Sept. 28, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
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| Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio. | |
| So when I was a kid, we used to have to feed money into the heater in the little... | |
| apartment or flat that I grew up in. | |
| And we often didn't have the money for the heater. | |
| It'd get really, really cold. | |
| And you'd get one of these involuntary body shudders. | |
| And the phrase that I would use is, oh, I think a goose just walked over my grave. | |
| I actually had that feeling when looking into the transfer of authority and power over the internet from the United States, which has some First Amendment protections, to the world as a whole, to authoritarian regimes, to the UN, which do not have Any particular commitment to free speech. | |
| So let's get into what is going on and I'm going to put out an unprecedented call for action at the end of it, which I hope will help people understand how bloody serious this all is. | |
| So let's start with what is at stake here. | |
| The domain naming system of the DNS is really one of the most essential components of the internet. | |
| It pairs human-friendly web addresses like freedomainradio.com with the relevant IP addresses so you don't have to remember, you know, four digits with three dots in order to access a website. | |
| Now, there's something called the ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, created in 1998 to take over the task of assigning these web addresses to the relevant servers. | |
| Actually, before 1998, the job was actually handled by one man named John Postal. | |
| He was known as the god of the internet because he was just fantastic at networking technology, and also he controlled this information. | |
| And ICANN manages the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, IANA, which is under contract to the United States Department of Commerce, or the DOC. Now, ICANN is under the auspices of the US government, but the US government rarely interferes Once it tried to step in, ICANN was going to go ahead and launch a new top-level domain for pornography called.xxx. | |
| Actually, I think Taylor Swift bought taylorswift.xxx or.porn or something to avoid the kind of trollery can occur. | |
| The government wanted ICANN to ditch the idea, but ICANN eventually went ahead with it anyway. | |
| As former Network Solutions, Inc. | |
| CEO Mike Daniels, who administered both the IANA functions and the allocation of domain names in the late 1990s, has stated, quote, he who controls all IP addresses controls the internet. | |
| And this is under the auspices of a largely non-interventionist U.S. government at the moment, moving it offshore, moving it to the U.N., putting it under the control of a basket of true deplorables out there in the world. | |
| Well, Americans are very much against it. | |
| Apollo shows 41% against it and 14% supporting it. | |
| So, hey, it's a democracy slash republic, so shouldn't the government listen? | |
| Apparently not. | |
| That is what may be ignored in this most essential of potential transfers. | |
| So what happened? | |
| Well, after it was revealed that the National Security Agency, the NSA, was spying on foreign leaders, everyone got pretty upset. | |
| This was the Snowden stuff, right? | |
| So in 2014, the Obama administration suddenly announced plans to shift control of the Internet Corporation for assigned names and numbers, I can, from the U.S. to a multilateral body. | |
| And a lot of foreign governments kind of howled in protest and upset. | |
| Maybe it was real. | |
| Maybe it was mock outrage. | |
| Ah, America under Obama is unable to supervise Internet domains and therefore, blah, we should make it more democratic and open it up to the world. | |
| In other words... | |
| The West developed something cool, and now everyone wants to take it over for not particularly good intent, I'm going to make the case. | |
| So, under the supervision of Obama crony and Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, she's a billionaire heiress and campaign bundler who has zero technological experience as well as a history of failure in the subprime loan industry, the administration has generally ignored criticisms of this plan to hand over control of the internet offshore. | |
| So, critics point out that transferring control of domain names to a body like the UN's International Telecommunication Union Could leave nations like Russia and China and even Iran in charge of the world's most important free speech medium. | |
| And if you've got control over that which maps human-friendly names to servers, you can just turn them off at will, thus putting large sections of the internet into darkness. | |
| U.S. control of domain names has helped to guarantee the freedom of speech and commerce across the Internet. | |
| And sometimes these freedoms have been exercised in strenuous opposition against countries like China and Iran who want to suppress Internet traffic and content. | |
| So in March 2014, a public proposal for the transfer of oversight of the non-profit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, is expected to go forward. | |
| Unless the US Congress votes to block the handover. | |
| So soon, in a matter of days, America could relinquish exclusive control of the internet it created, and begin sharing ICANN oversight with foreign governments, tech companies, and advocacy organizations. | |
| Organizations who will never ever be populated by social justice warriors and rabid leftists who want to censure free speech that they disagree with. | |
| Never. | |
| Couldn't happen. | |
| Impossible. | |
| So there's currently nothing prohibiting ICANN post-transition from eliminating or transferring web addresses for US government and military websites, a company in Russia or in China or wherever. | |
| Or owned by those governments could end up managing whitehouse.gov, fbi.gov, or navy.mil. | |
| I guess Hillary's server would have escaped all of that. | |
| Maybe she was just ahead of her time. | |
| Losing control of these web domains could theoretically put US national security at risk. | |
| Now there is, of course, transparency. | |
| So publicly available databases at the moment show who owns what domain names and how to contact them could vanish. | |
| And obviously there are some pluses to that, but it's arguable that there are some significant minuses as well. | |
| So Ted Cruz has been working very hard to attempt to block this transfer. | |
| And I'm going to read a little bit from a letter. | |
| We'll link to all of this as the sources are usually put below. | |
| I'm going to link to the letter below. | |
| He said, ICANN's proposal seeks to end United States government oversight of key operating functions of the Internet that were originally financed by U.S. taxpayers and created pursuant to government contracts. | |
| This is important for reasons we'll get to in a sec. | |
| He goes on to say, The proposal will significantly increase the power of foreign governments over the Internet, expand ICANN's historical core mission by creating a gateway to content regulation, and embolden ICANN's leadership to act without any real accountability. | |
| Simply put, regardless of its intentions, the proposal as a whole does not adequately address the grave concerns expressed by Congress. | |
| The proposal to insert into ICANN's bylaws an undefined commitment to respect, quote, internationally recognized human rights, would open the door to the regulation of content. | |
| Inclusion of such a commitment would unquestionably be outside the historical mission of an organization whose functions are supposedly very limited to the names and numbers and the protocol parameters which are way down in the plumbing of the internet. | |
| However, any provision such as human rights that is included in ICANN's bylaws automatically becomes an integral part of ICANN's core mission and in this case could provide a gateway to content regulation. | |
| So I'm not going to put words in Ted Cruz's mouth, obviously, but the way that I view it is the word human rights has been used for a wide variety of censorship. | |
| Oh, I'm offended. | |
| Oh, this group gets upset. | |
| Oh, this is blasphemy or whatever. | |
| Human rights, the right to not be offended, the right to not be upset, the right to not be criticized or have your core values challenged, that is all over the place, not just in third world countries, but it's increasingly so in Europe. | |
| The commitment to free speech, the First Amendment, is far from universal in the world. | |
| It's pretty singular. | |
| Western countries have a tradition. | |
| The U.S. has a very strong commitment to free speech. | |
| But around the rest of the world, it's kind of crumbling. | |
| And so if you put this kind of thing in, well, this has to respect internationally recognized human rights, what? | |
| It's like the Interstate Commerce Clause, which eventually was what? | |
| Used to justify certain sections of Obamacare? | |
| It is very loosey-goosey, and rather than it being a technological consideration, this opens it up to political manipulation, the control over content rather than the mapping of human-friendly names to actual IP addresses. | |
| So, the Republican-controlled House passed legislation in 2014 to defund this ICANN transfer. | |
| In 2015, it also voted to provide Congress a 30-day period to review it when it happened. | |
| And earlier this year, Ted Cruz and Sean Duffy introduced the Protecting Internet Freedom Act to prevent the transfer without congressional approval. | |
| And Cruz has also said that the employees are at risk of, quote, personal criminal liability of up to two years in prison. | |
| Because he says that they overstep provisions in the last government spending bill that prevent them from using these funds to carry out the ICANN transition. | |
| And Cruz has also said, imagine an internet run like many Middle Eastern countries that punish what they deem to be blasphemy. | |
| Or imagine an internet run like China or Russia that punish and incarcerate those who engage in political dissent. | |
| All this and more seems possible. | |
| Ted Cruz's letter went on to say, of such property. | |
| This is very, very important. | |
| So the root zone file, the map that establishes where everything is located in virtual space, the argument is, well, look, this was all developed by the U.S. Defense Department with the U.S. taxpayer funding because way back in the day, the Internet was established as a military network that would allow, decentralized, right, peer-to-peer in a sense, that would allow the U.S. military and government to communicate in the event of a nuclear attack or some other weapon of mass destruction. | |
| It is therefore a national IT asset and it has in fact been officially designated that way. | |
| The Commerce Department's contracts with the corporations that work on administering internet names and addresses explicitly identify this root zone file as, quote, property of the U.S. government. | |
| And there is a bunch of letters included in this political communication that say, look, there are official documents and pronouncements that say that the root zone file is the property of We're good to go. | |
| The government owns this root zone file, and if the government owns this DNS system, well, then the president has no authority to transfer it. | |
| That is something that has to be done by Congress. | |
| Ted Cruz's letter went on to say, There is concern that ICANN may consider moving its headquarters outside the United States to escape U.S. law and redraft its bylaws once the transition has been finalized. | |
| He says ICANN is not reaffirming its commitment to the United States government to remain headquartered in the United States. | |
| The fact that this issue has been deferred to an unspecified point in the future, when the US would have a far lesser voice in the transition process, raises questions about ICANN's intent on this matter. | |
| There are also concerns regarding the future operation and security of.gov and.mil, ICANN's future antitrust status, and the potential for ICANN to impose global taxes without US government oversight. | |
| None of these have been adequately addressed. | |
| So other countries, particularly China and Russia, put a lot of pressure on the UN to call for the DNS to be controlled by the United Nations International Telecommunications Union. | |
| In fact, back in 2012, a treaty to do just that was on the table, but the US, the UK, Canada and Australia refused because they said, look, there are concerns over human rights abuses and other abuses that could arise if other countries had greater say and control over the internet and its technical foundations. | |
| And certainly, if the left has called for criminalizing skepticism of climate change dogma and criminalizing things that give offense to particular religious groups and so on, so I don't know. | |
| Without the First Amendment, without the U.S. government's fairly benign non-interventionist stance with regards to this stuff, things could get very dicey, very censored very quickly, in my humble opinion. | |
| So the UN could take over control of the internet on October the 1st, a couple of days from now, when the ICANN passes from US administration to the control of some multilateral body, most likely this UN International Telecommunications Union. | |
| Now, defenders of the move have denied that the UN will have authority over ICANN, but the Wall Street Journal's L. Gordon Krovitz notes that ICANN will have to be run by a state agency to retain its antitrust exemption, which makes it almost certain that the UN will step in to take control, right? | |
| So you're not allowed to have monopolies. | |
| You're subject to antitrust legislation. | |
| So to retain it, it has to be run by a state agency. | |
| I mean, the US military has a monopoly and they're not hit with antitrust legislation. | |
| So he said, it's shocking that the administration admits it has no plan for how ICANN retains its antitrust exemption. | |
| The reason ICANN can operate the entire World Wide Web root zone is that it has the status of a legal monopolist stemming from its contract with the Commerce Department that makes ICANN an instrumentality of government. | |
| Without the US contract, ICANN would seek to be overseen by another governmental group so as to keep its antitrust exemption. | |
| Authoritarian regimes have already proposed ICANN become part of the UN to make it easier for them to censor the internet globally. | |
| So much for the Obama pledge that the US would never be replaced by a government-led or intergovernmental organization solution. | |
| Congress, the US Congress, can still act to prevent the transfer. | |
| Senator Ted Cruz and Sean Duffy have introduced the Protecting Internet Freedom Act, which prevents the transfer of ICANN without congressional approval. | |
| Now, John Bolton, who was the 25th US ambassador to the UN, has very strong words to say on this. | |
| He says, and I quote, Because it's entirely a U.S. government proposition with U.S. people involved, the Internet has been free and open. | |
| If, as the administration wants to do, it's transferred to an international body, I will predict right here, within 10 years, it will come under the control of the United Nations, and the Internet as we know it will end. | |
| Because there are governments around the world that are already doing everything they can to prevent a free and open Internet in their countries. | |
| And it will extend to ours. | |
| In due course. | |
| Now this is a guy who knows quite a bit about the United Nations. | |
| Bolton called the internet handover, quote, a mistake of such colossal proportions that you would have thought we'd have a huge debate about it in this country. | |
| He said, what they're talking about is succumbing to the demands of foreign governments and foreign interests who say in what is effectively a global means of communication. | |
| It's just wrong to have the United States in charge of it. | |
| But the fact is, under American control, it's had remarkable growth. | |
| It's been kept free. | |
| It's been able to withstand a lot of pressure to try and set rules that favor one side or another. | |
| And in an international environment, I can tell you from my own experience, when you get all kinds of governments from all over the world setting standards and making decisions, it will be far less free than it is now. | |
| And I don't think... | |
| The particular kind of transfer we're talking about now is the end of the game. | |
| This is a black and white binary choice. | |
| It's either under American control or it's not. | |
| And once we let go of it, we are never getting it back. | |
| Foreign governments want big control Of course not. | |
| The United Nations recently expressed a huge powerlust and eagerness to turn search engines into censorship engines because they wanted to battle cyberviolence against women, which often seems to mean disagreeing with feminists. | |
| The idea that this technological association between human-friendly names and IP addresses would be subject to human rights, internationally recognized human rights, what internationally recognized human rights are there around the world that we would consider morally legitimate? | |
| I would say few to none. | |
| So all this means is people get to scream about their rights and shut down large parts of the internet. | |
| Is it even constitutional for Barack Obama to give away The priceless property created and funded by U.S. taxpayers without congressional approval? | |
| Does it matter to anyone in the administration? | |
| Does it matter to people in Congress? | |
| Do your damn jobs! | |
| For God's sakes! | |
| So Westerners build cool stuff and then governments misuse it by spying on foreign governments and then everyone gets upset and then they just appease them by giving it all away. | |
| And this greatest medium of communication in the history of the world will never be replaced in the future by anything that can compete with it in terms of the incredible capacity for us to have conversations with no gatekeepers. | |
| This amazing web of human interaction, human communication, and the spread of reason, evidence, and the possibilities of critical thought to all corners of the world Where we race against those who use this amazing power to communicate, to do harm, and we race against them to help it heal and provoke thought and self-criticism in the human psyche. | |
| Built by Westerners, screwed up by governments, handed over to those who will use it for the opposite of its intended purpose, to turn the world dark rather than to bring it light. | |
| And this is why we can't have or keep cool and good stuff. | |
| Hillary, in a fundraising letter, said that she wanted to shut down Alex Jones and Breitbart.com. | |
| Well, how is that possible with today's internet? | |
| Hey, cool answer. | |
| It's not! | |
| But, by the time she's inaugurated, should she become president? | |
| It is. | |
| May well be possible with UN or foreign basket of deplorables control over the internet. | |
| So maybe, just maybe, she was talking about what was possible for her after internet control is handed over or gets away from America. | |
| So here's my unprecedented call to action. | |
| Call and write your congressman, your congresswoman. | |
| Get the message out that this MUST NOT STAND! We have to hold on to the freedom to communicate. | |
| Right now, that means keeping control of the Internet under the protection of the First Amendment and a largely non-interventionist U.S. government. | |
| It's not perfect, but it's a lot better than the alternative. | |
| So please, we'll put links below. | |
| Call, write, email, fax, send carrier pigeons, smoke signals. | |
| I don't care. | |
| Get the message across. | |
| This must not be allowed to stand. | |
| Because let me tell you this. | |
| I value enormously what I have to say and I know that there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of you out there who also value what it is that I have to say. | |
| I'm telling you this. | |
| If the internet becomes less free, if I start having to look over my shoulder and worry about what might be coming in from some godforsaken hellhole out there in the world somewhere who gets upset about something that I say, I am done. | |
| I am going to turn this into a makeup and lingerie channel. | |
| So please, nobody wants that. | |
| Get involved. | |
| Stop it. |
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