Hands-off the Internet order needed for Kofi and Company 
By Judi McLeod & David Hawkins
November 14, 2005
Canada Free Press 
Original Source: http://www.canadafreepress.com/2005/cover111405h.htm

Like the human ghouls that sometimes surround the deathbed of a rich relative, the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) gets underway in Tunisia this week.
Strategies to bridge the digital divide and harness information and communication technologies will top agenda parlay.
Why is it that the politics conducted by the world’s largest bureaucracy always sounds so benign and even noble in the beginning of the story?
Take away the hype and the UN Tunisia summit is really all about control of the Internet.
Armed with the argument that the United States of America has too much control over the Internet, countries such as Communist China and Cuba, along with Brazil and Iran, will press the case for a more `international’ Internet. Nations like Libya and ironically, Rwanda, want the UN to have more participation in the Internet.
The U.S. worries that either methods will politicalize and bureaucratize the Internet, and that the politicalization of the Internet is its ultimate ruin.
According to the UN, world leaders feel that the United States plays too large a role in overseeing the operation of the Internet.
When the battle is all over and control of the Internet changes hands, the smooth-talking Kofi Annan, will throw up his hands and say, I didn’t do it.
As passionately as he maintains his innocence in the Oil-for-Food scandal, Annan insists that the UN does not want to run the Internet.
One mistaken notion is that the UN wants to `take over’, or police or otherwise control the Internet, Annan wrote in an editorial in the Washington Post last week. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The United Nations only wants to ensure the Internet’s global reach, and that effort is at the heart of this summit.
Standing in grand testimony to all the only wants of the United Nations is its ever sprawling Manhattan towers on the original site of an animal abattoir and cramped-quarter satellites the world over.
To understand the UN and the Internet, let’s take a look at how the UN got hooked up to the Internet.
Through the Tides Foundation back in the early 1990s, Teresa Heinz (Mrs. John Kerry) gave the United Nations a massive, 24-hour, transnational electronic network, the Institute for Global Communication (IGC). Incredibly, IGC and its offshoot, the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) are divisions of the 501c, non-profit charitable institutions in the U.S., funded by Heinz-Kerry, currency speculator George Soros, journalist Bill Moyers and the Ford Foundation.
The UN has been politicking on the Internet ever since, and you can depend it is not the little guy picking his way on a PC somewhere in a remote African village, but the Mikhail Gorbachevs and Maurice Strongs who get picked up and promoted by the Internet giant known as the UN.
Guess Kofi didn’t know all that. 
The Internet is now under the control of a non-governmental organization with the unlikely name of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). ICANN was established by the United States in 1998 to take over the activities that had been performed for 30 years by professor Jon Postel in California. 
ICANN manages the current domain-registration system, which means it decides who gets Web addresses ending in .com, .net, as well as which governmental entities operate national country-code suffixes, such as .uk for Great Britain.
Life is no picnic for ICANN, which also operates the up-to12 digit Internet Protocol that every computer needs in order to be recognized by others on the Internet. Since only about 4 billion IP numbers can currently be accommodated, it has to make sure there’s no duplication.
If you’ve ever pondered where all your SPAM is coming from, people in the know at ICANN say the Internet is in use by over 1 billion people.
In coming months, the coveteous will have to be reminded that the Internet was developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s by the same source the lib-left like to demonize, the U.S. military. The military pulled it off with the help of American universities under the auspices of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
It’s really thanks to the DARPA that you get to keep in touch with your grandchildren in Australia.
Unfortunately, when ICANN went out on the public market to try to privatize and find self-government three years ago, it was a failed mission, so Uncle Sam decided to hold onto it for a little longer. ICANN is currently under the wing of the U.S. Department of Commerce--but the contract holding it there expires next year.
At this week’s WSIS summit, countries such as Brazil, China, Cuba and Iran are expected to call for the creation of an international body to govern the Internet. An even worse scenario is what countries like Libya and Rwanda are looking for: More UN participation in ICANN.
Even the tough on U.S. administration New York Times has argued that it’s in everybody’s best interest for ICANN to continue its role under the supervision of the United States.
For all of the little people of the world now hooked on that wonderful resource called the Internet, let’s hope the information highway is never handed over to the power-grabbing, land grabbing, waterway and air-grabbing, bloated, corrupt and largely dysfunctional United Nations.
If the UN’s long-touted godless one-world religion hasn’t coopted you yet, say a prayer.
If you believe more in the goodness of the homo sapien than you do a supreme being, start looking for Lady Luck. 
An Internet under the control of the United Nations will be one that will be out of access to all the little people who inhabit Mother Earth.