What Do You Think?

[John.hergy]

copied from:

http://www.jihadwatch.org/2010/12/geller-islamic-supremacists-envision-a-takeover-of-the-internet.html


Islamic Supremacists Envision a Takeover of the Internet

In "Islamic Supremacists Envision a Takeover of the Internet" in the American Thinker, December 28, Pamela Geller discusses yet another Islamic supremacist initiative:

It was hardly noticed at the time, but its consequences could be catastrophic. Late last September, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which assigns internet domain names, approved a huge change in the way it operates. Europe and North America will now have five seats on its Board of Directors, instead of ten, and a new "Arab States" region will have five seats as well.
How big a deal is this? ICANN at the same time took a reference to "terrorism" out of its Draft Applicant Guidebook. Why? Because Arab groups complained. And so now jihad terror websites can grow and prosper, as ICANN has removed its own ability to police them.

This has been a long time coming.

Back in October 2009, I warned of a seismic transformation in internet regulation and free speech. Under the transnational-happy Obama administration, the U.S. relinquished control of the net at that time. ICANN ended its agreement with the U.S. government.

If not America, who? Now we know the answer to that. The new agreement gave other countries (including dictatorships and rogue nations) and the U.N. the ability to set internet use policies. At the time, I wrote, "[W]atch for Sharia law to find its way into this."

Well, that didn't take long. The ICANN action in September gave the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) and other unfriendly nations a prominent internet role -- something they never could get during the administration of George W. Bush.

News analyst Daniel Greenfield explains:

The OIC has already effectively used the UN to push its censorship agenda. But the UN is virtually toothless when it comes to the United States. However if the Muslim world can dominate ICANN the way it dominates the UN General Assembly, then free speech on the internet is dead.

In practice, the new arrangement makes it much easier for Muslim countries to dictate what stays on the internet and what doesn't. The removal of the material about "terrorism" was just muscle-flexing; there is much more of that kind of censorship coming. If this stands, anti-jihad sites like my own site AtlasShrugs.com and the JihadWatch.org site run by my colleague Robert Spencer will likely lose their domain names. It will become harder and harder to find the truth about jihad activity, or any resistance to it, on the internet or anywhere else....

[troach]

This is actually scary at many levels.

Not only does it give them a major say in who stays on the net and who doesn’t. I also gives them access to major hubs so that they can monitor what is being said (or done) by anyone that is online. It also would give their groups a lot more anonymity as they would not be required/not enforced to give exact location information.