It shouldn’t come as a surprise. Lefties don’t like the fact that more and more people are spreading common sense and the truth about the world via the Internet. They’ve always looked for ways to rein in or muzzle those who speak/write candidly about politics or the state of society. Now, the United Nations, with the support of such “upstanding members” as Russia, India, Brazil and China, is trying to gain control of the Internet – with disastrous consequences if this goes through. Needless to say that this kind of Internet shaped and controlled by the UN would actually kill the Internet, and with it, most of the technology and convenience we’ve come to take for granted for business as well as in our personal lives.

Here are a few examples of what the UN intends to do:

• Subject cyber security and data privacy to international control;

• Allow foreign phone companies to charge fees for “international” Internet traffic, perhaps even on a “per-click” basis for certain Web destinations, with the goal of generating revenue for state-owned phone companies and government treasuries;

• Impose unprecedented economic regulations such as mandates for rates, terms and conditions for currently unregulated traffic-swapping agreements known as “peering.”

• Establish for the first time ITU dominion over important functions of multi-stakeholder Internet governance entities such as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the nonprofit entity that coordinates the .com and .org Web addresses of the world;

• Subsume under intergovernmental control many functions of the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Society and other multi-stakeholder groups that establish the engineering and technical standards that allow the Internet to work;

• Regulate international mobile roaming rates and practices.

Let’s start from the top.

International control is never a good thing, particularly if such control is exercised by the UN, which has a long track record of siding with and supporting despotic and dictatorial regimes that couldn’t care less about human rights, such as free speech. Canada, for example, is currently in the process of abolishing the infamous Section 13 of the Canada Human Rights Act, the very section that has been used by lefties, and Islamist radicals and terrorists, to gag ordinary Canadians who try hard to instil some common sense in the population at large. That effort would be quickly brought to nought, as a UN-controlled regime would instantly replace it with something much worse and more sinister.

It goes without saying that an Internet controlled by the UN, regardless of whether such control is sold to the international public as a “cybersecurity” measure, would see a lot of websites be taken down – for starters, any site, blog or tweet that dares to criticize the UN, for example. And pro-Israel sites would cease to exist if the anti-Semitic forces calling the shots at the UN got their hands on the big control switch for the Internet.

If you want to shut down the Internet and prevent people from using it as it was intended, go ahead and implement “international traffic fees” to be paid to phone companies around the world. If you sit in Canada and click, say, on the New York Times you might be charged $2 for the privilege, with the money going to an American phone company in this case (as if US phone companies needed any more cash, especially from non-subscribers outside the US).

Obviously, such a measure would kill the Internet right there. No one would visit sites outside one’s country, or even one’s province, as “long-distance charges” would probably apply to any website hosted outside one’s local area code.

Handing control over domain names and extensions to the ITU is also a lousy idea. If you’ve ever purchased a .ca address, you’ll know that the red tape involved in the process is already quite considerable compared to simply snatching up a .com, .net, .org or even .biz address. Now multiply the .ca experience by five hundred, or even a thousand, and you’ll get an idea of how ridiculously difficult it would become to register a .com address for your personal site bearing your name.

It has been pointed out that those measures would result in a balkanization of the Internet, with many countries opting out, if it isn’t destroyed outright. Freedom and prosperity would be threatened, and the world would become paralyzed.

The Obama administration has been asleep at the switch and has thus far failed to appoint a representative for the negotiations. It might be the administration’s stance, perhaps, that it can simply say “No” to any UN and/or ITU control of the Internet, but that still wouldn’t stop the process from going forward – it would move ahead alright, but without the US (which is probably precisely what the usual suspects running the UN gong show want).

We should remember this: an attack of this sort on the Internet is an attack on the Western world, which today depends for its prosperity heavily on global communications, more so than any developing country. Cause the Internet and all related technology to wobble, which would be the least of the consequences, and Western civilization as we know it would come to an end.