Thought this may be of interest, as Ang Peng Hwa was the only (?) Asian
nongovernmental personality who was a member of the WGIG. His article is in
response to an article in Open Source Media by Claudia Rosett, which is also
copied/pasted below Ang's own.
--------
Choose now this day whom to trust
Dr. Peng Hwa Ang
http://osm.org/site/articles/20051204angpenghwa
(Professor Peng Hwa Ang of Nanyang Technical University in Singapore is a member
of the UN Working Group on Internet Governance and attended the recently
concluded World Summit on the Information Society.)
Ms Rosett's piece illustrates the kind of reaction that worries those of us who
consider ourselves centrists and friends of the US in the debate over internet
governance. I hope her views are not those of the informed in the USA, primarily
because they ignore the concerns of Most of the Rest of the World (MRW) and come
across as spin from the Department of Commerce.
The key concern, not mentioned at all in the piece, is this: the US had and
technically still has oversight of the internet's root zone system. What does it
mean in practice? Well, just before the US went to war in Iraq, the domain name
of Iraq-.IQ (or country code Top Level Domain ccTLD) disappeared from
cyberspace. In other words, if Yahoo then had wanted to register its domain name
in Iraq, it could not register Yahoo.com.iq. This was the unspoken fear of MRW
at WSIS: that critical infrastructure and services for an information age laid
on the internet could be shut off if the US, for any reason, decided to do so.
The story of why that happened belongs to the X-Files unless someone like
Seymour Hersh digs it out. The official and public version is that the person
who managed the .IQ ccTLD was jailed for unauthorised sale of computer parts to
Syria and Libya. In other words, the US Government did not shut off the .IQ. It'
s just that the person in charge could not go to office to turn it on. Will we
ever know the real reason?
In October, I gave four presentations to university audiences in the USA, just
before WSIS. In all cases, not a single person objected to the handing over of
the ccTLD from the USA to the country in question. The audience understood the
nub of the problem.
In the Tunis Agenda, that problem is acknowledged in Paragraph 63: "Countries
should not be involved in decisions regarding another country's country-code
Top-Level Domain (ccTLD)."
It is this issue for which oversight over the entire internet was sought.
Defusing this meant defusing the hottest issue at the Summit.
Now, to be fair, many countries, privately, felt that the US was being generous
in sharing the internet with the rest of the world. But once strong statements
from the US Department of Commerce emerged that the US would continue to have
oversight of the internet, there could only be equally strong public pushback.
It is therefore disingenuous to describe what was done at the Summit as an
"internet grab". The US did not have to do an "internet grab" because it already
had the internet in its hands.
Does the choice of Tunis as the site for WSIS reflect a bias towards censorship?
Tunis was chosen because it is regarded as one of the best run Arab countries.
It was Tunisia who spoke on behalf of the Arab countries in putting ICT for
development on the agenda back in 1998. For bringing this to the attention of
the world, Tunis was given the honour of being a host country.
On the UN process. I'm not sure if Ms Rosett understands or does not understand
the process. When she writes: "Thanks to the U.S. just saying no, the UN bid to
get its hands on our keyboards failed." she seems to understand that the UN
usually works by consensus. In this case, that one veto by the US was enough to
stop the agreement from the rest of the world. Consensus works because the one
resister would face pressure on other issues. There is a lot of horse-trading
and lobbying going on to reach agreement.
And so while the US said no to oversight, the US had to agree on other issues it
did not want to give in to earlier, such as agreeing to a forum to discuss
internet governance issues.
It is important to note that the United Nations is not Kofi Annan. Neither is it
10, 20 or 30 countries. It is an institution made up of almost all the countries
on the planet that has done good work on healthcare, education, development etc.
I speak not from the experience of someone in Singapore because the UN is
invisible to many in Singapore, but from talking to others in the region. The
oil-for-food programme, as Mr Annan admits, should not have come under the UN.
But I can understand why it did. Only the UN has the credibility as a
third-party to be acceptable by Most of the Rest of the World (MRW).
That credibility is reflected in the Internet Governance Forum. In the end,
after looking around, MRW decided to park it under the UN Secretary General.
Given the choice-trust the US or trust the UN-unlike Ms Rosett from the USA, MRW
chose the latter.
*His response was to the article of Claudia Rosett posted below on Open Source
Media, where he participated in a blogjam
========
La Rosett: Whose internet is it anyway?
By Claudia Rosett, Pajamas Media Editorial Advisory Board Member
http://osm.org/site/articles/20051130rosettinternet/
(Claudia Rosett is a journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for the Defense
of Democracies.)
Greetings, and a quick tip: Anyone in favor of censorship and internet taxes can
skip the rest of this column.
OK. For those still with me, who probably agree it is not a good idea to have
Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe editing your blog and then charging you for it, it's
time to talk about the great UN internet grab. Thanks to the U.S. just saying
no, the UN bid to get its hands on our keyboards failed this month at the United
Nations Internet conclave in Tunis. But don't drop your guard. The UN will be
back. The pickings are potentially too rich, and the stakes too high, for them
to resist. In case anyone has any doubts, Secretary-General Kofi Annan himself
(about whom you can read more by googling his name together with "Oil-for-Food,"
"Rape-by-Peacekeepers" and "Bribes-for-Procurement") appeared in Tunis to
proclaim that while the U.S. had blocked a UN takeover of the internet this
time, "I think you also acknowledge the need for more international
participation in discussions of Internet governance issues. So let those
discussions continue." Then came Annan's scariest line: "We in the United
Nations will support this process in every way we can."
You can bet your laptop they will. Any institution brazen enough to hold a
"World Summit on the Information Society" in internet-censoring
journalist-jailing Tunisia is obviously ready to try anything to get hold of the
net. This initiative has been bubbling along since Tunisia first proposed it in
1998, and by now there have been enough conferences, theme papers, working
groups and planning sessions so that this UN campaign has put down roots. The
WSIS website is already an empire unto itself, packed with stocktaking
questionnaires, press releases, a photo library and the outpourings of the
Preparatory Committee, abbreviated UN-style as the Prepcom, which sounds like
something out of George Orwell, because it is.
On the WSIS site is a document issued November 18, at the end of the Tunis
summit, containing 40 statements on building an Information Society, and among
these, item number six contains some information that is truly alarming. It
spells out that the delegates in Tunis have 'established a coherent long-term
link between the WSIS process and other relevant major United Nations
Conferences and Summits." The internet grab, in other words, has become part of
the UN grand plan.
And what is that plan? The UN's 1945 founding mandate was to promote peace.
Sometime during the past six decades of dictator-packed voting blocks,
diplomatic privileges, immunities and institutional secrecy, the UN instead got
into the business of promoting mainly itself. At today's UN, that involves the
self-interest of two basic groups, and neither bodes well for the internet.
The first UN group is interested mainly in censorship, though they're also
partial to money where they can get it. That would be the General Assembly, made
up of the UN's 191 member states. Unfortunately, that membership includes dozens
of repressive regimes, such as China, Cuba, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe and
information-summit-hosting Tunisia; in other words, countries whose despots have
a common interest in hating and fearing the kind of freedom the Internet might
offer their subject fellow citizens. Under the guise of taking control of the
net to bring orderly access to all, they hope to acquire control over exactly
who gets what. It is telling that in the list of financial contributions for the
Tunis summit, the third-largest donor state after Japan and Sweden (both
jockeying for influence at the UN) was Saudi Arabia- whose rulers specialize in
banning just about every freedom you can imagine, including free speech.
The second group is the UN Secretariat, which is mainly interested in money,
though they're also partial to censorship when they can get away with it -
which, since they operate with diplomatic immunity, is most of the time.
According to the UN charter, the Secretariat is simply supposed to function as
the administrative arm of the UN, run by a Secretary-General whose job is
basically to manage the shop. But for quite some time the Secretariat has been
evolving into more or less a state unto itself, led by a Secretary-General whose
ambitions-- on the evidence of his various campaigns, programs and proposals
over the past eight years-- tend less toward managing the office than running
the world.
For this, the billions paid in dues and contributions every year by member
states, most substantially by the U.S., are still not ample enough. They also
entail such headaches as having to periodically satisfy members of the U.S.
Congress that the UN actually deserves funding. What the Secretary-General keeps
angling for is a direct global tax base, to collect money directly from you and
me, whether we like it or not. And though the Secretary-General of the moment,
Kofi Annan, has been particularly lively in the pursuit of a global tax base to
call his own, it is not just Annan who fits this description, but a whole bevy
of aides and advisers who inhabit the upper reaches of the UN - many of them,
like Annan, denizens of the place, or its sister multilateral institutions, for
decades.
Of course, there are many areas in which the aims of the repressive regimes and
self-aggrandizing Secretariat come together. The common interest, after all, is
in telling other people what to do. And much in the manner of the Soviet central
planners of the last century, the UN these days has gotten into the business of
expanding its empire on any front left undefended. The UN portfolio of projects
by now includes everything from the world economy to the weather. As you read
this, an estimated 10,000 delegates and observers from 189 countries are meeting
for 10 days in Montreal, Canada, to continue the UN discussions on climate
change. It's possible this meeting alone will generate enough hot air to melt
the polar ice caps. But otherwise, this sort of jamboree has little to do with
science, and everything to do with a UN-based bid to tax rich countries and fund
UN-related climate-change initiatives (though one has to admire the creativity
of UN personnel a few years back in commissioning a study of whether snow lines
were receding at Alpine ski resorts).
The most notorious of the recent UN power grabs was Oil-for-Food, which began as
a limited and somewhat ad hoc relief program, but turned into the biggest scam
in history for the simple reason that the UN tapped right into the oil wells of
Saddam Hussein's UN-sanctioned Iraq - effectively dipping its cup right into the
world oil market. Once that happened, getting relief to the Iraqi people became
a sideshow to doing business with Saddam. The idea was that the UN would
supervise Saddam, ensuring he sold oil only to buy relief goods for the Iraqi
people. For its administrative pains, the UN Secretariat collected 2.2% of the
revenue on every barrel of oil sold by Saddam, totaling $1.4 billion over the
course of the seven year program. Member states that supported Saddam got
lucrative business from him, with the eager but confidential approval of the
Secretariat. What followed was oil-for-fraud, oil-for-palaces, oil-for-weapons,
kickbacks for Saddam, payoffs to businesses and politicians, and, allegedly,
bribes to assorted UN officials surrounding Kofi Annan. None of that was
disclosed to the public at the time, and far too little has been disclosed
since, by this same UN now proposing itself as the keeper of the Internet
information society. We know it today only because President Bush finally put
together a coalition outside the UN, and over UN protest, to topple Saddam --
and in so doing, exposed a lot of dirty laundry, not only Saddam's, but the UN'
s.
Oil-for-Food was the kind of fiasco that should have humbled the UN. But with
the Oil-for-Food scandal high in the headlines, Annan rolled out another
proposal this year that has the potential to be even worse -- unimaginable
though that might seem. This one was his plan for global taxation, in which he
wants the world's wealthiest nations to pledge an automatic .7% of their annual
gross national income for aid - much of that, presumably to be administered by
the UN. Never mind that decades of UN-run aid programs have done more to prop up
and bail out tyrants than to help the impoverished people living under them -
since UN aid is generally funneled through governments, and it is basically
despotic government that keeps people poor. For the UN, the big effect of Annan'
s global tax plan would be to provide a steady gusher of billions straight into
the coffers of the same UN Secretariat that administered Oil-for-Food. That plan
was shot down by the U.S. at Annan's "reform" summit this past September. But it
is only down, not out. That number, the .7%, persists in UN rhetoric. It is the
germ of a plan, and the UN has been playing with similar, smaller, and perhaps
more feasible plans of similar kind. A tax on airlines. A tax on. well, that
brings us back to the internet.
The danger by now is that the UN has two powerfully motivated interest groups,
the censors and the taxers, both gunning for control of the net. And the UN has
already sprouted a bureaucracy, complete with Prepcoms, to organize the next
summit, and the next. The takeover bid failed in Tunis, but with enough time and
persistence, it could very well happen.
So, what's a blogger to do? For people who care about freedom and value the
internet for all the right reasons, the best answer I can see is to fight back
with the best weapon you've got- the truth. It helped air out CBS. Indeed, it is
on blogs that much of the best UN coverage can be found already. We need more.
If it's information the UN wants to talk about, let's start with a lot more
information about the UN itself. Find it, post it, The more daylight, the better
the chance that the UN will have to either shut itself down, or clean up its
act-and back away from the internet.
Just to help kick things off, here are two questions I've been puzzling over,
along with some other members of the press, for a while now. Can anyone out
there find the answers?
1) What happened to Kojo Annan's Mercedes? Or is it Kofi's? (For those not yet
tuned in to the saga of the wayward UN Mercedes Benz, here's some background at
National Review.)
2) This one sounds simple, but it's not. What is the total budget of the UN?
Doo-dads, voluntary contributions, principal organs and wing-dings included?
Here's one place to start, a map of the UN wonderworld.