U.S. Should Keep Control Over The Internet

At a UN conference in Tunis this week, there have been calls for the U.S. to turn over control of the Internet to an international body. But the last thing this world needs is an Internet controlled by despots and totalitarian regimes. It's simple: The U.S., through ICANN, should maintain control over the Internet. Countries who have been calling for international control include totalitarian regimes like China and Saudi Arabia.

China filters the Internet, attempting to stop billions of its citizens from reading news that the government finds inconvenient. It reads people's private emails, and has arrested journalists, based on what it finds. And Saudi Arabia is nobody's idea of a free country --- you can imagine what the Muslim fundamentalist regime would do if it managed to get control over the Internet?

The U.S. remains the world's bastion of intellectual freedom. That's why we should maintain control over the Internet. Otherwise, the Internet could end up walled off, like the Great Firewall of China.