The
UN’s War on Internet Freedom Isn’t Over
The
Internet is one of the greatest mechanisms of progress in
the history of the world. More than one billion people use
it; anyone with a computer and a connection has access to
167 million megabytes of information that are instantly
available. Ideas and information can be shared, explained,
tested and improved upon. Because of the Internet, governments,
economies, institutions and individuals can and do prosper.
But
the availability of such information threatens a great many
despotic nations which do not believe individuals should
have access to information that may be damaging to their
governmental societies. The regimes in China, Cuba, Iran, Syria and Tunisia, for example, believe Internet content must be controlled
so that individuals do not have access to any information
that has not been approved by their governments. In China the word "democracy" is not allowed on the
Internet; it is just too dangerous to the communist government.
And so such nations want international controls on Internet
usages and content.
Today
no organization or government controls the Internet. The
mechanics of participation ― domain names, suffixes
like .com and .org, and technical codes ― are supervised
by the independent organization Icann,
an acronym for Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers,
based in America and loosely overseen by the U.S. government. Much of the rest of the world, gathered
last week in Tunisia for the U.N.-hosted World Summit on
the Information Society, wants to take over that responsibility,
or as European Union spokesman Martin Selmayr
put it, the U.S. must "give up their unilateral control
and everything will be fine." Perhaps as fine as it
is in China, where, according to the New York Times, "major
search engines... must stop posting their own commentary
articles and instead make available only pieces generated
by government-controlled newspapers and news agencies."
Old
Europe and the despotic nations want exactly that ―
international Internet content control. And they
have convinced the EU establishment that U.N. control of
the Internet would be just and appropriate. The last United
Nations World Summit on the Internet ― held in 2003
― concluded that "governments should intervene...
to maximize economic and social benefits and serve national
priorities." The report of the U.N. Working Group on
Internet Governance says it would have "respect for
cultural and linguistic diversity, " explaining that
meant "multilingual, diverse, and culturally appropriate
content" on the Internet.
And
what is "culturally appropriate" content? If your
nation is a free society ― America, Ireland, Australia ― a free and unregulated-content Internet is
a good thing. For dictatorships and state controlled societies
― the former USSR, China or Cuba ― it is a catastrophe, for allowing citizens
free access to information puts your government at risk.
And if you are in between ― a socialist government
like France or Germany ― U.N. control is a good thing because government
control is always better than unregulated
markets.
The
good news is that last Wednesday U.N. and U.S. representatives in Tunis agreed upon, and the World
Summit then adopted, a process that at least for the moment
avoids U.N. control of the Internet. It created an Internet
Governance Forum that allows current Icann operational mechanisms to continue, has no regulatory
power, and will begin meeting in 2006 to consider all aspects
of Internet governance.
But
the war against Internet freedom is far from over; Mr. Annan
again demands international discussions of "Internet
governance issues" and says that change has become
necessary regarding Icann Internet
oversight. So first the U.N. and the E.U.
will seek Internet content control, and then perhaps the
old U.N. idea of applying an international tax on e-mail
messages.
Pete Du Pont
Opinion Journal
http://www.opinionjournal.com/
columnists/pdupont/?id=110007578
--
Only
Encouraging Them
Generous
people give money to colleges without restrictions. The
money gets misused.
Many
research organizations, including the Intercollegiate Studies
Institute and the National Association of Scholars, have
documented the elimination of the traditional core curriculum
at most of our leading universities. We can no longer assume
that college graduates possess even a rudimentary knowledge
of history, for instance, or that they understand basic
concepts like federalism or the separation of powers or,
indeed, that they know about the
ideas and events that have shaped our institutions. All
this great wealth, donated with the best of intentions,
appears to have had the perverse effect of liberating academic
institutions to do a less than admirable job of educating
the young.
And
what do the young learn when they do learn? Entrepreneurs
may give generously, but college faculties are today awash
in antibusiness and anti-free-market
prejudices, with scholarly publications beating the drum
against globalization and the supposed depredations of capitalism.
Not many faculty members would agree precisely with Ward
Churchill, the University of Colorado professor who said
that the victims of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade
Center deserved their fate because they were working on
behalf of the capitalist system. But, terrorism aside, his
low opinion of America's economic system does not wildly diverge from that
of professors everywhere. Meanwhile the diversity ideology
so common on campuses today holds that the history of the
U.S. is primarily one of exclusion and oppression, another
Ward Churchillian theme.
All
this is roughly quantifiable. A recent national survey of
college faculty showed that 72% of professors held liberal
and left-of-center views, while just 15% held conservative
ones. This imbalance, surveys show, has grown worse since
the early 1980s. It is a strange paradox indeed that academic
opinion should have moved so far to the left in a period
of unprecedented wealth and prosperity for colleges and
universities themselves ― let alone in a period of
capitalism's triumph and communism's defeat…
Here
is where the charitable giving comes in. These trends have
taken hold in academia in part because too many donors have
failed to exercise appropriate care when signing over their
funds…
Donors
are often unaware that they are entitled to set aside their
money for purposes of their own choosing, not just established
categories.
James Piereson
http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110007567
--
Manners
and Virtue in a Modern World
[George
Will discusses Lynn Truss’s latest trumpet-blast of a book,
Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World
Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door.
Her previous wail of despair was Eats,
Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation]
Good
punctuation, she says, is analogous to good manners because
it treats readers with respect. "All the important
rules," she writes, "surely boil down to one:
remember you are with
other people; show some consideration."
Manners, which have been called "quotidian ethics,"
arise from real or ― this, too, is important in lubricating
social frictions ― feigned empathy.
"People,"
says Truss, "are happier when they have some idea of
where they stand and what the rules are." But today's
entitlement mentality, which is both a cause and a consequence
of the welfare state, manifests itself in the attitude that
it is all right to do whatever one has a right to do. Which
is why acrimony has enveloped a coffee shop on Chicago's
affluent North Side, where the proprietor posted a notice
that children must "behave and use their indoor voices."
The proprietor, battling what he calls an "epidemic"
of anti-social behavior, told The New York Times
that parents protesting his notice
"have a very strong sense of entitlement."
A
thoroughly modern parent, believing that children must be
protected from feelings injurious to self-esteem says: "Johnny,
the fact that you did something bad does not mean you are
bad for doing it." We have, Truss thinks, "created
people who will not stand to be corrected in any way."
Furthermore,
it is a brave, or foolhardy, man who shows traditional manners
toward women. In today's world of "hair-trigger sensitivity,"
to open a door for a woman is to play what Truss calls Gallantry
Russian Roulette: You risk a high-decibel lecture on gender
politics.
One
writer on manners has argued that a nation's greatness is
measured not only by obedience of laws but also by "obedience
to the unenforceable."
George Will
Townhall
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/
columns/georgewill/2005/11/20/176220.html
