[governance] Ethiopia criminalises the use of VOIP

[William Drake]

MM

This is an example of where your argument that ITU does not matter only national governments do sort of frays at the edges.  The issue with the former is not just whether treaties get signed that have binding effect and are backed up by sanctioning mechanisms, and if they don't we can declare the organization to be a paper tiger and anyone who expresses concerns about it a witless dupe of corporate scare mongers.  Like other international organizations, ITU is also a space in which a great deal of collective learning, community building, and decentralized policy convergence takes place.  Long and iterative meetings are held and reports written on NGN, security, standards, accounting and settlements, whatever, and participants sit in a room and learn from peers and have to consider and explain what they are or aren't doing.  Given the symmetry of interests among many players, the natural result is that ideas and information get taken back home and acted on, and by the next cycle of meetings they're able to report back that they're doing xyz to address the collectively identified issue and are therefore a member in good standing of the concerned community.  And when enough governments, telcos and manufacturers start to do this on important issues, you can reach a point where policy spaces are being ordered, i.e. governed, on a decentralized basis with varying degrees of transnational consistency irrespective of the absence of a formally negotiated instrument.  That's why the OECD matters a lot even when not negotiating agreements.  Which is I guess a long winded way of saying economistic contractarian theories of international institutions miss much of the action that constructivist ones capture, and thereby present distorted pictures.

In the particular case of VOIP restrictions, I attended the WTPF 2001 on Internet Telephony.  The ITU had produced various backgrounders and meeting reports saying that it's a major challenge for national 'administrations' that——together with the GATS, FCC Benchmark Order, and new modes of operation (call-back, resale, refile and hubbing, country-direct, country-beyond, calling cards, international simple resale) was collapsing the accounting and settlement system and rapidly suppressing foreign exchange earnings.  (Some in secretariat took the progressive line that reforms were needed to accommodate VOIP, but that was hardly a universal view in the membership.)  This was building on long discussions in ITU-T looking into all these issues, as well as the WTPF in 1998 on trade in telecom.  In this charged context, dozens of delegates at WTPF 2001 from across the developing world but particularly from Africa and the Middle East got up to say that they had adopted or were going to adopt bans on Internet telephony.  Of course, restrictions weren't always easy to enforce, and one ITU study at the time summarized that 'in most developing countries, governments choose to block outgoing VOIP traffic while being unable to block incoming VOIP.'   Subsequently, Skype took off and there was eventually some accommodation on revenue sharing for calls that break out into the PSTN, but a lot of countries' governments continued to take a rather dim view, and to talk to counterparts in ITU that felt the same.  

So all of this is just background, but it adds some context to the continuing propensity of some governments to periodically step out with self-defeating regulatory actions.  In a tightly woven international system, no country is an island.  And if the final WCIT text were to include some of the more problematic current proposals (e.g. declaring Internet to be telecom and subject to ITU instruments, applying the regulations to all 'operators,' defining and restricting 'misuse of number resources', making ITU a registry, requiring 'fair compensation' arrangements for IP traffic and yes, banning alternative calling arrangements) there'd be some countries that would take this as mandate for national policies and bilateral relations irrespective of whether OECD governments take broad Reservations.  So if down the line more countries announce bans and regulations Internet-related activities that have been debated intensively for over a decade, I'm not entirely sure I'd declare that this has nothing to do with the ITU.

Best,

Bill




On Jun 15, 2012, at 8:49 PM, Milton L Mueller wrote:

> <irony>
> How could they possibly do this before the ITU has taken over the Internet through the new ITRs?
> </irony>
>  
> From: governance-request at lists.igcaucus.org [mailto:governance-request at lists.igcaucus.org] On Behalf Of Wilson Abigaba
> Sent: Friday, June 15, 2012 4:46 AM
> To: governance at lists.igcaucus.org
> Subject: [governance] Ethiopia criminalises the use of VOIP
>  
> I think this is yet another dark day for internet users in Ethiopia, 
>  
> A new law in Ethiopia has criminalised the use of VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) services such as Skype. Users could face up to 15 years of jail time. The law was passed May 24th, but the story wasn't picked up by international media until recently
>  
> http://stream.aljazeera.com/story/ethiopia-skype-me-maybe-0022243
>  
>  
> ____________________________________________________________
> You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
>     governance at lists.igcaucus.org
> To be removed from the list, visit:
>     http://www.igcaucus.org/unsubscribing
> 
> For all other list information and functions, see:
>     http://lists.igcaucus.org/info/governance
> To edit your profile and to find the IGC's charter, see:
>     http://www.igcaucus.org/
> 
> Translate this email: http://translate.google.com/translate_t

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.igcaucus.org/pipermail/governance/attachments/20120616/ca317ebf/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
____________________________________________________________
You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
     governance at lists.igcaucus.org
To be removed from the list, visit:
     http://www.igcaucus.org/unsubscribing

For all other list information and functions, see:
     http://lists.igcaucus.org/info/governance
To edit your profile and to find the IGC's charter, see:
     http://www.igcaucus.org/

Translate this email: http://translate.google.com/translate_t