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Dan Hannan has an interesting post on his blog, on what he (rightly) calls the EU's attempts to get its hands on the internet. As he writes:
Viviane Reding, bonsai Commissioner from the bonsai state of
Luxembourg, wants ICANN, the company that allocates Internet addresses,
to be taken over by an international consortium: what she calls "a G12 for Internet governance".What is her problem with the current model? That it doesn't work?
That it's too expensive? That people can't register the names they
want? Nope. She objects to it because it is American. As she put it earlier this week:"In the long run, it is not defendable that the government
department of only one country has oversight of an internet function
which is used by hundreds of millions of people in countries all over
the world."
There you have the EU all over. As you can hear me telling an
unsympathetic chamber above, the Internet works better than any EU
policy. But that's not what counts in Brussels. For Eurocrats, it is
better that something be mismanaged by a global bureaucracy than run
successfully by those uncouth neo-liberal Amerloques.
Until I moved to the JC, I ran a think tank in Brussels. I cannot tell you how good it is never to have to deal with the Brusselsocracy again; the snooty, superior, codescending elite which knows - just knows - thatit alone understands how and by whom things should be run.
I had the misfortune to come across Ms Reding in my time in Brussels, and as finer an example of unmerited superiority you could not find. Does it surprise me that she thinks the internet is, by definition, failing, because it is not run by an organisation which includes Luxembourg?
Have a guess.