Let's give control of the Net to China and Russia!

Following on from the European Parliament voting to keep the Internet out of the hands of the ITU, we have the Chinese "People's Daily Online" "editorial team" arguing for the opposite - placing ICANN firmly under the thumb of the ITU. One can only imagine about the divergence between the opinions of the People's Daily editors and the Communist Party leadership; I suspect you'd find it hard to slip a sheet of rice paper between them.

It's fairly clear what the Chinese want:

More and more countries are beginning to question the U.S. control over the world's Internet as the international resource should be managed and supervised by all countries together.

Note that, as per the Europarl vote "more and more countries" does not seem to include many of the countries which actually respect freedom of speech. And what will this change consist of?

As a big country on the Internet, China opposes the U.S. unreasonable and unilateral management of the Internet, and seeks to work with the international community to build a new international Internet governance system.

"Governance". Well, we've seen the Chinese and Russian approaches to governance in their countries and the great contributions that they have made to human rights and freedom of speech. This sounds like just the approach that the Internet could benefit from, don't you think?

I submitted a comment to the People's Daily article, since they have a comments box. Oddly, no comments have yet made it through moderation. How strange.