Hospitals & Asylums
1st Internet
Governance Forum HA-1-11-06
Athens, Greece 30 October – 2 November
Dear
Internet Government:
Internet Architecture Board (IAB)
execd@iab.org
Internet Corporation for Assigned
Names and Numbers (ICANN) committee@alac.icann.org, chair@gac.icann.org
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) statements@ietf.org
Internet Governance Forum (IGF) igf@unog.ch
Internet Society (ISOC)
isoc@isoc.org
International Telecommunications Union (ITU) itumail@itu.int
Google Page Rank U.S. Patent 6,285,999 security@google.com
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) bpi@unesco.org
World International Property Organization (WIPO) arbiter.mail@wipo.int
World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) wsis-info@itu.int
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) ij@w3.org
The Internet Engineering Task Force wrote on 2 November to
tell me to indicate reference to Liasion
Statement [Inquiry #89845] in the subject line of all future correspondence
about this issue so you may reply to this message. The primary issue introduced to the 1st Internet
Governance Forum regarded the establishment of
a UN Treaty Body to draft a treaty upholding the rights of Internet users and
the standards of the world wide web.
The Internet is a fairly new form of communication and an international treaty
is clearly needed to give the International Government Forum a more permanent
presence as the UN treaty body engaged by the Secretary General of the UN to draft
a world wide web treaty to the satisfaction of the Member States and people
using the Internet alike. This
statement has been used by HA to claim intellectual credit for attendance of
the Conference. It is dreamed that the Internet Government has
already replaced the little known International Government and all people can
now enjoy the service of human rights without any discrimination upon the basis
of nationality, language, race, sex, disability or political opinion on the
World Wide Web.
The purpose of this
letter is to find an Internet Government able to compete the with
Google Inc. search engine monopoly for the restoration of Hospitals & Asylums
(HA) website (title24uscode.org) as the first response of search
engines for those words. UN Enable is hosting an International Day for
Disabled People on 3 December with the theme for this 2006 being
E-accesibility. It is hope that the Internet Governance Forum in
Athens, Greece will follow the example of the Draft Convention on the
Rights of Persons with Disabilities to establish a UN treaty body to represent
the rights of Internet users and standards of the system. To remind you
to slowly and methodically draft a treaty HA has included you in the quarterly
email list. Is it too late to introduce the issue regarding the
establishment of a UN Treaty Body to draft a treaty upholding the rights of
Internet users and the standards of the world wide web to the
Internet Governance Forum in Athens, Greece?
According to
Internet Governance Forum in Athens Greece 30 October - 2 November 2006 the
existing governmental structure is composed of the Internet Architecture Board
(IAB) and Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the World Wide Web Consortium
(W3C), the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the
International Telecommunications Union (ITU). Other organizations are
contributing towards deeper understanding of the cultural and practical
implications of this global and growing network such as the Internet Society
(ISOC), the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
ICT, especially internet, is a two-way vehicle, optimally
providing a platform for expression as well as access to information. And
freedom of expression is essential if the internet is to serve individuals and
communities. As people seek answers to their problems, they must be free to
express their views and share their experiences without fearing reprisals for
voicing opinions or making observations that are not in line with the official
representation of facts concerning social, economic, political, sanitary or
cultural issues.
The term "Internet".
"Internet" refers to the global information system that -- (i) is
logically linked together by a globally unique address space based on the
Internet Protocol (IP) or its subsequent extensions/follow-ons; (ii) is able to support communications using the
Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) suite or its
subsequent extensions/follow-ons, and/or other IP-compatible protocols; and (iii) provides, uses or makes accessible, either publicly or
privately, high level services layered on the communications and related
infrastructure described herein. The
Internet has grown to over 50,000 networks on all seven continents and outer
space, with approximately 29,000 networks in the United States.
On 24 May 1844, Samuel Morse sent
his first public message over a telegraph line between Washington and
Baltimore, and through that simple act, ushered in the telecommunication age.
Barely ten years later, telegraphy was available as a service to the general
public. To simplify
matters, countries began to develop bilateral or regional agreements, so that
by 1864 there were several regional conventions in place. On 17 May 1865, after
two and a half months of arduous negotiation, the first International Telegraph
Convention was signed in Paris by the 20 founding members, and the International
Telegraph Union (ITU) was established to facilitate subsequent amendments
to this initial agreement. Under an agreement with the newly created United
Nations, it became a UN specialized agency on 15 October 1947, and the
headquarters of the organization were transferred in 1948 from Bern to
Geneva. Today, some 135 years later, the reasons which led to the
establishment of ITU still apply, and the fundamental objectives of the
organization remain basically unchanged.
The first recorded description
of the social interactions that could be enabled through networking was a
series of memos written by J.C.R. Licklider of MIT in August 1962 discussing
his "Galactic Network" concept. He envisioned a globally interconnected
set of computers through which everyone could quickly access data and programs
from any site. In spirit, the concept was very much like the Internet of today.
Licklider was the first head of the computer research program at DARPA,
starting in October 1962. While at DARPA he convinced his successors at DARPA,
Ivan Sutherland, Bob Taylor, and MIT researcher Lawrence G. Roberts, of the
importance of this networking concept. After a series of networking conferences
by 1985, Internet was already well established as a technology supporting a
broad community of researchers and developers, and was beginning to be used by
other communities for daily computer communications. Electronic mail was being
used broadly across several communities, often with different systems, but
interconnection between different mail systems was demonstrating the utility of
broad based electronic communications between people. At first they were
intended for, and largely restricted to, closed communities of scholars; there
was hence little pressure for the individual networks to be compatible and,
indeed, they largely were not.
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee
invented the World Wide Web. He coined the term "World Wide Web,"
wrote the first World Wide Web server, "httpd," and the first client
program (a browser and editor), "WorldWideWeb," in October 1990. He
wrote the first version of the "HyperText Markup Language" (HTML),
the document formatting language with the capability for hypertext links that
became the primary publishing format for the Web. His initial specifications
for URIs, HTTP, and HTML were refined and discussed in larger circles as Web
technology spread. In October 1994, Tim
Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, Laboratory for Computer Science [MIT/LCS]
The World Wide Web Consortium
(W3C) is an international consortium where Member organizations, a full-time
staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards. W3C's mission is
to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and
guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web. W3C primarily pursues its mission through the creation of Web
standards and guidelines. Since 1994, W3C has published more than ninety such
standards, called W3C Recommendations
The Internet Corporation for
Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is an internationally organized, non-profit
corporation that has responsibility for Internet Protocol (IP) address space
allocation, protocol identifier assignment, generic (gTLD) and country code
(ccTLD) Top-Level Domain name system management, and root server system
management functions. These services were originally performed under U.S.
Government contract by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) and other
entities. ICANN now performs the IANA function. As a private-public
partnership, ICANN is dedicated to preserving the operational stability of the
Internet; to promoting competition; to achieving broad representation of global
Internet communities; and to developing policy appropriate to its mission
through bottom-up, consensus-based processes.
The At-Large Committee listens to individual Internet users and the
Government Advisory Committee organized nations to facilitate the development
of a comprehensive international public-private partnership in this important
area of management of the global Internet infrastructure.
The Internet SOCiety (ISOC) is a
professional membership society with more than 100 organization and over 20,000
individual members in over 180 countries. It provides leadership in addressing
issues that confront the future of the Internet, and is the organization home
for the groups responsible for Internet infrastructure standards, including the
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the Internet Architecture Board
(IAB). The Internet
Architecture Board that is the Research Committee of the Internet Engineering
Task Force that is a large open community of network designers, operators,
vendors, and researchers concerned with the Internet and the Internet protocol
suite. It is organized around a set of
eight technical areas, each managed by a technical area director.
The
ACLU's fight against Internet censorship stretches back a decade and continues
as we return to court for the latest round. Congress first attempted to censor
the Internet in 1996, when it passed the Communications Decency Act. The law
criminalized "indecent" speech online. The ACLU sued, arguing that
the law abridged the First Amendment. All nine Supreme Court justices agreed
and struck down the law. The legal
battle continues with the challenge to privacy evidenced in Gonzalez v. Google Inc. on 18 January
2006 where the Attorney General sought and court compeled the search
engine company Google Inc. to turn over, “a multi-stage random sample of one
million URL’s,” under the "Child Online Protection Act" (COPA) of 1998
which would impose draconian criminal sanctions, including five-figure
penalties and months of imprisonment, for online material acknowledged as
valuable for adults but judged "harmful to minors [kidnappers]".
"This
case is about speech. It is not the role of the government to decide what
people can see and use on the Internet," said lead counsel Chris Hansen,
ACLU Senior Staff Attorney. "Those are personal decisions that should be
made by individuals and their families. Congress does not have the right to
censor information on the Internet. Americans have the right to participate in
the global conversation that happens online every moment of every day." The
online censorship law has already been held unconstitutional twice, and the
Supreme Court upheld the ban on enforcement of the law in June 2004. Although there are bad bills floating around
Congress the
United States Senate is currently considering a
bipartisan bill offered by Senators Olympia Snowe and Byron Dorgan, S. 2917,
the Internet Freedom Preservation Act whereby Internet
Servers shall not block, interfere with, discriminate against, impair, or
degrade the ability of any person to use a broadband service to access, use,
send, post, receive, or offer any lawful content, application, or service made
available via the Internet and is reasonable and
nondiscriminatory, including with respect to quality of service, access, speed,
and bandwidth.
HA is entitled to promotion as the first Google response
for the search string “Hospitals & Asylums”, with a caption as follows, “Hospitals & Asylums (HA) advocates for
human rights, public health and economics in America and around the world
title24uscode.org”.
Sanders, Tony J. Google Inc. v. Hospitals &
Asylums. 22 paragraphs. HA-24-10-06,
title24uscode@aol.com