Who Will Regulate the Internet in the Future?

I am just relaxing today; but, saw this article from the Wall Street Journal and thought I would pass it on to my dear readers. The summary of it is that the United Nations wants to have control over the internet. The internet was "privatized" (the Department of Defense contracted with companies that it created) in 1995. This was really the event that allowed private citizens to use the internet outside of universities and the government. I was one of those people to immediately use it as a part of my job, I was asked to look into it because nobody knew what it would become. I was one of the first 15 million users.

I have watched how the web has changed and grown and it is pretty amazing. When I first began using it, there was no google and no Yahoo and no search engines, you had to know the address. At first it was mostly just a social thing, businesses had not yet invested in having web pages and then I saw that change. The businesses that were first to adopt the web successfully were frequently porn sites, then the non-porn businesses got involved. By the late 1990s the thing had taken off and you could order pizza on-line.

In the beginning the internet was primarily an American thing. Heck, we built it and we own it. Now the United Nations was to be the government body over it. Why should we allow this? If they don't like how it works, they don't need to use it. They also want to tax the use of the internet. Why should the United Nations be allowed to tax Americans for using the internet that our tax dollars created and paid for?

The organizations that maintain and manage IP addresses and domain names and all the rest are funded by the United States Department of Defense, the NSA and others. Rather than us paying for using it (because we already do pay through our taxes), maybe we should be charging the rest of the world for using it. Anyways, you have to understand what the internet is to understand why we don't need to allow international bodies to tax us and tell us what to do. Here is the article.

Wall Street Journal - The U.N. Threat to Internet Freedom.