The UN’s Internet Treaty has suffered a major setback today with the United States, Britain, and Canada all refusing to sign the pact, and several other European nations saying they cannot sign the deal without further discussion.
The treaty had been penned by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a deal which was initially supposed to co-ordinate efforts against spam but eventually ballooned into an effort to impose ITU control over the Internet as a whole.
The nations refusing to sign cited concerns expressed by several Internet experts, including World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, who warned that the treaty could threaten the stability of the Internet and would set the stage for global censorship of it.
The conference chairman Mohammed al-Ghanim says that he believes the majority of the nations involved endorse the treaty, but with most of the Internet’s infrastructure based in the US and Western Europe, the treaty is unlikely to carry much meaning.
I am against censorship . Period .
But ; if we truly believe in democracy shouldn't we stop being obstructionist and allow the majority of the world to vote ?
Alternatively ; we only believe in selective democracy … you know : whenever it is in our interest !!!!
The problem with the internet is that it is American-controlled. It thus peddles the American world view and largely censors out anything which conflicts with that view. Here in Europe, the principal gripes are invasion of privacy and hate speech. European authors often post articles on American websites to get around our fairly strict hate speech laws, for example, taking great care not to repeat the contents of the articles when in Europe. Europe, and in particular the EU, has been trying to get around American control by launching its own satellites and introducing the .eu top domain name. That is probably a better approach than the treaty, whose main fault seems to have been that it tried to go too far too fast. There will no doubt now be further negotiations and a milder treaty will emerge in one or two years. In any event, whole chunks of the interent are out of control and something needs to be done at international level.
That's a pretty Orwellian comment: The problem with the "American-controlled" Internet is that it doesn't take care of Europe's censorship desires?
The internet should be free from any free speach laws.We all should have the right to say anything we belive and give the facts,without being blocked and haveing people taking down anything that does not fit the Main Stream.Antiwar blocks truth all the time,they give good information,but stop you from commenting if it's not MS things you say.