The International Telecommunication Union has been in the news a fair bit as of late, tackling everything from patents to the future of HDTV, and it’s now set to be at the center of a particularly contentious issue. As BBC News reports, the ITU is holding a conference in Dubai next month where government representatives plan to tackle a new information and communications treaty — one that at least some countries hope will shift some oversight responsibilities from US-based groups like ICANN to an international organization. Those plans unsurprisingly aren’t going over well with everyone, including Google, which has now come out strongly against the proposed changes. To that end, it’s launched a new Take Action website, where it details its opposition and asks folks to sign a petition to back them up. Among other things, Google is criticizing the “closed-door meetings” and “secretive” nature of the ITU, and says the “proposed changes to the treaty could increase censorship and threaten innovation,” adding that “the ITU is the wrong place to make decisions about the future of the internet.”
Filed under: Internet, Google
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Source: Google Take Action, BBC News