The Washington Times is featuring a story that appeared on The Hill regarding “UN Regulation of the Internet”<\/p>\n
http:\/\/times247.com\/articles\/house-scrutinizes-u-n-plan-to-seize-more-control-of-internet<\/a><\/p>\n This story is EXTREMELY misleading with the associated comments taking the bait.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The story indicates that the UN wants to have a vote to empower the ITU get involved in international issues regarding the Internet.<\/p>\n The ITU was created in 1865<\/strong> when countries realized that it was in everyone’s interest to standardize how Morse Code was used – punctuation, abbreviations, methods of transmission, how telegraph lines were operated, etc…\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 When the radio telegraph came into use, in 1906 they then had to deal with resolving disputes over competing companies and technologies for sending messages wirelessly. \u00a0 The names Hertz, Tesla, Marconi figure large in the history of Wireless Telegraphy<\/a> which would in turn evolve into disputes over the patents on carrier based radio (AM).<\/p>\n The ITU was involved in the 1920s in laying down the international standards regarding AM radio – what frequencies would be used, how countries would protect their stations from interference from other countries.\u00a0\u00a0 Unfortunately, the US and the rest of the world had already created different standards – with the US having 10 kHz spacing of stations and the rest of the world standardizing on 9 kHz spacing.<\/p>\n As technology evolved, the ITU has been involved in almost everything you use – telephone systems, fax machines cell phones, cable modems, satellite communications, the infrastructure that carries the Internet traffic.\u00a0 It’s not an accident that you can send a fax to a person in Europe and it works.<\/p>\n When the United Nations was founded in 1947, one of the first things it did was announce that the ITU was in charge of International Telecommunications policy and those issues were NOT within the scope of things the United Nations was going to become involved.<\/p>\n So having the United Nations say “The ITU is in charge of issues related to the Internet” is taking those issues “off the table” for the United Nations and putting them in the hands of a largely apolitical organization that is not controlled by the United States (the real reason The Hill thinks this is a “bad thing”)<\/p>\n When the US Government starts doing things like proposing that the RIAA and its allies should have unilateral power to push web sites or entire countries off the internet, it just feeds into the hands of people who believe the Internet is too important to be trusted in the hands of Barack Obama (who also opposes this action)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Washington Times is featuring a story that appeared on The Hill regarding “UN Regulation of the Internet” http:\/\/times247.com\/articles\/house-scrutinizes-u-n-plan-to-seize-more-control-of-internet This story is EXTREMELY misleading with the associated comments taking the bait.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The story indicates that the UN wants to have … Continue reading