[bestbits] A false consensus is broken

[parminder]

Hi All

My analysis of WCIT outcome, as an op-ed for 'The Hindu'..... parminder

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/a-false-consensus-is-broken/article4222688.ece


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December 21, 2012


  A false consensus is broken

Parminder Jeet Singh
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*/The U.S. rejection of new global telecom regulations should not 
overshadow the need for an Internet-powered social agenda for the world/*

The United States’s decision to walk out of the International 
Telecommunication Union’s World Conference on International 
Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai along with some of its allies last 
week could represent a turning point in global Internet governance. 
These countries refused to sign the new International Telecommunications 
Regulations (ITRs) that contain some basic principles governing the 
technical architecture of the global communication system. They said 
they could not agree to the ITRs, and the ITU’s remit, extending to the 
Internet. However, the new ITRs contain no reference to the Internet, 
all such language having been assiduously weeded out over the two weeks 
of intense negotiations. Also, the ITU has been undertaking 
Internet-related activities for more than a decade, with the U.S. 
participating in them.

In a full-blown Internet age, the new ITRs make no reference to naming 
and addressing the system of the Internet or its routing structures, 
make no effort to make ITU ‘the’ Internet standards making body, and 
make a clear statement that ‘content is not included’ in their remit. 
This could, in fact, have been taken to be a significant acknowledgement 
of the existing naming and addressing regime (ICANN) and Internet 
standards making processes (IETF or Internet Engineering Task Force). 
However, the U.S. remained adamant.

*Diplomatic blunder
*

Both the U.S. and the ITU will take a hit from this meltdown of what was 
in any case a make-believe consensus. The U.S. seems to have said, well, 
the kid gloves are off and we are done with making polite noises about 
ITU. The old order is dead and the new has taken over. What if it is 
U.S.-centric; most people the U.S. likes to talk to seem to be happy 
with it. The walkout by the U.S. and its allies can also considerably 
damage the ITU. It has practically been told by these countries that 
they see no role for the ITU in an age when all communication systems 
will soon be Internet-protocol based. This suddenly leaves developing 
countries without any existing global forum to turn to for an 
appropriate role in global governance of the Internet. It is expected 
that this will lead to a hardening of their position on the existing 
U.S.-centric global Internet governance regime, something most of them 
have been lazily going along with. With the walkout on the ITRs, the 
U.S.’s diplomatic ability to defend the substantial control it has over 
the existing privatised Internet governance regime will go down 
considerably.

It is unclear whether the U.S. had come expecting a deadlock but hoping 
it would happen in such a way that the blame could be pinned on 
authoritarian countries with an extreme agenda of statist control over 
the Internet. These countries did bring in highly problematic drafts 
which were all rejected or withdrawn. By the end of two weeks of 
negotiations, as noted by Eric Pfanner in the /New York Times/, “the 
United States got most of what it wanted, but then it refused to sign 
the document and left in a huff.” It may turn out to be a diplomatic 
blunder. Despite valiant statements from the U.S. about having defiantly 
stood for freedom of expression, the blame for the failure of the treaty 
process, and the consequent breakdown of the ‘false consensus’ on global 
Internet governance, will have to be borne by the U.S.

*Sequence of events*

The real reasons for this sudden shattering of the uneasy calm over ‘who 
governs the global Internet’ lie in the larger, long-standing structural 
issues, the kind which often come to a head when a definitive text has 
to be signed, as happened at the WCIT.

With less than two days to go before the end of the conference, the more 
active developing country actors began to get restive. The draft had 
gone bare-bone with hardly anything new in it compared to the existing 
ITRs. They felt that they had made all the concessions; included text 
that ‘content is not covered,’ agreed to human rights language in the 
preamble, and had withdrawn all proposals with explicit mention of the 
Internet, and also the more radical ones that would have taken the ITU 
into ICANN and IETF territory. As a delegate said in exasperation, “It 
is unacceptable that one party to the conference gets everything they 
want and everybody else must make concessions, and after having made 
many concessions we are then asked to suppress the language which was 
agreed to.”

Rather than seeking to give the ITU a new role with regard to the 
Internet, many countries legitimately feared that if the ITRs contained 
nothing at all about the Internet, this would be taken as the basis for 
pulling the ITU back from even its existing Internet-related activities. 
All along, the refrain from the U.S. side had been that it is fine for 
the ITU to keep doing what it already does with respect to the Internet, 
but it would not accept any mention of the Internet in a binding treaty 
like the ITRs. In this background, it was a rather legitimate compromise 
that the Internet be kept out of the ITRs but be mentioned in an 
appended resolution which does not have the force of a treaty. The 
resolution was merely a set of instructions to member states and the 
ITU’s Secretary General for a continuation of existing Internet-related 
activities and role by the ITU.

This resolution mostly repeated agreed language from the World Summit on 
the Information Society (WSIS). It was adopted by a show of hands past 
midnight of December 12, the second-last day of substantive 
negotiations. Its purpose seemed to be to make clear that the absence of 
the Internet from the ITRs should not be seen as taking away the kind of 
role that the ITU already plays in the Internet area, and/or as 
compromising the WSIS mandate in this regard. But the U.S. and its 
allies were very unhappy with the resolution, and the first indication 
of an impending breakdown emerged.

*Right of access*

The real flash point, however, came on December 13, on a proposal to 
include text in the preamble seeking the “right of access of Member 
States to international telecommunication services”. It is difficult to 
see what a global telecommunication treaty would mean without such a 
basic high-level principle. The U.S. took it to be aimed at the 
unilateral trade sanctions that it applies against some countries. Since 
this text had been hotly debated many times during the preceding days, 
and was in and out of the draft, Iran sought a vote on it. A gentleman’s 
agreement at the meeting had indeed been to not go for a vote and seek 
consensus. But an equally important point to note is that the U.S. was 
standing against a simple statement asserting a collective right of 
people. As the proposal to insert this text in the preamble was carried 
77 votes to 33, the U.S. declared it would not sign the treaty. The U.S. 
was immediately followed by the U.K., and the process broke down.

The U.S. does claim in its post-WCIT statements that, apart from the 
above two reasons, it was the inclusion of some language on security of 
networks and spam that made it walk out. However, this language does not 
seek anything that could be taken as getting into content regulation, 
which the U.S. says it is afraid of, especially if read along with the 
clear text in the preamble that excludes content regulation. The WSIS 
had associated security and spam issues with the ITU and the ITU already 
works in these areas.

Even if somewhat contingent, the point of actual breakdown makes a 
telling statement. The U.S. will have to explain why it walked out on 
what was a simple assertion of the right of all countries to access 
global telecommunication services. If it cannot agree to even such a 
basic statement of principle, it has lost all legitimacy for 
overlordship of the global Internet, which it claims as its ‘historic 
role.’ Its legitimacy will now be more easily and openly questioned by 
other countries.

The fallout from Dubai may also significantly compromise the ITU’s role 
in the foreseeable future. The appended ‘Internet resolution,’ which was 
one of the main reasons for the walkout, contains many areas that the 
ITU is working on substantially at present. A very important ITU meeting 
— the World Telecommunication/ICT Policy Forum — to be held in May 2013 
is mostly about the Internet. It remains to be seen how the U.S. and its 
allies will interact with the ITU from now on, especially regarding the 
latter’s Internet related activities.

*Positive agenda*

The real problem with the WCIT was that there was no real positive 
agenda on the table, which is surprising given that we are on the cusp 
of an ICT triggered social revolution. It finally became just a battle 
between two sides, both with a largely negative agenda. One side wanted 
to prevent the U.S. from making a historical point that the Internet is 
to remain an entirely unregulated space — whereby its new global 
domination strategy leveraging its ‘control’ over the Internet remains 
unchecked. The other side was trying to prevent China, Russia /et al/ 
from changing the basic nature of the global Internet into a tightly 
state-controlled space. There was no constituency oriented to any 
positive agenda in the global public interest. The fact that the clash 
ended the way it did was perhaps expected. It can be taken as an 
opportunity for progressive actors — from among civil society and many 
countries from both the South and the North — to begin shaping a 
positive agenda for the global communications realm.

/(Parminder Jeet Singh is Executive Director, IT for Change)/

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