During his radio broadcast yesterday, American Family Radio’s Bryan Fischer excoriated President Obama for supposedly giving the internet away to the United Nations because he hates America.
As with his opposition to net neutrality, Fischer’s position was rooted entirely in his own ignorance about the issue, but that didn’t stop him from accusing Obama of selling out the nation.
What is happening is that, at the end of the month, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s contract with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will expire, allowing oversight of ICANN to transition to an international body. Since ICANN “merely makes sure that the URLs work as internet users expect them to, and IANA [the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority] acts as a maintenance of registries, the so-called phonebook for the internet,” nothing about this transition “gives away the internet” because ICANN performs the purely clerical function of keeping the IANA registry up to date.
But Fischer obviously doesn’t understand anything about this process, which is why he fumed yesterday that “President Obama is going to turn over the internet to the United Nations.”
“He’s going to let the United Nations run the entire, worldwide internet,” Fischer stated. “There is no president who would do that if he truly loved his country and cared about its security. No president would do that. You put this in charge of the UN, there there is nothing on the internet that’s safe! There’s nothing on the internet that they cannot make a way for somebody to get at. There will be no possibility of any kind of genuine cyber-security any longer if the UN is in charge of the internet … This may sound like an exaggeration, but the only reason you would do this is to sell out your own country.”
