[KLUG Advocacy] Re: [KLUG Members] Should the United Nations run the Internet?

[Adam Williams]

> >http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,104413,00.html
> One of many articles on this topic.

Actually this has been percolating for some time.  I remember reading
snippets about this quite awhile ago.  It seems like the natural
progression to move this now-major conduit of information and commerce
to the world's primary administrative body.

> This is one of those things which sounds good in principle and is likely to
> happen at some point in the future. I suspect that ITU itself may not have
> the technical expertise to do this now.
> A constructive process to go to ITU-administered Internet oversight could be
> executed over a 3-5 year period, IMO.

Sure, anything like this takes a LONG time.

> For those readers who have some philosopical objection to this transition, I

Personally, I agree with the policies of the UN more often than our own
national policies.  So I'd feel better about this than creating some
board of corporate oligarchs to oversee it, as currently exists at ICANN
and other multi-national "regulartory" bodies.

> need merely point out that the radio spectrum has been under general ITU ad-
> ministration since the 1950's, as have other forms of international communi-
> cation. The USA was the first signatory to the agreements that formed the ITU,
> and it has been enthusuastically supported by every US governemnt since. While
> ther have been some cases of adminstration of the EM spectrum that some would
> consider objectionable, readers will find this to be in questions of national 
> juristiction, and is attributable to the FCC (in the USA).

Shocking!

> There is general consesnsus, even among proponents of ITU administration, that
> it is difficult to see how the transition could be done in a very near term.