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

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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

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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