Skip to main content

UN challenges freedom of the internet

We freely use the internet and access to its use is now fairly widespread - for good and bad!  

A number of groups are now taking on the UN which is threatening to, in effect, take control of the internet.

"Trade unions, Greenpeace and communications corporations including Google on Monday launched a campaign to stop a proposal before the United Nations that would give the UN control of the internet.

"Stop the Net Grab" opposes the plan by some telecommunications companies and countries including China and Saudi Arabia. If approved, it would allow the UN's International Telecommunications Union to charge users for services such as email and restrict access to the internet and monitor activity online.

The International Trades Union Conference, representing 6.2 million union members in Britain, wrote that the proposal could "restrict political freedoms and harm civil society." Such changes would hit users from developing countries particularly hard, according to the ITUC.

"Unless we act now, our right to freely communicate and share information could change forever," ITUC general secretary Sharan Burrow told Australia's News Limited Network (ANLN). The ITUC represents 6.2 million union members in Britain.

If the plan is accepted, according to ANLN, "the changes would allow government restriction or blocking of information disseminated via the internet and create a global regime of monitoring internet communications—including the demand that those who send and receive information identify themselves." It would also allow governments to shut down the internet "if there is the belief that it may interfere in the internal affairs of other states or that information of a sensitive nature should be shared."




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Pentagon's eye-popping spending....and waste!

Only a gigantic bureaucracy could get away with spending of such dimensions - and the amazing waste involved in part of that ginormous spend.   Think US Pentagon..... "From spending $150 million on private villas for a handful of personnel in Afghanistan to blowing $2.7 billion on an air surveillance balloon that doesn’t work, the latest revelations of waste at the Pentagon are just the most recent howlers in a long line of similar stories stretching back at least five decades.  Other hot-off-the-presses examples would include the Army’s purchase of helicopter gears worth $500 each for $8,000 each and the accumulation of billions of dollars' worth of weapons components that will never be used. And then there’s the one that would have to be everyone’s favorite Pentagon waste story: the spending of $50,000 to investigate the bomb-detecting capabilities of African elephants. (And here’s a shock: they didn’t turn out to be that great!) The elephant research, of course, represe...
Post a Comment
Read more

Video: Israel demolishing a Bedouin village

From Mondoweiss - Israel's supposed "most moral army in the world", the IDF, engaged in immoral, and according to international law, illegal action.... "Israeli forces have demolished every home in the Bedouin village of Khirbet Taha in the northern West Bank district of Nablus during three separate demolitions since the start of the year. Unlike most Bedouin villages, the residents in Khirbet Taha own their own land. However that land falls in Area C, territory in the occupied West Bank under full Israeli control. The village’s only school was also destroyed, leaving children to study in a dilapidated 100-year-old mosque — the only structure left standing in the village. According the United Nations, Israel has demolished half as many Palestinian buildings in the first few months of 2016, as they had in all of 2015. In February alone, the UN found that more Palestinians homes were destroyed than any other month since 2009, when the organization began its docum...
Post a Comment
Read more

What does a no-fly zone actually mean?

As some countries consider imposing a no-fly zone in relation to Libya, the pertinent question must be what does that mean and entail? FP provides the answers: "It depends on the circumstances. There are two primary types of no-fly zones imposed by air forces. The first is imposed by one military over another, while the two sides are at war. In practice, this type of no-fly zone amounts to a warning from one side that it will engage the other's aircraft if they are spotted in a given territory. The second type, more applicable to the situation in Libya, is when an outside power possessing overwhelming air superiority restricts flights over a given country in order to discourage an internal conflict or humanitarian crisis. This is a relatively recent tactic, which was used most famously in Bosnia and Iraq during the 1990s. No-fly zones are often a compromise in situations where the international community is demanding a response to ongoing violence, but full military interven...
6 comments
Read more