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

[William Drake]

Wow, talk about missing the point…who has said it's about ICANN?


On Jun 6, 2012, at 11:14 AM, Pranesh Prakash wrote:

> <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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