A nonprofit organization with heavy sway among policymakers across the European Union (EU) is pushing for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to wage "war on disinformation."
Known as the EU DisinfoLab, the nonprofit, which claims to be independent, says ICANN needs to expand its control over domain registration limitations to include "disinformation" policing in addition to phishing and malware. In other words, the group wants ICANN to police who is allowed to register websites based on their adherence to official narratives.
It is disingenuous, just for the record, for the EU DisinfoLab to claim independence when a large percentage of its funding comes from none other than the Open Society Foundations, which are a project of billionaire agitator George Soros.
The Open Society Foundations is already testing the waters concerning the "repurposing" of ICANN to become a tool for targeting "disinformation sites." Natural News, presumably, would be included in that repurposed targeting, as would many other independent media sites.
"Attempting to directly enlist ICANN would be highly controversial, to put it mildly, at least at this stage," writes Didi Rankovic for Reclaim the Net about the news.
"Given its importance in the internet infrastructure – ICANN manages domain names globally – and the fact content control is not among its tasks (DisinfoLab says ICANN 'refuses' to do it) – this would represent a huge departure from the organization's role as we understand it today."
(Related: When the war in Ukraine first began, Ukraine asked ICANN to disconnect all Russian websites and DNS.)
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Internet 2.0 a censorship nightmare
Utilizing "the structure already created by ICANN," The EU DisinfoLab is urging ICANN to basically police the entire internet in search of anything the powers the be (TPTB) consider as "disinformation." Doing this, the group argues, would require a "minimal amount of diligence and cooperation" from registries.
The purpose of all this would be to have ICANN determine which websites are unacceptable, meaning their domain names would be revoked. The entire internet worldwide would be affected by such a change.
The cover story TPTB are using to try to justify such a drastic change is that "disinformation doppelganger" sites, which are sites that try to mimic "trusted news sites" with similar names or formatting, are getting too out of hand and must be stopped.
Since ICANN is the top authority for both website domain names and DNS registration, the group would be allowed, under the new scheme, to revoke entire websites that are deemed to be spreading some kind of "misinformation."
Truth be told, ICANN was already doing something similar during the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) "pandemic." Domain names containing the word "covid," along with other related terms, were probed to see if they were trying to use such keywords to mask phishing or malware proliferation operations. In other words, it was not yet about trying to "moderate" any content related to COVID.
What is being proposed now, conversely, is a type of moderation format in which ICANN would have the authority to strike entire website domains found guilty of spreading disinformation.
The EU DisinfoLab wants ICANN to use a system called DNSTICR to report "genuinely open-and-shut (disinformation) cases" to registrars for removal. The question is: Who gets to decide what an "open-and-shut disinformation case" actually is?
One possibility is that registries or registrars could "grant media trade associations 'trusted notifier' status, though this, too, would be arbitrarily decided in that there is no established framework for deciding who gets "trusted notifier" status.
What this all amounts to is everything George Orwell warned the world about many decades ago: a ministry of truth control grid that expands the entire world, regulating everything people say and do – in this case online.
More related news can be found at Tyranny.news.
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