[governance] Techcrunch | Is The U.N. Really Trying To Take Over The Internet? Nope.

[Pranesh Prakash]

<http://goo.gl/Y9V7U>

Is The U.N. Really Trying To Take Over The Internet? Nope.
==========================================================

By Frederic Lardinois


At a U.S. House of Representatives hearing earlier this week, a number of
government officials from both sides of the aisle, as well as Google’s
chief Internet evangelist and inventor of the TCP/IP protocol Vint Cerf,
warned that the U.N.’s [International Telecommunication Union][] (ITU)
could try to wrestle control away from the U.S.-centric [ICANN][] and “take
control of the Internet.” For the most part, all of these fears are
completely speculative at this point and as the ITU’s secretary-general
[Hamadoun I. Touré][] himself clearly [pointed out][] earlier this year,
“this is simply ridiculous.”

Here is some background on why these fears keep popping up: this December,
the ITU is scheduled to convene at a [major summit][] in Dubai, the World
Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT). During this summit,
the ITU’s International Telecommunication Regulations (ITR) treaty, which
was adopted all the way back in 1988 is up for revision. These regulations
have guided how the organization’s members organize international telecom
services ever since. While this treaty has been widely heralded for jump
starting the widespread telecom deregulation in the 1990s, it obviously
predated widespread usage of the Internet and is overdue for revision.

The ITU has a membership of 193 countries and over 700 private-sector
entities and academic institutions (including, for example, Apple and
Cisco, but not Google). Its mission is to coordinate the [international
radio-frequency spectrum][] and satellite orbits, as well as the
development of standards for Internet access, voice and video compression
and related issues. In total, the ITU produces or revises more than 200
standards per year. Last but not least, the ITU’s development sector is
chartered with assisting developing countries in gaining access to
information and telecommunications technologies and help narrowing the
digital divide.

Given the commotion around last week’s hearings in the U.S., I talked to
ITU senior communications officer Toby Johnson late last week to get the
ITU’s perspective on this controversy. As he noted in our conversation,
part of the reason why there is a lot of confusion about the ITU
potentially trying to wrestle control away from ICANN (and, by extension,
the U.S.), is that there tends to be a lot of confusion around how the ITU
actually works. The ITRs are, he stressed, not binding regulations but a
treaty between the ITU’s member states. The member states then have to
implement them through national legislation. They don’t surrender their
national rights to the ITU or U.N. by being part of the ITU.

Another reason why this controversy keeps coming up – and will likely
continue to do so until at least the Dubai summit – is that the proposals
the member states are currently submitting for the revision are not public.
So far, Johnson tells me, the states have submitted about 180 pages worth
of proposals. While we can’t know what’s in those proposals, the ITU is
willing to say that there is nothing in them so far that even comes close
to threatening ICANN’s position.

The U.S., by virtue of being a member state of ITU, has access to these
documents and in a [widely circulated memo][] (PDF) from earlier this year,
the U.S. government itself admitted that it’s quite happy with how the
preliminary preparations for the summit have proceeded and that “there are
no pending proposals to invest the ITU with ICANN-like Internet governance
authority.”

A proposal that would try to take some control away from ICANN could, of
course, be submitted before the summit, but even if that happened, it’s
unlikely that it would ever get past the proposal stage given that ITU
decisions are made by consensus (though they don’t have to be unanimous).

It’s worth noting, too, that there are far more important issues at stake
at the Dubai meeting anyway. Instead of attacking ICANN’s position, the
meeting will likely focus on questions about taxation, roaming,
interoperability, network neutrality, how to get more broadband access to
developing countries and other more pressing issues.

If U.S. government officials and folks like Vint Cerf then keep saying no
to U.N. government control of the Internet, they do so knowing that they
are playing a pretty safe game given how unlikely this scenario really is.
Given that people from across the political spectrum in the U.S. feel a
certain unease about all things related to the U.N., it’s hard not to look
at this as political gamesmanship that values this kind of rhetoric more
than a rational debate over how the Internet should be governed.


Links
-----
  [International Telecommunication Union]:
<http://www.itu.int/en/Pages/default.aspx>
  [ICANN]: <http://www.icann.org/>
  [Hamadoun I. Touré]: <http://www.itu.int/en/osg/Pages/biography.aspx>
  [pointed out]: <http://www.itu.int/en/osg/speeches/Pages/2012-05-01.aspx>
  [major summit]:
<http://www.itu.int/ITU-R/index.asp?category=conferences&rlink=wrc-12&lang=en>
  [international radio-frequency spectrum]: <http://www.itu.int/itu-r>
  [widely circulated memo]:
<http://www.internetgovernance.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/WCIT-12-Memo-1-23-12.pdf>

-- 
Pranesh Prakash  · Programme Manager · Centre for Internet and Society
@pranesh_prakash · PGP ID 0x1D5C5F07 · http://cis-india.org

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