Keeping The Internet Open For Everyone

It appears the UN hasn't given up on the idea that the US should give up control over the Internet and hand it over to them. This is such a bad idea that I have no idea where to start listing my objections. I don't know about you, but I trust the US to keep the Internet far more than I'd ever trust that bunch of thieves at the UN. Too many members of the UN would love to get control of the Internet in order to rein in the open nature of the 'net and restrict the freedom it represents.

Some out there may think it's time for the US to relinquish its hold on the Internet because of its international reach. I disagree, if for no other reason than we invented it.

I'm not the only one who believes we should not turn over domain control to the UN. So does Fred Thompson.

More than 1.4 billion people around the world seem to be emailing each other a lot, and those emails get delivered a lot faster and more reliably than “snail mail.” Lots of people are innovating around the Internet – voice calling over the Internet, e-commerce, blogs, education, employment, and healthcare services, music and video streaming and downloads, and such – and lots and lots of people are profiting from those innovations and the websites and companies that operate online.

Despite what Al Gore may think, the Internet was an invention of the U.S. government and a number of universities and other entities a couple decades ago. As the Internet became what it is today, the government created a nonprofit organization, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, to manage what was then a growing network of networks. Today ICANN does things like manage the assignment of Web sites domain names – the .coms, .orgs, .edus – for example.

But countries like China aren’t happy about U.S. control of “the tubes.” They’d rather have the U.N. run it. I wonder how the U.N. would’ve handled the situation in Burma recently when the government cut off all Internet access to all anti-government protesters, or how it would’ve handled the imprisonment in China of dissidents and reporters who emailed news out of the country.

The notion of surrendering management of the Internet – a global, strategic infrastructure for communications and commerce – to the UN is just a plain dumb idea. We shouldn’t be handing over something that works right to an institution that has difficulty doing anything right.

We'd all be better off if management of the Internet stayed in our hands.