Be there or be square!

I've mentioned before that the United Nations is staging a gala social event in Geneva on Dec. 10-12. 6,000 delegates, 50 "heads of state", and nothing to do but shop, er, decide how United Nations control should be extended to the Internet. You know, based on their fabulous track record for running things. Robert Fulford has the skinny in the National Post - Keep Kofi away from the Internet:

Like bureaucrats everywhere, the people running the UN believe above all in the growth of their power. This winter, undeterred by their failures in peacekeeping, AIDS prevention and women's rights, they are focusing on a new target of opportunity: the Internet.
...
On Dec. 10-12, more than 6,000 delegates will gather in Geneva at the UN's World Summit on the Information Society, warming the hearts of restaurateurs and hoteliers for several kilometres in every direction. Some 60 heads of government have promised to come, including Gerhard Schroeder and Fidel Castro.

Now it's 60 "heads of states" including the old murderer, Fidel! It's the social event of the season!

The man in charge is Nitin Desai, an economist and a UN under-secretary-general. He's Kofi Annan's special advisor for this project, a nimble bureaucrat who knows how to keep a crazy idea alive and may even push this one through.

Admittedly, the conference in Geneva looked for a while like a solution without a problem. The International Telecommunication Union, a UN agency, proposed this grand international gathering in 1998, after reporting on severe disparities in the telephone systems of rich and poor countries. The General Assembly endorsed the conference in 2001, but about that time things started turning sour. Sad to say, the inequalities began disappearing on their own. As a UN press release put it this year, "The connectivity gap between rich and poor had narrowed." Cellphones were the reason. It looked like the UN wasn't needed. Maybe the conference would have to be cancelled.

But Nitin Desai didn't get his beautiful office in New York by letting that kind of embarrassment inconvenience him. He began chattering about a new problem, which nobody mentioned in 1998. Now, he said, we must deal with a computerization gap, or "the digital divide." The conference's purpose will be to encourage high-speed computer access and content development in the poor countries.

Do I detect demands for largesse in the offing for some of the "heads of state"?

And oh, by the way, Desai also wants to take power out of the hands of (can you guess?) the Americans.

There's a surprise!

He believes the Americans are running things, and it's the duty of the UN to make them stop. Desai says that while the Internet was put together by private interests, its current problems (he mentioned spam, viruses, cybercrime, and pornography) call for "governance." Doing his best to keep up with current language, Desai recently said the Geneva conference will "address such issues as e-education, e-health and e-governance." The UN policy people now insist that the Internet, being a public resource (actually, it's mostly owned in private) should be managed within any given country by the national governments and internationally by, well, the UN.

Bite me, Nitin.

When President Bush doesn't show up for this wankfest, brace yourselves for the "unilateralism" whines.