The Summit to Suppress Internet Freedom

The World Summit on the Information Society is holding meetings, the ostensible goal to expand Internet access in developing countries but the real agenda to shift control of the Internet to the U.N. from U.S. dominated organizations. As in all things, the countries united to suppress freedom who are the majority at the United Nations, facilitated by cowardly European eunuchs envious of the U.S., pay lip service to the downtrodden as they devise ways to keep them that way.

South African journalist at the Summit, Brenda Zulu, summed up the stakes: “With censorship we can never get anywhere and the marginalized voices will never be heard.”

Reporters Without Borders, among the many cases it tracks, tells us about cyberdissident Nguyen Vu Binh. Nguyen began his fourth year in Vietnamese prison on September 25. He formerly worked for “The Communist Reviews”, an official communist party publication. Among his sins was involvement in an organization fighting corruption, rampant in the workers’ paradise to enrich its ruling elite, and applying to set up a liberal democratic party, that might actually benefit the downtrodden rather than those wearing the boots.

Reporters Without Borders tells us “the 11 commandments of the Internet in China,” announced on September 25 by the state controlled media. As RSF says, “The Chinese authorities never seem to let up on their desire to regulate the Web and their determination to control information available on it ever more tightly.” The RSF report concludes that these moves to filter the Internet are “a sign that the Internet frightens those in power.”

Constructively fighting back, Reporters Without Frontiers just published its downloadable “Handbook for Bloggers and Cyberdissidents.” Global Voices Online calls it “the first truly useful book [for] people who have views and information that they want to share with the world…if you’re in a country where the government might not like what you’re saying, how to avoid getting in trouble when you by-pass the information gatekeepers.”

The Washington Times’ report on the Handbook reminds us that, “China has acquired the gear and know-how to engage in censorship so effectively from American companies, as for example Cisco Systems Inc. and Yahoo Inc.” And, don’t forget Microsoft and Google’s willing collusion in suppressing freedom of the Internet. Human Rights Watch, blisters the “trend of major American-based companies assisting the Chinese government in its efforts to censor free expression on the Internet,” reminding us “Google has agreed to exclude from a list of links publications that the Chinese government finds objectionable. Microsoft has capitulated to China by sending an error message to Internet users in China who use Microsoft’s search engine to search for the Chinese words for democracy, freedom, human rights, or demonstration, among others.”

As Human Rights Watch correctly observes, “When companies like Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google decide to put profits from their Chinese operations over the free exchange of information, they are helping to kill that dream.”

Carlos Ramos-Mrosovsky and Joseph Barillari have a succinct yet comprehensive report on the Summit to suppress Internet freedom, full of links, “World Wide (Web) Takeover,” at National Review Online.

Ramos-Mrosovsky and Barillari so well describe this Summit’s attempted putsch to further the take over of this bastion of free thought that its entirety and links is a MUST read. Some brief excerpts:

“Only dictators, and, perhaps, the doctrinaire internationalists who so often abet them, stand to gain from placing the Internet under "international" control. If, for example, the U.N. were to control domain names, its component tyrannies would find it much easier to censor and repress. After all, "internet public policy" is subject to interpretation, and it is hard to imagine international bureaucrats resisting — as ICANN and the U.S. largely have — the temptation to politicize their task.”

Another good point made is that, “Surrendering the Internet might also increase America's vulnerability to online security threats. It could be difficult to guard against cyber-terrorism or to pursue terrorists online, if the Internet were under the supervision of a body unsure of what terrorism is, but quite sure that it does not like the United States.”

Ramos-Mrosovsky and Barillari conclude: “Although the Bush administration will not relinquish U.S. oversight of the Internet, a future president may be more willing to make this seemingly small concession to curry favor with internationalist elites or supposed strategic partners. As with the Kyoto Protocol or the International Criminal Court, Washington's refusal to bend to the "international community" over the Internet might be magnified into another gleefully touted example of American arrogance. America's rivals, less constrained by electoral cycles, tend to view foreign policy over the longer term. They are willing to wait. If we are to preserve the Internet as we know it, the Bush administration must take steps to foreclose the possibility of it ever becoming the plaything of dictators.”

The Associated Press reports today that the “U.S. insists on keeping control of Web,” quoting U.S. Ambassador David Gross, the State Department’s coordinator for international communications and information policy, “ The genius of the Internet is that it has been flexible [and] private sector led.”

The AP failed to note, as the International Herald-Tribune does, that Ambassador Gross comment was “an angry reply” to a last-minute, typical European Union weasel proposal, what Gross called “a very shocking and profound change of the EU’s position,” to “create an intergovernmental forum that would set principles for governing the Internet.” Gross said the “EU’s proposal seems to represent an historic shift in the regulatory approach to the Internet from one that is based on private sector leadership to a government, top-down control of the Internet.”

Lover of free enterprise that I am, we must recognize that many U.S. companies have more love of enterprise than freedom.

I’d suggest that legislation be introduced in Congress and backed by the Bush administration that penalizes any U.S. company, like Cisco, Yahoo, Microsoft and Google, from facilitating censorship of the Internet. Like the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), penalizing U.S. companies for participating in the common international contracting corruption far beyond anything even Louisiana politicians can fantasize about, this will not be an easy bill to craft, and it may take years of interpretations and court cases to flesh it out. But the effort is needed and worthwhile. Like FCPA, such a bill will help maintain U.S. corporate standards of conduct in commerce and human rights and through the very weight of the U.S. economy in the world may further them elsewhere. At the very least, we will not be letting Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! or Cisco be defining to the rest of the world that America does not really stand for freedom.