I came upon some rare spare time and found this:
cookreport.com
An Excerpt:
The danger of ICANN, of course, is an 'internationally' governed Internet - meaning the regulation of everything from IP names to 'permissible' content, who can be an ISP, who can put up Web Sites (be licensed, with fee), who can even POINT one web site to another (one foreign court just ruled it is illegal for a web site to even post a hyperlink pointing towards a web site owned by Scientology, a step far beyond citing them for publishing their content). i.e. we seem headed for an Internet which is government controlled, without freedom of electronic speech, and run to the satisfaction of the largest corporations for their benefit, not yours. Under such an Internet we will likely see the imposition of "standards" in a way to deliberately inhibit the introduction of new technologies in order to allow those with the vested interests to amortize their installed plant investments over the longest possible period at the expense of the newer technology companies and the general public.
ICANN aims at nothing less than becoming an Internet United Nations, a Treaty-bound organization, where the US government would be bound by 'its' rules, arrived at by votes of other countries, with taxing authority (ICANN wants every DNS domain name taxed $1 a year to pay its expenses). So can McCain help stop this train rushing down the track?"
My question: how much of this is real and how much is paranoid anti-one-world-government rambling? Should we as individual citizens and shareholders of companies that stand to benefit from a free and mushrooming internet be concerned? |
