[governance] UN Non-Takeover Of The Net: ITU’s Touré Calls For Documents To Be Public

[Riaz K Tayob]

    UN Non-Takeover Of The Net: ITU’s Touré Calls For Documents To Be
    Public

Published on 20 June 2012 @ 10:36 pm

EmailShare Print This Post 
<http://www.ip-watch.org/2012/06/20/un-non-takeover-of-the-net-itus-toure-calls-for-docs-to-be-public/print/> 
Print This Post 
<http://www.ip-watch.org/2012/06/20/un-non-takeover-of-the-net-itus-toure-calls-for-docs-to-be-public/print/> 


By Monika Ermert <http://www.ip-watch.org/author/monika/> for 
Intellectual Property Watch

UN International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Secretary General 
Hamadoun Touré today in Geneva announced he would propose to the ITU 
Council later this month to make the draft documents for the 
much-debated International Telecommunication Regulations (ITR) publicly 
accessible.

According to participants at today’s meeting 
<http://www.itu.int/council/groups/cwg-wcit12/index.html>, Touré said he 
would also recommend a public consultation on the draft ITR, to be held 
during the last preparatory meeting for the December World Conference on 
International Telecommunication (WCIT) 
<http://www.itu.int/en/wcit-12/Pages/default.aspx> at which the ITR will 
be updated.

With this initiative, Touré is answering ever louder calls for access to 
ITR negotiations. He referred to an open letter 
<https://www.cdt.org/letter-for-civil-society-involvement-in-WCIT> from 
civil society sent to him about the issue in May and said, member 
states, too, could hold consultations on the controversial treaty. The 
Netherlands has already done so.

There was near-unanimous support for the opening up, with some member 
states urging not to wait for the Council meeting. The US delegation 
said that they had already made documents available.

Details on the upcoming Council meeting are here 
<http://www.itu.int/council/C2012/index.html>.

By opening up the documents, member state representatives also hope to 
address concerns that the ITR would lead to more ITU control over the net.

Touré strongly rejected the notion that the ITRs would impact the free 
flow of information. Restrictions on communication have been foreseen by 
governments in Article 34 of the ITU constitution, and according to 
Touré, such restrictions are in place in most member states to protect 
against copyright piracy, defamation, hate speech and also certain forms 
of political speech.

Touré also defended plans to address interconnection and traffic cost in 
the ITR, arguing that connectivity is still too expensive in many 
developing counties and international mobile roaming prices were seen as 
too high by many.

Yet the idea of a “sender pays” regime and potential limitations to a 
completely agnostic and neutral data transport network have resulted in 
stern warnings from the internet services and platform providers.

In the push for more transparency, a WCIT leaks website 
<http://wcitleaks.org/> was set up.

A first background brief on the WCIT has been published by the ITU 
secretariat here 
<http://www.itu.int/en/wcit-12/Documents/WCIT-background-brief1.pdf> [pdf].

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.igcaucus.org/pipermail/governance/attachments/20120621/960c1581/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: printer_famfamfam.gif
Type: image/gif
Size: 1035 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.igcaucus.org/pipermail/governance/attachments/20120621/960c1581/attachment.gif>
-------------- 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