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