"Digital Munich"

I'll have to ask contributing editor Mike Godwin whether this one constitues an oblique violation of his infamous law: Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.) compares this month's World Summit on the Information Society, which will take up proposals to place the Internet under international oversight, to the 1938 conference at which Britain signed off on Hitler's annexation of the Sudetenland.

Hyperbole aside, he's right that this would be a bad move. But as I wrote last month, it would be a lot more credible if Coleman's clarion call to avoid "allowing Internet governance to be politicized" included a commitment to renouncing the U.S.'s own veto power—with a greater indirect chilling effect power, as evidenced by the hubbub over .xxx domains—rather than simply defending the status quo.

Addendum: As long as I'm pimping my piece on this from last month, I might as well note that I made there the same point Jon Zittrain makes today in a Politech post: There are some real concerns to do with U.N. oversight, but the actual leverage for censorship involved in control of the TLD root servers isn't nearly as great as you might infer from a lot of the discussion of this issue. We should oppose U.N. control of the root, but with a realistic sense of what the worst-case scenario there looks like.