On the first full day of Julian Assange’s release from imprisonment, we now learn that some members of the United Nations want to introduce some sort of worldwide Internet regulation. That’s nice. But don’t worry: this isn’t a “takeover,” or anything scary like that. It’s simply to ensure that we never see something like Wikileaks ever again. A bit late for that, no?
All of this went down on Wednesday, with Brazil’s UN delegation proposing “global standards” that would, in effect, regulate the Internet.
The proposal in the obtuse verbiage of the UN would:
convene open and inclusive consultations involving all Member States and all other stakeholders with a view to assisting the process towards enhanced cooperation in order to enable Governments on an equal footing to carry out their roles and responsibilities in respect of international public policy issues pertaining to the Internet but not of the day-to-day technical and operational matters that do not impact upon those issues.
I seem to recall Brazil throwing up another Internet-related stink a few years ago vis-à-vis the .xxx top-level domain. A sort of, “We can’t have a dot x x x because that will encourage the proliferation of pornography.”
As if the Internet isn’t already swarming with pornography.
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All of this, of course, is related to Wikileaks, and we all know what they did: expose the truth. Can’t have that, now can we?
We’re all old cowboys in the Wild West, and we can see a train approaching in the distance. “What’s that thing, an iron horse? Eh, I’m sure my way of life won’t be affected one bit.” (Yes, that’s a Ron Bennington line.)
Sure it won’t.
It’s going to be fun in the future telling kids that we remember a time when you didn’t have to get a license to use the Internet, or that anyone and everyone was allowed to communicate online, even if they were anti-social miscreants.
