UN to regulate the Internet? HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES to examine the BILL NEXT WEEK

Hill is reporting that the U.S. House of Representatives is due to consider a proposal that would give the international United Nations more control over the Internet next week.

Supported by China, Russia, Brazil, India and other members of the international body, the proposal is to establish fire on both sides of the aisle in Congress, as members of the Obama administration move to the same criticism.

"We are very concerned," said Larry Strickling, head of the National Telecommunications Department of Commerce and Administration information.

He described this as "top-down, where regulation is really the governments that are at the table, but the rest of the stakeholders are not."

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) also stressed that China and Russia "are not exactly bastions of freedom on the Internet", and only because they support a measure, it is not exactly a reason to follow the no.

Pledging to keep the issue, Rubio said: "Any place that prohibits certain search terms should not be a leader in international regulatory frameworks Internet."

The Internet is currently governed by a "multi-stakeholder" approach that gives power to a host of nonprofit organizations rather than governments.

"We lose when we turn to a group of just governments," [Larry Strickling, head of the National Telecommunications Department of Commerce and Information Administration] said.

In an editorial earlier this year in the Wall Street Journal, [Robert McDowell, a Republican commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission] has warned that a "top-down, centralized, international regulatory overlap is the antithesis of the architecture Net. "

"The productivity, rising living standards and the spread of freedom everywhere, but especially in the developing world, would be paralyzed as the technical and business decisions become politically paralyzed in a world regulatory body," says McDowell.

"And let's face it," concluded McDowell, "muscled regimes are threatened by popular cries for political freedom which are authorized by unfettered Internet connectivity."

Nevertheless, the proposal could still get a vote at a UN conference in Dubai in December.