A rebuttal to Stephan Molyneux by Philippe David
Hi Stefan,
Let me start with the flowers. I've been watching your videos for years and I'm a pretty big fan of yours, but I think you're not only misinformed on this issue, but you're also being a tad incoherent in pleading for which criminal gang should «control the internet».
To begin with, ICANN denies the US government even had any control over their activities, They claim to have always been independent. Furthermore, your argument that ICANN must be overseen by some governmental agency in order to remain exempt of the anti-trust laws doesn't hold any water as ICANN never had any such exemption and has always been subject to anti-trust laws. Therefore, there never was any need for government oversight of ICANN before and there is no need to seek oversight moving forward. What happened on Oct 1st was actually ICANN breaking off any sort of ties with government and had been planned since 1998. It should be celebrated by voluntaryists all over the world as a liberation.
Secondly, even if it were true that the US stewardship by the Dept. of Commerce over ICANN meant some kind of government control over the internet that only remained very mild thanks to the constitutional protection of the US, as your narrative suggests, there is nothing to prevent the US from becoming tyrannical and we both know that it's becoming more tyrannical everyday. So continued stewardship of the IANA functions by the US government is no guarantee of internet freedom by any stretch of the imagination.
Thirdly, even if a takeover of ICANN were to become a reality, there is actually nothing that prevents DNS systems from being started to compete with ICANN and indeed, one such competitor actually exists and had introduced a new TLD (.bit). This new DNS system, called Namecoin, is based on a blockchain and thus completely decentralized and secure, which means no single entity can ever control it. So you see, even if the UN tried to «take over the internet», the market will always find a way to get around such an attempt. (Oh ye of little faith!)
So let’s stop all the scaremongering. The internet is anarchy and will always remain so.
Best regards,
Philippe David
Philippe David is an IT consultant from Montreal, Quebec who is also the editor of the french-language libertarian news site contrepoids.com and the french-speaking voluntaryist community site projetv.org
Fine rebuttal of Molyneux's save the internet plead.
I read and prefer your
L’ONU VA-T-ELLE PRENDRE LE CONTRÔLE DE L’INTERNET? article to his STOP THE INTERNET TAKEOVER video I just finished watching.
I've been meaning to ask you: are you the one writting the Le Minarchiste blog?
I used to write a blog called Le Minarchiste Quebecois (www.minarchisteqc.com) which is still up but I no longer write to it. However, there is another blog called Le Minarchiste (minarchiste.wordpress.com) that is authored by another Montrealer. I don't know him personnally, but I've chatted with him many times through comments on both our blogs. In anycase, I chose to abandon Le Minarchiste Quebecois, because I'm no longer a minarchist. I've evolved out of it, as most voluntaryists have.
Thank you for the good comment. I actually wrote the text you mentionned first, but when someone posted Molyneux's videos in comments on Facebook, I decided to write a more direct rebuttal to Molyneux in english here on SteemIt.
Since I've only started to be interested in getting to know more about anarcho-capitalism, libertarianism, voluntaryism, minarchism, etc. for only the last couple of years or so, I would have a hard time saying where my philosophy stands on the anarchy spectrum.
One thing I know for sure, is that I enjoy reading your material on Contrepoids (being notice by the RSS feed, on my Facebook's feed or on Twitter's) as much as I like reading this Minarchist guy's articles.
There is a lot of people interested in these topics on Steemit, I'm surprised your post didn't get more hits.
Yes, Minarchist does write some pretty good stuff.
I've only just started to write on SteemIT and I haven't had a chance to gather much of a following, but I'm not giving up just yet.