— Published with permission from the John Birch Society —
On Saturday, the United States oversight of the Internet was transferred to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Despite many members of Congress and conservative leaders opposing it, President Obama’s radical proposal still went through. Now there is no turning back from eventually losing free speech online, opening up more national security vulnerabilities and dealing with possible legal ramifications.
Of course, ICANN has the potential to be run by none other than the United Nations communist Chinese agent Houlin Zhao, who claimed that censorship, is in the eye of the beholder. China has already been censoring their part of the Internet since 1996 with a program called the “Great Firewall of China.” This firewall uses censorship that is called the “Golden Shield” that blocks any websites that are marked dangerous to the Communist Party’s control, which even includes the popular YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram sites.
While you would think there would be ways to get around their cybersecurity, China has continued to impose tighter security. Their shield even blocked Apple’s iTunes Movies and iBooks. Studying China’s censorship is a professor of law and governance at Leiden University, Rogier Creemers. Creemers claimed that China has been using the censorship to change the facts that are available to the public. “The Internet,” he said, “is as much a tool for control, surveillance and commercial considerations as it is for empowerment.”
Is the world going to experience this sort of surveillance across the board? Is this what the impending future of the Internet looks like? Since Congress failed to block the transfer and even the last ditch effort by the attorneys general of Texas, Nevada, Arizona, and Oklahoma failed to gain enough time to sift through constitutional and legal issues, the future of the Internet is out of the United States’ hands.
Technically it is now controlled by ICANN, but it looks as if the United Nations has been patiently waiting for the chance to provide oversight over ICANN. The ICANN’s Board of Directors is currently overseen by the Government Advisory Committee (GAC) which “includes 111 member states, including many communist, ‘former’ communist, Islamist, socialist, and authoritarian regimes notorious for currently censoring and policing the Internet and punishing citizens for politically incorrect and religious expression,” according to The New American Senior Editor William Jasper.
Knowing that the keys to the kingdom have been handed over, what’s in store next for the World Wide Web? Domain names could be eliminated, free speech could be diminished, public information will now be more controlled, and the Constitution has been yet again violated for giving away government property without Congress’s consent.
This transfer will be stripping Americans of their First Amendment God-given rights to free speech and handing them over to foreign countries. Be wary and keep your eyes open for changes as a new Internet could be right around the corner.
