The United Nations is considering a new Internet tax targeting the largest Web content providers, including Google, Facebook, Apple, and Netflix, that could cripple their ability to reach users in developing nations.
The European proposal, offered for debate at a December meeting of a U.N. agency called the International Telecommunication Union, would amend an existing telecommunications treaty by imposing heavy costs on popular Web sites and their network providers for the privilege of serving non-U.S. users, according to newly leaked documents.
The documents
(
No. 1 No. 2) punctuate warnings that the Obama administration and Republican members of Congress
raised last week about how secret negotiations at the ITU over an international communications treaty could result in a radical re-engineering of the Internet ecosystem and allow governments to monitor or restrict their citizens' online activities.
"It's extremely worrisome," Sally Shipman Wentworth, senior manager for public policy at the
Internet Society, says about the proposed Internet taxes. "It could create an enormous amount of legal uncertainty and commercial uncertainty."
Yes, but think of the enormous amount of cash that would roll into UN coffers.
Such sender-pays frameworks, including the one from ETNO, could prompt U.S.-based Internet services to reject connections from users in developing countries, who would become unaffordably expensive to communicate with, predicts Robert Pepper, Cisco's vice president for global technology policy.
Developing countries "could effectively be cut off from the Internet," says Pepper, a former policy chief at the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. It "could have a host of very negative unintended consequences."
"Unintended consequences" is what usually happens when globalists get their grubby hands on anything. And the question of why fiddle with something that works spectacularly well is beyond comprehension. There's no reason to monkey with the internet except to monetize portions of it for very powerful interests.
It should be resisted at all costs.
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http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/...#ixzz1xQ8eOSAR
