[governance] Ethiopia criminalises the use of VOIP

William Drake william.drake at uzh.ch
Sat Jun 16 07:02:39 EDT 2012 

Hi

Thanks, this is very interesting.  FT is also an important player in ITU and in ETNO, which as you may know is calling within the WCIT negotiations for the International Telecom Regulations to cover IP interconnection, and for all Operating Agencies (not just Administrations) to negotiate commercial agreements based on fair compensation and adequate return on investment for their telecommunications services, including sending party pays.  

Of course we can't jump to conclusions about what was advised by whom, but sometimes data points cluster in ways that, at a minimum, are interesting….

Best,

Bill

On Jun 16, 2012, at 11:35 AM, International Ivission wrote:

> Hi Gael,
> After reading the article http://www.apanews.net/photo/fr/photo.php?id=136408 
>  on France Telecom/Ethiopian Government deal, and knowing what France Telecom is up to in Africa, I may be convinced to believe that someone advised the Government of Ethiopia to criminalize VOIP.
> 
> I am afraid my country Cameroon might run into similar disaster. The government owned Telecom Company is gradually running into private hands.
> 
> How can we avert such situations in the future?  I understand that the ITU stands a better chance of governing the Internet provided some shortcomings are sorted out.
> 
> 
> 
> Excel Asama
> 
> President of
> 
> I-ViSSIon international
> 
> Box 13040 Douala-Cameroon
> 
> Web: www.ivissoin.net
> 
> 
> --- En date de : Sam 16.6.12, Gaël Hernandez <elgaelo at gmail.com> a écrit :
> 
> De: Gaël Hernandez <elgaelo at gmail.com>
> Objet: Re: [governance] Ethiopia criminalises the use of VOIP
> À: governance at lists.igcaucus.org, "William Drake" <william.drake at uzh.ch>
> Date: Samedi 16 juin 2012, 9h09
> 
> What nobody is mentioning is that Sofrecom, a business consulting group owned by France Telecom-Orange, was asked by the Ethiopian Telecommunication Authority to provide interim management at least during 2011 - Google it, it's there.
> 
> Did Sofrecom advice in this direction? Or did the contract finished and the regulator took its own initiative?
> 
> Probably good to know before jumping into conclusions.
> 
> Gaël
> 
> On Jun 16, 2012 10:37 AM, "William Drake" <william.drake at uzh.ch> wrote:
> 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
>>  
>>  
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