You know what?  This nation ain’t bad.  The ol’ US of A is awright.  Sure, it lets me down all the time, the government is inefficient, and the day our two parties finally put aside old grudges and actually try to represent the will of the people is the same day Jesus will come down from the sky and say “By the way, the Norse had it right all along–everyone worship Odin!”  But you know, when our backs are to the wall, we can actually get stuff done, you know?  We stopped game censorship, we defeated SOPA, and now, Congress has unanimously shot down a treaty drew up by the UN that was designed to give “more control” over the internet to governments worldwide: Basically the UN would ‘take over’ the whole of the internet.

Yes, you read that right.  Unanimously.  We agreed on something for once.  There was literally a  397-0 vote in the house of reps in approval of rejecting the treaty.

“There is not only bipartisan, but bicameral support underlying this resolution, and there is complete support across the Executive Branch of our government,” Democratic Rep. Anna Eshoo said. “In other words, the United States of America is totally unified on this issue of an open structure, a multi-stakeholder approach that has guided the Internet over the last two decades.”

This is a huge win for the whole of the world–the United States, for lack of a better term, “owns” the internet–a good many severs and domains link their origins to the shores of the US, and without our cooperation, it seems very, very unlike that this resolution will go anywhere.   The concern amongst enemies of the treaty, the United States included, is that while the ability to block websites currently exists in a regional capacity (as we see in China, Russia, North Korea, and other countries who just love their censorship), allowing it on a world-wide scale would stifle free speech everywhere, even in places where the right to speak one’s mind is generally considered a-okay, like, say, America.  Or Canada.  Or Venezuela.

Anyway, with the US’s support pulled it seems this treaty won’t go anywhere anytime soon, but it won’t be the last we hear of this, or even this issue.  Rest assured, as long as there’s an internet, they’ll be efforts to control it, and we must remain diligent in our defense… and all that stuff.

So yeah, celebrate your new freedom by looking at pictures of cats that look like Hitler.