The WCIT is almost over, and I got an email from avaaz.org regarding a petition to stop the internet from getting censored (again).
If you want to read more:
Proposal for Global Regulation of Web - 9 Dec 2012
Quote:
An unexpected new proposal for international regulation of the internet drew warnings over the weekend of a spread of online censorship and left a global conference on the issue on the edge of collapse.
The deep divisions over treatment of the internet came after a group of Arab states put forward a plan late on Friday that would require countries around the world to explicitly regulate internet companies. The proposal, made at a conference in Dubai to agree a new international telecoms treaty, has also won the backing of Russia and China, along with a group of other countries.
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The articles written at the beginning of the conference talked about this type of development but the quotes sound like they were made by people who spend their time making tin foil hats.
ITU and Google face off at Dubai conference over future of the internet - 3 Dec 2012
Quote:
Vint Cerf, one of the "fathers of the internet" who is now "chief internet evangelist" at Google, has been campaigning against the ITU almost full-time for months, offering a seemingly inarguable combination of the economically and democratically essential open internet, and his winning putdowns.
A lengthy comment piece in the New York Times proclaimed: "The decisions taken in Dubai in December have the potential to put government handcuffs on the Net." The New York Post was rather less measured, quoting Cerf in a piece that began: "If delegates have their way at next week's World Conference on International Telecommunications in Dubai, the man in charge of the Web will be a Soviet-trained apparatchik from Cold War days."
Even Cerf himself appeared to lose his composure last week when he told Reuters: "These persistent attempts are just evidence that this breed of dinosaurs, with their pea-sized brains, hasn't figured out that they are dead yet, because the signal hasn't travelled up their long necks."
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The petition can be found here:
http://www.avaaz.org/en/hands_off_ou...xTXLcb&v=20018