[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.

[potatolicious]

As a Canadian your freedom to torrent is probably greater than your American buddies - the legality of downloading is murky, though uploading is most definitely illegal. Last I checked the two largest ISPs in Canada (Rogers and Bell) both throttle file sharing protocols, though my information may be out of date.

But we're not talking about your right to be a pirate, we're talking about something much more fundamental - i.e., freedom of speech.

We're talking about your ability to go online and talk shit about your neighbor, your city councilman, your MP, your Congressman, your Governor General, or your Prime Minister.

As a Canadian myself, I can tell you that the US takes a much stronger stance in favor of freedom of speech than Canada (or really, any Westminster system country today) and has consistently erred on the side of preserving speech moreso than Canadians - to the point where some Canadians consider the US stance to be rather extreme (e.g., malicious but truthful attacks are not consider libel nor defamation).

As far as protections for both political expression as well as creative expression (i.e., the arts) the US is one of the strongest (if not the strongest) in the world - and this is coming from a Canadian who's mostly cynical about American politics.

The claim that the US is the most free (in terms of speech) country in the world isn't just typical pompous American exaggeration, there is a lot of meat behind the claim.

[dhughes]

Yes I agree the US has enshrined freedom of speech Canada not so much it's more an unspoken unofficial agreement.

But I'd say it evens since the US seems to push the limits of prosecution on free speech and Canadian authorities just don't really seem to bother.

As for the incidents of lawsuits mentioned in other comments I can't say I've ever heard of them not that it matters but what I'm saying is it seems rare for anyone to go to that extreme.

[fraserharris]

We Canadians have fewer protections of freedom speech, specifically hate speech (ie: sections of the Criminal Code of Canada, and the Canadian Human Rights Act).

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

[tsotha]

It's not just that you have fewer protections. It's that someone can file a complaint with the local HRC for free and you'll end up spending thousands defending yourself. It's the perfect vehicle for legal harassment.

[miked]

This. Here's a story of two Canadian writers who were forced to spend thousands on defending themselves for engaging in politically incorrect Badthink:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_complaints_against...

[hfsktr]

That link didn't quite work but this seems to be it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_complaints_against...

[fraserharris]

The most abused part of the Canadian Human Rights Act, Section 13, was repealed in August. Alberta Conservative MP Brian Storseth, author of the repeal bill, said this at the time:

"The current human rights code allows too many frivolous cases to proceed against citizens, when the Criminal Code already covers hate speech that could generate harm against an individual or group.

Acts of hate speech are serious crimes that should be investigated by police officers, not civil servants, he said, and the cases should be handled by "real judges and real lawyers," instead of a quasi-judicial body such as the human rights commission."

http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/06/07/tories-repeal-sectio...

[ajross]

Not to step too far into a nationalist spit war, but:

Of all the oddball things to plant that maple leaf of internet freedom on, you picked... downloading illegal[1] copies of movies? Really? That's "freedom" to you guys up north?

[1] Something no one sane disagrees with. Very reasonable arguments can be made about overzealous enforcement, of course, or the lack of acceptable legitimate alternatives. But really: no one thinks that making copies of copyrighted material from anonymous peers on the internet is "OK", even if "everyone" does it.

[ampersandy]

Please, let's not make generalizations about an entire country because of one comment.

[ubernostrum]

Practically every major Western democracy has, or soon will have, roughly equally draconian anti-piracy enforcement, typically in the form of "N Strikes" laws with forced disconnection. Practically every major Western democracy does, or soon will, have ISP-level filtering of sites alleged to infringe copyright.

So copyright enforcement is not an area where it's really possible to take a useful stand.

Other aspects, though, are: consider, say, an internet subject to English libel jurisdiction. Or one subject to some European countries' feelings on religious -- particularly Muslim religious -- content. Or one subject to China's ideas about appropriate political speech.

While there are many things to complain about with respect to the US federal government, and its approach to freedom of speech, it is -- much like democracy is occasionally quipped to be -- the worst, except for all the alternatives.

[ihsw]

As a fellow Canadian you should know that Bill C-30 is gaining support, and there is apparent international pressure[1] from US and UK to pass this legislation.

Just as CALEA continues to be abused in the US against 'downloaders' it will be abused here just as well.

Personally I would prefer Canada continue to maintain its unwillingness to implement these policies and instead wait several years to study the effects of these CALEA-like laws on other nations.

[1]: http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/11/27/canadian-government-...

[Roybatty]

Canada and most of Western Europe doesn't have the protection of freedom of speech that is embedded in the U.S. constitution. In particular, things like "hate speech". I believe Canada has the same insidious problem that many western European countries have where if you "deny" something in public, you can go to jail.

The U.N. would just take this leftist P.C. nonsense an order of magnitude further.

[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.