[tvwonline]

In principal, as a non-US citizen, why would I want the US to control the internet as opposed to the UN?

This is not a reflection of what is currently being considered at the UN which from what I have read I don't support.

What do other international people think?

[fraserharris]

The US has stronger protections of freedom of speech than (any?) other countries.

"The legal protections of the First Amendment are some of the broadest of any industrialized nation, and remain a critical, and occasionally controversial, component of American jurisprudence."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_the_Unite...

[dhughes]

As a Canadian I bet I have far more Internet freedom than a US citizen does I don't have to fear being flagged as a downloader of movies by media corp swat teams.

I'd say any person in any western nation would think their country is more fair than the others.

I'm not distrustful of the UN I'm not a fan because it's a huge bureaucracy but the US isn't any better, I bet people in the US wouldn't accept Canada being in control of ICANN.

[dlitz]

Free-speech issues aside, there's also the question of whether you want the IAB/IESG/IETF engineers to continue define Internet standards, or whether you want a group of telephone monopoly bureaucrats to take it over.

Let's consider some of the protocols that the ITU has produced: OSI, X.500, X.509, GSM, V.92, etc. The one thing that they all have in common is that they're all orders of magnitude more complex and difficult to implement than they need to be. They're often also covered by a ridiculous number of patents.

The ITU organization doesn't seem to be capable of producing anything that doesn't cost billions of dollars to implement. Just from a purely technical standpoint, the ITU's history does not suggest that putting them in charge would be good for interoperability, competition, or technological progress.

[yk]

Because the US have a rather good track record concerning internet gouvernance. By contrast the main drivers for ITU involvement are gouverments with rather dubious motivations, like Russia.

So as much as I would like to see a more international internet gouvernance, I am afraid that the ITU ( with their "old men with pens" influence) would most likely not do a very good job compared to ICANN and W3C. (And besides, never change a running system ;)

[Turing_Machine]

It's not just the U.S. The E.U. is also unanimously opposed to this. Also Canada, Australia, and numerous other countries.

The countries in favor are regimes like Saudi Arabia, China, and Russia.

[betterunix]

"why would I want the US to control the internet as opposed to the UN?"

UN control of the Internet means that the governments of China, Russia, and numerous other governments that are far worse than the US government would be in a position to influence Internet policy. Some governments want to add a structure of fees to the Internet, so that visiting websites would involve paying every country through which your packets travel. Some want censorship to be built-in, so that their political dissidents cannot simply use VPNs, proxy servers, or Tor to evade national firewalls.

To put it another way, the US government's approach to censorship of the Internet is mostly a combination of rare and costly raids on server rooms, hijacking domain names, and arresting people who download illegal pornography. China's approach is to have tens of thousands of government workers laboring 24 hours per day to identify websites that go too far in contradicting the Communist party's official policies, maintaining an enormous national firewall, and attacking Tor network connections to prevent people from evading the firewall -- and they also raid server rooms and arrest people who possess the wrong information. Do you really want to let China have any sort of power over the Internet?

[mcpie]

I personally feel the US has been doing a rather good job.

I also like that a free and open internet is in the US' interest - the de-facto 'control' over the internet by the US gives it enormous amounts of soft and technological power that they can subtly profit from.

We're basically all locked into the US-paradigm on the internet. That means it's in the US' national interest not to mess with the internet too much - far better to just coast along on the wave you've created yourself.

It also means that Russia and other states are strategically opposed to a free and open internet. Not just for national purposes (censoring speech critical of their autocrats), but also for strategic purposes an open internet is a threat to their international power. They're swimming against the US wave.

So, ideally speaking, yes, everybody should democratically have a say in how to run the internet. Realistically speaking, however, the current situation is a near-optimal solution.

[spindritf]

> why would I want the US to control the internet as opposed to the UN?

That's not the choice here.

Sure, the US already has a lot of control over the Internet because a huge chunk of infrastructure (including large parts of crucial systems like DNS) is under their jurisdiction. But that's not going to change.