Starting last Friday, the topic of the ‘RNS Quote of the Day’ has focused in the flawed concept of “The Common Good�. I’m hoping to be able to continue this for the rest of the week because the concept deserves as much derision as one can heap upon it.
Yesterday, I swung by the new ‘Pajamas Media’ for a looksee and found a discussion group that they are calling a ‘BlogJam’. Neat concept; kind of like a comments section but the participants are invited into it and it has to stay on topic.
The participants for this one are Michael Barone of US News & World Report, Perry De Havilland of Samizdata, Franklin Cudjoe of Imani Ghana, Peng Hwa Ang of the UN’s Working Group on Internet Governance and Dan Gillmor.
Today’s topic is titled “Whose internet is it anyway?�, discussing the UN’s want of control over this here internet.
If you get some time, you might want to go take a look, though I will warn you that a couple of the participants will make reading the thing a bit frustrating just by what they say.
Oddly enough, or maybe not so oddly, one of the strongest proponents of the internet staying just the way it is Franklin Cudjoe from Ghana, and has seen first hand what happens when you let a government entity touch personal access to it.
The reason I bring this up and the ‘Quotes of the Day’ together is that the folks who want the UN or some similar entity to take over administering the internet are using ‘The Common Good’ as their basis of reasoning.
Always, always, always keep those folks as far away as possible from anything you care about.
But you already knew that. Go read.
I would second the “not so oddly” comment regarding Mr. Cudjoe’s position. It has been my experience that those most genuinely concerned about tyranny are those who have lived with it and experienced life without it (for example, after emigrating to the US). The biggest proponents of tyranny, aside from those who have the reins, are usually pampered upper-middle-class kids with no knowledge of the world beyond their windows, aside from what they are told by their Chomsky tomes.