderers of last Thursday spend much time in it.
The troublesome [American] underclass is not huge, but its influence is much greater than its numbers. It is a visible problem if one goes to the wrong part of any city. It is much more in people’s minds than it is present in their lives. Indeed, it may be the lack of everyday acquaintance with the underclass that makes it all the more threatening.
It’s a little like terrorism. The British have lived with it for thirty years. It hasn’t touched many of us very directly, but we have always known that it might, and have always seen evidence of it out of the corner of our eye, as it were. We are, to that extent, ready for it when it comes much closer.
– Richard D. North, Rich is Beautiful
USAF personnel in the UK have been told to stay out of London because of the bombings. Sorry but this is not just a propaganda gift to the enemy, it is just plain daft.
Firstly, the US was not the target of these bombs, Londoners were. Secondly, London is always full of American visitors and US military folk do not really stand out from the crowd all that much. In fact Americans are probably more likely to form identifiable ‘target clusters’ in the rural communities around the US bases in the UK.
It was a terrible atrocity but we have seen it all before in London at the hands of the IRA, so please, telling US service personnel to avoid London is foolish and plays to the often held stereotype of Americans as easily scared by such incidents. Methinks USAF people are made of sterner stuff and more than capable of assessing the risks for themselves.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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