The organizers of the Internet Summit in Geneva have had Dr. Paul
Twomey, the president of ICANN (the organization that’s chartered to
administer the international domain-name system), ejected by security
guards after he’d flown twenty hours to participate in the
meeting.
I was not especially surprised. The organizers of the Geneva
summit seem to be very much the same scum of the planet that one
normally finds running these U.N. events — third-string
diplomatic timeservers, addle-brained NGO moonbats, a scattering of
celebrity Eurotrash, and a legion of gray apparatchiks from
authoritarian Third World pestholes. It didn’t astonish me that
they’d use force to keep out anyone who might interfere with their
plans for a government-friendly, politically-correct, censored, and
very thoroughly controlled Internet.
No, the really surprising part is that I found myself sympathizing
with Dr. Twomey. ICANN’s performance, while not the unmitigated
disaster many of its critics like to portray, has not been glorious.
Way too many deals have been done in back rooms and the organization has
been far too kind to expansive trademark claims and other sorts of
corporate land-grab.
Perhaps the one salutary effect of the Geneva summit is to remind us
that things could easily be worse — and almost certainly will be, if
the U.N. gets control.