UN Wants One World Internet

File this under "What are they, crazy?"

The people who brought you the oil-for-food scandal now want to get their hands on the Internet. On Tuesday, a U.N. organization called the Working Group on Internet Governance proposed that the United Nations take control of regulating the Internet's inner workings. Apparently, U.N. leaders think their failures in global security and humanitarianism qualify them to regulate the engine of the high-tech industry.

The U.N. group -- which is a team of bureaucrats from, among other places, Cuba, Tunisia and Iran -- envisions taking control of such Internet functions as registering domain names, settling disputes, conducting arbitration and fighting cybercrime. Currently, a U.S.-based nonprofit called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, handles basic registration functions. Traditional law enforcement bodies handle the rest. The United Nations would like to wrest all this from ICANN and governments because it thinks it is more inclusive and more transparent than the people who currently run the Internet. In all but one of its proposals, the U.N. envisions itself setting "international Internet public policy."

Somewhere along the way the United Nations forgot to invite Silicon Valley. Its 40-member working group boasts not a single executive of a major technology company. It invited such "experts" on the Internet as Peiman Seadat from Iran's U.N. mission in Geneva; Juan Fernandez, head of Cuba's Commission of Electronic Commerce; Faryel Beji, president and CEO of the Tunisian Internet Agency; Baher Esmat, a telecom planner for the government of Egypt; and assorted other bureaucrats from Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Korea, Singapore and a few dozen other countries. (source)

Let's see. Their tsunami relief project is leaving warehouses full of relief supplies undelivered. Their programs for Africa have contributed significantly in the deaths of millions and the continued economic depression of that continent. And their effort to use oil revenues to provide relief to Iraqis turned out to be the largest scandal in history.

So why not give them the Internet?

h/t Paragraph Farmer