spinningthroughaworldinmotion:

Ass bad as SOPA and PIPA were/are. As terrible and unpopular as ACTA is vastly becoming. As secret as the TPP somehow still remains to be… This is far worse than all of them.

For all the talk of SOPA/PIPA/ACTA/TPP, there’s another much bigger threat to “the internet as we know it.” It’s a bunch of countries who are seeking to use the UN’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU) to create a top-down regulatory scheme for the internet. This process began a few months back, but FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell has a pretty good summary of the situation in the WSJ, and why those who believe in internet freedom should be afraid. It is worth noting, of course, that things like ICANN and IETF are far from perfect today, but handing many of their functions over to the ITU with the goal of a pretty broad top-down regulatory plan for the internet is not the solution. McDowell highlights a few of the key points in the plan:

• Subject cyber security and data privacy to international control;
• Allow foreign phone companies to charge fees for “international” Internet traffic, perhaps even on a “per-click” basis for certain Web destinations, with the goal of generating revenue for state-owned phone companies and government treasuries;
• Impose unprecedented economic regulations such as mandates for rates, terms and conditions for currently unregulated traffic-swapping agreements known as “peering.”
• Establish for the first time ITU dominion over important functions of multi-stakeholder Internet governance entities such as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the nonprofit entity that coordinates the .com and .org Web addresses of the world;
• Subsume under intergovernmental control many functions of the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Society and other multi-stakeholder groups that establish the engineering and technical standards that allow the Internet to work;
• Regulate international mobile roaming rates and practices.

One of the things that bothers me the most of those points is the international internet traffic fees. Like a website in the US if you’re one of my foreign friends? Well, I hope you really like it, because it would cost you every time you went there.

Please share this. Please call your representatives and MEPs. Please do something to help stop shit like this. Educate yourselves on the matter, and pass on that education to others.

Holy balls, I actually… have a little hope now. Like that “life may be worth living” or, in the artist’s case, “art may be worth making”, sort of hope.

(via batchix)