The End Of Free Speech On The Internet

Investor’s Business Daily reported yesterday on the plan to hand control of the internet over to the United Nations. That’s the same United Nations that includes a voting bloc of fifty-seven Muslim nations (Organization of Islamic Cooperation-OIC) that has been attempting to alter the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to make it a crime to criticize Islam. Can you imagine what speech laws the United Nations could come up with if they had control of the internet?

The article reports:

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), part of the Commerce Department, has given its stamp of approval to transfer oversight to a little-known, but mighty, Los Angeles-based private nonprofit group called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN.

…The internet is one of the few places where, with some notable exceptions, free speech still reigns supreme. If some of the rest of that “multistakeholder community” doesn’t like that, what’s to keep it from exerting enormous pressure on ICANN to regulate away free exchange on the internet?

To keep this from happening, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (You wondered what he was up to since he stopped his campaign? Now you know.) and Wisconsin Sen. Sean Duffy have introduced a bill to halt transferring the internet domain name system away from the U.S. government unless Congress explicitly authorizes it.

There is also the matter of fees.

The article further reports:

Nor is this solely about freedom of speech. ICANN already charges fees to users. What happens when it’s free to raise fees with no oversight?

As Rick Manning of Americans For Limited Government noted recently, “nonprofit” ICANN had $219 million in revenue last year. When other countries gain clout, “it is guaranteed that they will seek to grab the pot of gold through a U.N. structure that would more directly benefit them and increase their power.”

Hopefully Ted Cruz’s bill will pass and keep the internet free from speech codes and increased fees.