Battleangel

Looks like it. And the new “Internet Governance Forum” is a mere shadow of what it should have been. Maybe I need a crash course in democracy but last time I checked, practically the whole world vs. America doesn’t require any negotiation.

Wired - Negotiators working late into the night Tuesday shook hands on a deal that creates a new U.N.-sponsored global forum to explore problems like spam and cybercrime, while leaving the United States firmly in control of the internet’s domain name system.

The United States and business groups had opposed the proposals, arguing that multilateral control would compromise the stability of the system, and that the current model has generally worked well. The domain name system is currently administered by the nonprofit Internet Corporation for Assigned names and Numbers, or ICANN, an organization established by the Clinton administration in 1998. It is loosely supervised by the U.S. Commerce Department.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in a press conference Wednesday that the last-minute bargaining doesn’t mean the U.S. won’t face some future challenge to its role in the internet’s operation.

We’ll be back. And if you so much as flinch, or breathe wrong, we’ll be over you like a pack of hyenas on an injured wildebeest.

“The internet lives to innovate another day as a result of our combined efforts here,” says U.S. Assistant Secretary of Commerce Michael Gallagher. The same Gallagher who got involved with the .xxx top-level domain and proved once and for all that the DoC does meddle in the affairs of ICANN and if anything, the U.S. government is an obstacle to innovation. Gee, I thought all Republican smart-asses knew that, with their hollow dogma about small government and all.

For some good old American jingoism and propaganda, here is what the so called non-partisan National Taxpayers Union (working for a smaller government) had to say. It’s doomsday scenario included just about everything except an alien invasion. As for reactions to the compromise, the U.S. isn’t happy with having once again derailed multilateralism. Apparently they want more (Congress: We Keep Internet Control). It figures. That is why you should never compromise with would-be totalitarian states. Their hunger knows no limits.