The net has been buzzing a bit with talk of the UN trying to hijack to internet. This isn't a new bad idea, it's one that crops up from time to time. This is an example of the excuses given.

China: "We feel that the public policy issue of Internet should be solved jointly by the sovereign states in the U.N. framework...For instance, spam, network security and cyberspace--we should look for an appropriate specialized agency of the United Nations as a competent body."

We have already had a taste of Chinese internet policy in their repression of Google, Yahoo and MSN Spaces demanding censorship of content. But here's a reminder of just what the UN membership is about:

It could be the biggest mass-indoctrination campaign that China has experienced since the Cultural Revolution.

Over the next year, more than 55 million Chinese people will be inculcated with Communist Party ideology in a series of Maoist-style "study sessions" and "self-criticisms." It's believed to be the most ambitious and far-reaching such campaign in China since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976.

Another excuse:

Brazil, responding to ICANN's approval of .xxx domains: "For those that are still wondering what Triple-X means, let's be specific, Mr. Chairman. They are talking about pornography. These are things that go very deep in our values in many of our countries. In my country, Brazil, we are very worried about this kind of decision-making process where they simply decide upon creating such new top-level generic domain names."

Brazilian virtue.

HAVING portrayed itself for so long as owning a monopoly on virtue in political life, the fall from grace of Brazil’s governing, left-wing Workers’ Party (PT) has been spectacular. In the past month, amid mounting allegations of corruption, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has lost a string of his top aides. The latest to step down, on Saturday July 9th, was José Genoino, the PT’s national president. Mr Genoino quit the day after police arrested an aide to his brother (who is also a PT official) at São Paulo’s domestic airport with $100,000 in American dollars stuffed down his underpants and a further 200,000 reais ($85,000) in a suitcase. . .

“Everyone knows where the money comes from,” Mr Jefferson told a congressional panel: state firms, their boards packed with political hacks, sign overly generous contracts with companies run by their cronies, who then distribute the loot as directed by the politicians. . .

More sleaze may yet emerge, and more heads may roll. Questions are being asked about the remarkable growth of a company jointly founded by Luiz Gushiken, the president’s communications chief, who controls big government advertising contracts. Lula’s opponents, and the Brazilian press, are also sniffing around a small company in which one of the president’s children is a partner, which received a 5m reais investment from a privatised phone company. Again, all involved deny wrongdoing. . .

So far, reckons David Fleischer, professor of politics at Brasília University, there is about a 30% chance that Lula will indeed muddle through, a 40% chance of his being so damaged that he ends up losing next year’s presidential election, a 20% probability that he is forced to make way for another PT candidate and just a 10% chance that the president is forced to resign. But the atmosphere is so feverish in the Brazilian capital that any fresh twist in the story could change the odds drastically.

Sounds a lot like the UN. Slogan: It'll be like oil-for-food, only with electrons!

Governments and international orgs like the UN should be kept away from the net. They are the problem not the solution. ICANN has faults but letting governments or the UN have control would be so much worse it's not comparable. Everything the UN touches turns to dung. The net is far too important to be ruined by these wankers.

the Bush administration, which recently announced that it will not hand over control of Internet domain names and addresses to anyone else.

That high-profile snub of the United Nations could presage an international showdown. The possibility of a political flap over what has long been an abstruse Net-governance issue casts a shadow over ICANN's meeting this week in Luxembourg, and will be the topic of a July 28 symposium in Washington, D.C., called "Regime Change on the Internet."

Beyond the usual levers of diplomatic pressure and public kvetching, Brazil and China could choose what amounts to the nuclear option: a fragmented root. That means a new top-level domain would not be approved by ICANN--but would be recognized and used by large portions of the rest of the world. The downside, of course, is that the nuclear option could create a Balkanized Internet where two computers find different Web sites at the same address.

That's bad but no where near as bad as knuckling under to UN terrorist attempts to seize control. That's not what the UN is for and it continues to harm itself by failing to do the things it could do to be useful.

UPDATE:

Here's an example of truly demented advocacy.

Imagine that the United Nations married the Internet. Any matchmaking program would consider them a dream date. After all, they're both (a) supposedly global in scale and (b) fearsomely crippled.

The UN has cumbersome rules, no popular participation, and can't get anything useful done about the darkly rising tide of stateless terror and military adventurism. The UN was invented to "unite nations" rather than people. The Internet unites people, but it's politically illegitimate. Vigilante lawfare outfits like RIAA and MPAA can torment users and ISPs at will. The dominant OS is a hole-riddled monopoly. Its business models collapsed in a welter of stock-kiting corruption. The Net is a lawless mess of cross-border spam and fraud.

Logically, there ought to be some inventive way to cross-breed the grass-rootsy cheapness, energy and immediacy of the Net with the magisterial though cumbersome, crotchety, crooked and opaque United Nations. Then bride and groom would unite their virtues and overcome those gloomy vices gnawing at their vitals. The global worldchanging multitudes could beat back the darkness of the gathering New World Disorder while swiftly improving the cramped lives of the planet's majority in a beneficent orgy of networked interdependence! Wow!

That's not how reality works. It's more likely that the worst of both would dominate the "marriage". We'd end up with a "cumbersome, crotchety, crooked and opaque" net riddled with "Vigilante lawfare outfits" like China and Saudi Arabia. It would be politically illegitimate but not grass-rootsy and cheap.

It is important that the net be kept out of the clutches of governments. Refute the ding bat advocates that fail to grasp reality and long to plunge us back into the old world totalitarian ideal. Superstition ain't the way.