April Fool's: Obama Sells Internet To China
Some more April Fool's Day hijinks courtesy of the boutique high-tech PR shop, 463 Communications... The firm's founding partners Tom Galvin and Sean Garrett posted a fake news story on their blog Wednesday announcing the White House had reached an deal to sell the Internet and its critical infrastructure to China for $350 billion. By 2010, the Internet's root servers and .com and .net will be transferred to China, said White House spokesman Robert Gibbs in the phony story. Under the bogus agreement, responsibility for oversight of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the technical coordinating body set up by the Commerce Department in 1998, will be transferred to the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information.
"This was a complicated negotiation but we feel comfortable that it will result in a win-win," Gibbs is quoted as saying. "The United States gets an immediate windfall that will help us address our near-term budget shortfall, and going forward we are confident China will act as a responsible steward of the Internet." The article also quotes a Chinese MII official who declined to comment on the negotiations but referred reporters to a Web site that detailed the "harmonious changes that will be made to world Internet." Among the changes proposed were the elimination of pornographic sites such as "PornoTube" and "TMZ", the Web site for "The Economist" and any reference to Rick Astley or "rickrolling." Read more here.
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