[governance] India's second update ..

[parminder]

On Tuesday 04 December 2012 11:24 PM, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:
> Tis, after minister Sibal held a bunch of multistakeholder 
> consultations, and then blandly said that while there was no time to 
> submit changed documents, India's viewpoints at WCIT would not let the 
> ITU be involved in igov,

The minister said no such thing. He said that it is certainly not 
India's intention that ITU gets into content regulation, and if there is 
any misconception about it coming from the existing language they are 
ready to amend it to that extent.

I inter alia suggested at the meeting with the minister that language 
promoting freedom of expression be proposed for the preamble to the 
ITRs, and promised to provide such language. The enclosed was submitted 
to the minister's office a few days back....

As the enclosed submission suggests, we remain rather concerned that 
while ENTO like specific proposals will surely not go through, some more 
cleverly and lightly put language, as we saw in the Indian proposal, 
that opens the door for a 'sender pays' regime in the future, may still 
get in.

/* It is our view that the greatest loss coming from the WCIT and new 
ITRs could such kind of language that is not very specific, but suggests 
the possibility of a sender pays regime in the future. It would at least 
give an anti net neutrality signal to the regulators at the national 
levels. */

In order to protect net neutrality, it is not enough for civil society 
to oppose ETNO proposal. Everyone knows that without regulation, net 
neutrality cannot survive. It will certainly be violated. Market forces 
left to themselves will undoubtedly move towards a non net neutral 
Internet. And therefore the only way to save net neutrality is to get a 
global agreement on net neutrality as an essential, or at least 
important, principle. ITRs,, and I quote from the text of the existing 
ITRs,

    'establish general principles which relate to the provision and
    operation of international telecommunication services'


Therefore, the ITRs is the right place to get net neutrality, as a key 
principle of an egalitarian Internet, mentioned as a global norm. 
Unfortunately, even the civil society did not fight for it - so anxious 
it has been to keep 'the Internet out of the ITRs'. In having done so 
they may have given up the case of global net neutrality - something 
that was recently identified as a key cross border Internet policy issue 
by an experts group of the Council of Europe.

We did suggest to the Indian delegation to insert pro net neutrality 
language as below ( instead of the problematic text that is there at 
present in the Indian position. )

/*Member States should endeavour to take measures to ensure that there 
is no discrimination by network operators vis a vis different sources of 
content, and the principle of net neutrality, including in terms of 
global inter-connections, is upheld as far as possible. */



But without any support even from the civil society for such a position 
we dont see much chance of this text getting in.


parminder










> and would support the multistakeholder model
>
> Now we have http://news.dot-nxt.com/itu/wcit/ind/20/2 .. A single 
> paragraph that seems to imply that one government shouldn't ddos the 
> other.
>
> Sheesh.
>
> --srs (iPad)

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