UN beachside conferencing goes way beyond plans for a December blowout on Bali, and the UN agenda goes way beyond taxing us in the name of controlling the weather. Live, right now, the UN is continuing its grab to control the internet, with a Nov. 12-15 conference in Rio de Janeiro (beach facilities shown in accompanying photo).
Big on the agenda is the UN-based campaign to take away control of the internet from the U.S. The aim, now that U.S. freedoms and resulting creativity (not Al Gore, his own claims notwithstanding) have brought mankind this marvelous gift of the internet, is to confiscate management of the World Wide Web and turn it over to the same grand conclave of UN potentates whose members include the web-censoring likes of dissident-jailing China, monk-murdering Burma, terrorist-sponsoring bomb-making Iran, and 2008 members-elect of the Security Council, Libya and Vietnam.
This current pow-wow in Brazil is the work of the UN-based Internet Governance Forum (IGF), which — with a secretariat now entrenched in an office at the UN’s palatial (BMW-rich) complex in Geneva — has been following up on the UN’s second World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). That internet summit, as you might recall, was held in November, 2005 in internet-censoring Tunisia — initial sponsor in 1998 of this UN bid to cash in on the web.
The current Rio proceedings, bankrolled by yet another of those murky special UN extra-budgetary trust funds, boasting more than 1,000 participants, and complete with a UN media team, are being broadcast live at this link. I tuned in Sunday afternoon long enough to hear one of the speakers, Mr. Fernandez Gonzalez, declaring — a familiar theme at UN conclaves — that the market model of development is a “disaster,” that what’s needed is an internet managed under the UN tent as yet another global redistribution scheme, etc etc etc. That would be the same despot-packed, unreformed, opaque and unaccountable UN that won’t disclose details of its own getting and spending, and has failed abysmally to reform its own dysfunctional and unjust internal “justice” system, while operating across borders, outside any normal system of law.
Coming up next on the UN IGF internet-grab agenda, complete with per diems for the UN support staff and power plays for the despotic governments of the planet: a 2008 meeting in India, 2009 in Egypt… and beyond. Enjoy the freedom of the internet while we’ve still got it.
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