Internet Governance & ICANN

Brazilian Interview with Touré on WCIT

by on August 1, 2012 · 0 comments

Today is a a big day for WCIT: Ambassador Kramer gave a major address on the US position and the Bono Mack resolution is up for a vote in the House. But don’t overlook this Portuguese language interview with ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun Touré.

In the interview, Secretary-General Touré says that we need $800 billion of telecom infrastructure investment over the next five years. He adds that this money is going to have to come from the private sector, and that the role of government is to adopt dynamic regulatory policies so that the investment will be forthcoming. It seems to me that if we want dynamism in our telecom sector, then we should have a free market in telecom services, unencumbered by…outdated international regulatory agencies such as the ITU.

The ITU has often insisted that it has no policy agenda of its own, that it is merely a neutral arbiter between member states. But in the interview, Secretary-General Touré calls the ETNO proposal “welcome,” categorically rejects Internet access at different speeds, and spoke in favor of global cooperation to prevent cyberwar. These are policy statements, so it seems clear that the ITU is indeed pursuing an agenda. And when the interviewer asks if Dr. Touré sees any risks associated with greater state involvement in telecom, he replies no.

If you’re following WCIT, the full interview is worth a read, through Google Translate if necessary. Hat tip goes to the Internet Society’s Scoop page for WCIT.

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ITU Releases a Single WCIT Document, Call Themselves Transparent

by on July 24, 2012 · 1 comment

In my [last update on WCIT](http://techliberation.com/2012/06/20/wcitleaks-gets-results/), I noted that due to pressure generated by WCITLeaks, the Secretary-General of the ITU promised to make a recommendation to the ITU’s Council to open up access to WCIT preparatory documents. Here is what has happened since then:

– Secretary-General Touré indeed made his recommendation to the Council.
– The Council responded by releasing a single document, TD-64, which has already been on WCITLeaks for weeks. Indeed, it was the first document we posted.
– The ITU issued a [press release](http://www.itu.int/net/pressoffice/press_releases/2012/46.aspx) declaring this to be a “landmark decision.”

As I [told Talking Points Memo](http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/07/un-telecom-agency-releases-secret-treaty-critics-unswayed.php), I am not impressed by the ITU’s landmark decision. In fact, I am more convinced than ever that the ITU is too out of touch to be trusted with any role in Internet governance.

Consider these quotes from Secretary-General Touré at May’s WSIS Forum, [highlighted by Bill Smith](http://www.circleid.com/posts/20120723_itu_landmark_decisions/) at CircleID:

– “The ITU is as transparent as organizations are.”
– “The transparency of the ITU is not something that you can question.”
– “We don’t really have too much to learn from anybody about multi-stakeholderism because we almost invented it.”

Troubling, no?

If you would like to see first-hand how transparent the ITU is, you can [visit its site and download TD-64](http://www.itu.int/en/wcit-12/Pages/public.aspx), the “draft of the future ITRs.” Then go to [WCITLeaks.org](http://wcitleaks.org/) to read all the other documents it wants to keep from you.

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SB 1161 Promotes California’s Internet Innovation and Economic Growth

by on July 2, 2012 · 0 comments

California is recognized as a world leader in Internet technologies and services. It is the home of companies, like Apple, Google, and Cisco, whose innovations are driving economic recovery in California and Internet innovation around the world. The success of these and many other California technology companies has been driven by the decentralized and largely unregulated Internet, which provides them with the ability to market their products and services globally.

California’s success is also its biggest threat. The economic growth, individual empowerment, and entrepreneurialism driven by Internet innovation in California have made it the envy of the world. As a result, local and international governments are increasingly proposing new regulations that would favor their own companies – and cripple California’s economy. A current example is the upcoming World Conference on International Telecommunications, which will consider proposals to impose price regulations on the Internet through an agency of the United Nations. Continue reading →

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We Must Take UN’s Internet Grab Seriously

by on June 21, 2012 · 2 comments

Thanks to TLFers Jerry Brito and Eli Dourado, and the anonymous individual who leaked a key planning document for the International Telecommunication Union’s World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) on Jerry and Eli’s inspired WCITLeaks.org site, we now have a clearer view of what a handful of regimes hope to accomplish at WCIT, scheduled for December in Dubai, U.A.E.

Although there is some danger of oversimplification, essentially a number of member states in the ITU, an arm of the United Nations, are pushing for an international treaty that will give their governments a much more powerful role in the architecture of the Internet and economics of the cross-border interconnection. Dispensing with the fancy words, it represents a desperate, last ditch effort by several authoritarian nations to regain control of their national telecommunications infrastructure and operations

A little history may help. Until the 1990s, the U.S. was the only country where telephone companies were owned by private investors. Even then, from AT&T and GTE on down, they were government-sanctioned monopolies. Just about everywhere else, including western democracies such as the U.K, France and Germany, the phone company was a state-owned monopoly. Its president generally reported to the Minster of Telecommunications.

Since most phone companies were large state agencies, the ITU, as a UN organization, could wield a lot of clout in terms of telecom standards, policy and governance–and indeed that was the case for much of the last half of the 20th century. That changed, for nations as much as the ITU, with the advent of privatization and the introduction of wireless technology. In a policy change that directly connects to these very issues here, just about every country in the world embarked on full or partial telecom privatization and, moreover, allowed at least one private company to build wireless telecom infrastructure. As ITU membership was reserved for governments, not enterprises, the ITU’s political influence as a global standards and policy agency has since diminished greatly. Add to that concurrent emergence of the Internet, which changed the fundamental architecture and cost of public communications from a capital-intensive hierarchical mechanism to inexpensive peer-to-peer connections and the stage was set for today’s environment where every smartphone owner is a reporter and videographer. Telecommunications, once part of the commanding heights of government control, was decentralized down to street level.

Continue reading →

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The UN’s ‘Internet takeover’ and the politics of Kumbaya

by on June 21, 2012 · 0 comments

When it comes to the UN exerting greater control over Internet governance, all of us who follow Internet policy in the U.S. seem to be on the same page: keep the Internet free of UN control. Many folks have remarked how rare this moment of agreement among all sides–right, left, and center–can be. And Congress seized that moment yesterday, [unanimously approving](http://techdailydose.nationaljournal.com/2012/06/house-committee-votes-to-preve.php) a bi-partisan resolution calling on the Secretary of State to “to promote a global Internet free from government control[.]”

However, below the surface of this “Kumbaya moment,” astute observers will have noticed quite a bit of eye-rolling. Adam Thierer and I wrote [a piece](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/06/a-note-to-congress-the-united-nations-isnt-a-serious-threat-to-internet-freedom-151-but-you-are/258709/) for *The Atlantic* pointing out the obvious fact that when a unanimous Congress votes “to promote a global Internet free from government control,” they are being hypocrites. That’s a pretty uncontroversial statement, as far as I can tell, but of course no one likes a skunk at the garden party. Continue reading →

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WCITLeaks Gets Results

by on June 20, 2012 · 2 comments

This morning, the Secretary-General of the ITU, Hamadoun Touré, [gave a speech at the WCIT Council Working Group](http://www.itu.int/en/osg/speeches/Pages/2012-06-20.aspx) meeting in Geneva in which he said,

> It has come as a surprise — and I have to say as a great disappointment — to see that some of those who have had access to proposals presented to this working group have gone on to publicly mis-state or distort them in public forums, sometimes to the point of caricature.

> These distortions and mis-statements could be found plausible by credulous members of the public, and could even be used to influence national parliaments, given that the documents themselves are not officially available — in spite of recent developments, **including the leaking of Document TD 64.**

> As many of you surely know, a group of civil society organizations has written to me to request public access to the proposals under discussion.

> **I would therefore be grateful if you could consider this matter carefully, as I intend to make a recommendation to the forthcoming session of Council regarding open access to these documents, and in particular future versions of TD 64.**

> I would also be grateful if you would consider the opportunity of conducting an open consultation regarding the ITRs. I also intend to make a recommendation to Council in this regard as well.
Continue reading →

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WCIT is about People vs. Their Governments

by on June 18, 2012 · 20 comments

As Jerry noted [ten days ago](http://jerrybrito.org/post/24687446662/an-update-on-wcitleaks-org), [our little side project](http://wcitleaks.org/) got some good press right after we launched it. I am delighted to report that the media love continues. On Saturday, WCITLeaks was covered by [Talking Points Memo](http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/06/un-proposals-to-regulate-internet-are-troubling-leaked-documents-reveal.php), and a [Wall Street Journal article](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303822204577470532859210296.html) appeared online last night and in print this morning.

I think it’s great that both left- and right-of-center publications are covering WCIT and the threat to our online freedoms posed by international bureaucracy. But I worry that people will infer that since this is not a left vs. right issue, it must be a USA vs. the world issue. This is an unhelpful way to look at it.

**This is an Internet users vs. their governments issue.** Who benefits from increased ITU oversight of the Internet? Certainly not ordinary users in foreign countries, who would then be censored and spied upon by their governments with full international approval. The winners would be autocratic regimes, not their subjects. And let’s not pretend the US government is innocent on this score; it intercepts and records international Internet traffic all the time, and the SOPA/PIPA kerfuffle shows how much some interests, especially Big Content, want to use the government to censor the web.

The bottom line is that yes, the US should walk away from WCIT, but not because the Internet is our toy and we want to make the rules for the rest of the world. The US should walk away from WCIT as part of a repentant rejection of Internet policy under Bush and Obama, which has consistently carved out a greater role for the government online. I hope that the awareness we raise through WCITLeaks will not only highlight how foolish the US government is for playing the lose-lose game with the ITU, but how hypocritical it is for preaching net freedom while spying on, censoring, and regulating its own citizens online.

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Troubling Internet Regulations Proposed for WCIT

by on June 14, 2012 · 23 comments

Today, WCITLeaks.org posted a new document called TD-62. It is a compilation of all the proposals for modification of the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs), which will be renegotiated at WCIT in Dubai this December. Some of the most troubling proposals include:

  • The modification of section 1.4 and addition of section 3.5, which would make some or all ITU-T “Recommendations” mandatory. ITU-T “Recommendations” compete with standards bodies like the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), which proposes new standards for protocols and best practices on a completely voluntary and transparent basis.
  • The modification of section 2.2 to explicitly include Internet traffic termination as a regulated telecommunication service. Under the status quo, Internet traffic is completely exempt from regulation under the ITRs because it is a “private arrangement” under article 9. If this proposal—supported by Russia and Iran—were adopted, Internet traffic would be metered along national boundaries and billed to the originator of the traffic, as is currently done with international telephone calls. This would create a new revenue stream for corrupt, autocratic regimes and raise the cost of accessing international websites and information on the Internet.
  • The addition of a new section 2.13 to define spam in the ITRs. This would create an international legal excuse for governments to inspect our emails. This provision is supported by Russia, several Arab states, and Rwanda.
  • The addition of a new section 3.8, the text of which is still undefined, that would give the ITU a role in allocating Internet addresses. The Internet Society points out in a comment that this “would be disruptive to the existing, successful mechanism for allocating/distributing IPv6 addresses.”
  • The modification of section 4.3, subsection a) to introduce content regulation, starting with spam and malware, in the ITRs for the first time. The ITRs have always been about the pipes, not the content that flows through them. As the US delegation comments, “this text suggests that the ITU has a role in content related issues. We do not believe it does.” This is dangerous because many UN members do not have the same appreciation for freedom of speech that many of us do.
  • The addition of a new section 8.2 to regulate online crime. Again, this would introduce content regulation into the ITRs.
  • The addition of a new section 8.5, proposed by China, that would give member states what the Internet Society describes as a “a very active and inappropriate role in patrolling and enforcing newly defined standards of behaviour on telecommunication and Internet networks and in services.”
These proposals show that many ITU member states want to use international agreements to regulate the Internet by crowding out bottom-up institutions, imposing charges for international communication, and controlling the content that consumers can access online.

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Today we’re launching WCITLeaks.org

by on June 6, 2012 · 3 comments

As you may have heard, the UN is trying to take over the internet. Well, that’s not really true, but member states of the UN’s International Telecommunications Union (ITU) are definitely going to negotiate an agreement related to the Internet at the World Conference on International Communications (WCIT – pronounced ‘wicket’) this December in Dubai. [U.S. officials have warned](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204792404577229074023195322.html) that some member states, including Russia and China, have put forth proposals to regulate the Internet. Vint Cerf [has warned](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/25/opinion/keep-the-internet-open.html) that “Such proposals raise the prospect of policies that enable government controls but greatly diminish the ‘permissionless innovation’ that underlies extraordinary Internet-based economic growth to say nothing of trampling human rights.”

So what are these proposals? Well, we don’t know exactly. To see them, you have to have access to the ITU’s password protected website. This lack of transparency brings to mind secret negotiations like the one that gave us ACTA, and several civil society groups [have written](http://wcitleaks.org/) to the ITU demanding access to the documents.

The proposals are not classified and it’s not illegal to share them. In fact, they often are shared. At a [recent panel discussion](http://www.c-span.org/Events/Dubai-Conference-Could-Change-How-Internet-Operates/10737431086/) that I attended, the State Department’s Richard Beaird said, “Access to the proposals, of course, as I have done and others have done, is if you ask me, I will give you those proposals. I don’t want to have a flood of requests coming in from the room or those int he television audience.”

At the time, I [tweeted](https://twitter.com/jerrybrito/status/207889003171684352): “If someone will pass them to me, I volunteer to host a site with gov WCIT proposals.” It seemed weird to me that someone wasn’t collecting and publishing the documents, like how opencrs.com does with Congressional Research Service reports. I promptly forgot about the idea, but was reminded yesterday when Milton Mueller wrote [this post](http://www.internetgovernance.org/2012/06/05/we-want-td64-itu-transparency-begins-at-home/) urging the U.S. to make documents available. He wrote:

>Today, IGP has learned that the U.S. government is in possession of a document that brings together descriptions of all the WCIT proposals emerging from the ITU’s Council Working Group. The document, known as TD 64, compiles all the proposals on the table into a single document without attributing them to any specific government. No law or treaty stops the US government from making this document available to the public. We urge the U.S. government to release TD 64 of the ITU Council Working Group immediately.

Of course, while it’s not illegal, publishing these documents is probably not considered polite in the rarefied diplomatic circles of the ITU. So, I thought we’d give folks with access to the documents a helping hand.

Yesterday Eli Dourado and I spent a couple of hours putting together a website at [WCITLeaks.org](http://wcitleaks.org). The idea is simple: If you have a WCIT or ITU related document you’d like to share, submit it anonymously and we will publish it. That’s it. We hope you find it useful and that you’ll spread the word.

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Resource Database for WCIT / ITU / “U.N. Taking over the Net”

by on May 7, 2012 · 0 comments

While preparing my latest Forbes column, “Does the Internet Need a Global Regulator?” I collected some excellent resources. I figured I would just post all the links here since others might find them useful as we work our way up to the big U.N. International Telecommunication Union (ITU) World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai this December. Please let me know of other things that I should add to this resource database. I’ve divided the database into “General Resources” and “Opinion Pieces”: Continue reading →

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