I’ve been meaning to write a piece about the UN’s intentions regarding the Internet for many weeks but just haven’t found the time. Yes, somehow I found the time to write this and this, but doing a Kofi story always seems to take more effort. Anyway, much to my pleasure, purusing my RSS feeds I came across Area 417’s take on it and it sums it up nicely. Area 417 was prompted by a letter Kofi Anan sent to the Washington Post. In it, Anan said the following:

“The United Nations wants only to ensure the Internet’s global reach…”

“…other governments have legitimate public policy and sovereignty concerns, and that efforts to make the governance arrangements more international should continue…”

“…build an open, inclusive information society that enriches and empowers all people.”

Area417 does a good job of responding to his silly statements starting with the fact that the Internet already does have global reach.

The only thing Independent Sources would have added would be a dig at France’s Minitel system. While pretty much every country that was investing (which wasn’t many) in such systems was making them closed, controlled systems. The US system was the one where the government figured out we would all do better by letting the private sector run with it (with the exception of new domains and even that needs to be freed of our governmental interference). So with that lesson learned we’re going to turn the Internet over to the people who brought us “Food for Oil”? Does Kofi have another son he’s trying to get set up for life?

Additional reading: 1 more thing the UN can’t do: Use MS Word and Blowing-up Papa Smurf as weeping children watch

technorati: internet kofi UN

trackbacked at: Mudville

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 5th, 2005 at 11:19 pm by Insider and is filed under Nemesises ... Nemesi?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.