The Wall Street Journal‘s L. Gordon Crovitz reports Monday that the Department of Commerce is unlikely to stop Los Angeles-based XYZ.com from enforcing Chinese censorship of domain names around the world.
These names include a list of 12,000 words to ban from Chinese web addresses. “Anyone in any country in the world will be denied use of these domains if their names include words that trouble Beijing’s repressive leaders, Crovitz writes.
The ban could be blocked by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which is still controlled by the U.S. government. However, Crovitz says, ICANN has become less fearful of U.S. oversight since President Barack Obama made it clear that he wants to hand over control of domain names to the international community. Congress has blocked funding for the move, but, as Crovitz reported earlier, ICANN is going rogue.
As Breitbart News reported last year, the person responsible for the unconscionable abandonment of a key U.S. strategic asset to the whims of our geopolitical rivals is Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, an Obama bundler from Chicago. Pritzker, a billionaire heiress to the Hyatt fortune, was considered too toxic for nomination in 2008, due to her earlier involvement with the collapse of a bank. She passed muster quietly after Obama’s re-election.
The media have followed Pritzker’s peregrinations to Ukraine, where her family is originally from, and to Cuba, where she is encouraging the communist regime to open investment opportunities to U.S. businesses.
Relatively little attention, however, has been paid to the role she is playing in overseeing the destruction of the Internet as a forum for the open exchange of ideas and a freewheeling haven for dissident causes–good and evil–worldwide.
A year ago, Pritzker gave an address at ICANN’s conference in Los Angeles announcing the administration’s plans. Her speech included phrases such as “let me be clear” and “make no mistake,” two Obama favorites that usually precede some empty promise or outright falsehood. Pritzker’s “red line” was: “The United States will not allow the global Internet to be coopted by any person, entity, or nation seeking to substitute their parochial worldview for the collective wisdom of this community…And we will preserve and protect a free and open internet.”
“But”–there had to be a “but”–“[w]e must collaborate,” Pritzker said. Collaborating with totalitarian regimes that deny their citizens basic freedom of expression can only mean diluting the freedom we Americans enjoy. The XYZ surrender to China’s demands the beginning of a long, dark descent–led by a crony unfit to hold high public office.