Authoritarian regimes throughout the world, including China, Russia, Iran, and the Arab nations, are trying to hijack an obscure UN agency, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), to take over the Internet and give them the power to regulate its content and restrict its usage.
And the mainstream media—with the exception of the
The world’s dictators realized long ago that their power rested, ultimately, on their ability to control the flow of information to their peoples. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, pioneered the “big lie” in assuring the Fuhrer of continuing popular support. Now, facing the challenge of the free flow of information over the Internet, the world’s authoritarian regimes have spent billions trying to censor the flow of information to their citizens.
Reuters explains how China “has developed the world’s most advanced censorship and surveillance system” to police Internet activity in an effort to restrict the information flow to its 485 million Web users.1
The news service notes that “the Chinese model is spreading to other authoritarian regimes. And governments worldwide… are aggressively trying to legislate the Internet.”2
To understand the lengths to which Beijing will go to stop the free flow of information on the Internet, let’s remember that on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square uprising, Chinese censors prevented the search for specific words connected to the massacre of students. Anything to keep things quiet.
Now these dictatorial regimes have hit on a new solution: United Nations regulation and control of the Internet.
Their chosen instrument of control, the ITU, was set up in 1865 to regulate the telegraph and was brought into the United Nations in the modern era. In 1988, the member nations of the ITU adopted International Telecommunication Regulations, which deregulated much of the industry. These days, this quaint nineteenth- century agency stays in business to regulate long-distance phone calls and satellite orbits.
PUTIN FINDS HIS INTERNET COMMISSAR
Then, Russia’s strongman Vladimir Putin had an idea: Use the ITU to regulate the Internet. Stop that pesky free flow of information and data that arms his domestic critics and stop his dissidents from using the Net to communicate their plans to resist his autocracy. He met with the secretary-general of the ITU, Hamadoun Toure, in June 2011. At the meeting “Putin commended a proposal from Toure for ‘establishing international control over the Internet using the monitoring and supervisory capabilities of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).’”3 Turning vocabulary on its head, the Russian ruler said, “if we are going to talk about democratization of international relations, I think a critical sphere is information exchange and global control over such exchange.”4 He did not explain how controlling information would promote “democratization.”
Putin shopped his proposal to his friends in China, who have worked ever since to line up support for crippling the Internet. The deed is to be done at the World Conference on International Telecommunications to be held in Dubai in December 2012. Russia, China, Iran, and others of the world’s worst countries are planning to use the forum to push through a new treaty expanding the powers of the ITU and, through it, their ability to silence the Internet and make it conform to their political agenda and to bring the Internet under the regulatory thumb of the United Nations.
Toure, a native of Mali in Africa, is the ideal person to suit Putin’s objectives. If ever Putin found the right man for the job of controlling the Internet, Toure is it. He studied at the Technical Institute of Electronics and Telecommunication of—get this—Leningrad, receiving a master’s degree in electrical engineering, and a PhD from the Moscow Technical University of Communications and Informatics.5
Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, is, of course, Putin’s original stomping ground. Toure’s Russian educational background may help to explain his receptivity to Putin’s proposals.
And a rebuttable presumption would indicate that Hamadoun Toure was—and perhaps still is—a communist. Born in 1953, he would have been educated in the Soviet Union during the 1970s and early ’80s when the nation was under the rule of Party Secretary Leonid Brezhnev. No glasnost reformer he. Brezhnev kept the USSR under iron communist rule until Mikhail Gorbachev broke open the nation’s politics.
Why would a young man from Mali want to be schooled in Russia? And, more important, why would communist Russia want him? And why would Soviet Russia help him acquire expertise in telecommunications, electronics, and “informatics”? We can only speculate, but the thought is not comforting.
Putin found his man!
And Toure is the person the UN would pick to be its Internet commissar—er, coordinator!
Never mind that the open, deregulated Internet has been the font of global creativity and innovation. Its free speech is politically inconvenient for Russia, China, Iran, and other third world dictatorships. Josh Peterson of the
NEGOTIATIONS ARE SECRET
The negotiators who are drawing up the plan for Internet regulation—including the delegates from the United States—have been keeping their plans top secret as they prepare their proposals for presentation to the Dubai Conference. There all 193 UN member countries will meet to discuss and possibly adopt their proposal. Each nation has one vote and none will have a veto. The
Particularly chilling is the ease with which the UN could assume the power to regulate the Internet. All the would-be regulators need is a majority vote at the Dubai Conference.
The proposal for Internet regulation has been gaining supporters outside of just the group of authoritarian countries that are pushing for its adoption. Brazil and India, for example, have joined Russia and China in backing aspects of the proposal. Together these four nations comprise the BRIC group (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), which is often poised as a counterweight to the power of the US and the European Union. Vinton Cerf commented that “Brazil and India have surprised me with their interest in intervening and vying for control [over the Internet].”9
Otherwise, Cerf noted that support for ITU regulation of the Net came from countries like Syria and Saudi Arabia, “who are threatened by openness and freedom of expression.” He said these countries “are most interested in gaining control [over the Internet] through this treaty.”10 It has not escaped the notice of the dictators and monarchs who rule these countries that the Internet and social media played key roles in the Arab Spring revolutions of recent years.
Under the one-nation, one-vote rules of the ITU, technologically backward and tiny countries can literally force the rest of the world to submit to regulation of the Internet! And don’t discount the very real possibility that Russian and Chinese leaders are working overtime to buy the votes of African, Latin American, Asian, and Oceanian nations. These countries, often with only very small Internet user populations, may have no stake in preserving Internet freedom and may be willing to sell it out for some financial reward (either to their countries or to themselves personally).
And what a welcome move Internet regulation would be for the petty tyrants and strongmen who rule most of Africa! The pesky revolutions and civil wars could be nipped in the bud by Internet controls. How happy they
