AW: [governance] US hearing on International Proposals to Regulate the Internet

"Kleinwächter, Wolfgang" wolfgang.kleinwaechter at medienkomm.uni-halle.de
Mon May 28 04:35:37 EDT 2012


Hello
 
my understanding is that the US Hearing is aimed less on ICANN and CIR oversight und more on ITU, WCIT and ITR. David Gross, who was the head of the US governmental delegation during WSIS II and in Tunis, raised this issue, by ringing the alarm bells, a couple of months ago.  http://www.whoswholegal.com/news/features/article/29378/the-2012-world-conference-international-telecommunications-brewing-storm-potential-un-regulation-internet/ 
 
I participated in the WCIT consultations during the recent WSIS Forum in Room 16 in the ILO Building where ITU´s Alexander Ntoko tried to water down the growing political debate about the renewal of the ITRs from 1988 which is the subject of the "World Conference on International Telecommunication" (WCIT), scheduled for Dubai, December 2012. The debate was partly bizarr. We discussed documents which the majority of the people in the room (around 150) didn´t know. The governmental representative from Iran said that "Internet Governance is not on the agenda of the Dubai conference". But in the next statement he said that IPv6 is part of the agenda and that today "the Internet is everyhwere".  An even more irritating position was taken by the rep from the UAE, the host of the WCIT. I felt that we are back in 2002, during PrepCom1, when CS (together with the PS) was moved out of the room. The UAE rep argued that the governments represent their people and there is no need to give access to documents to non-member states of the ITU. As a private company you can join ITU as a sector member, have to pay a high entrance fee and get access to the documents. If a CS organisations wants to have the documents they should contact their governments, was the recommendnation. As you know, all WCIT conference documents are not accessible. You have to have a TIED account to open the documents and this is reserved to member states only. 
 
The problem with ITR is that the old treaty was drafted by the WATTC in Melbourne 1988 when the Internet was not an issue. It is understandable that such a treaty needs a renewal,. The question is HOW? The ITR are seen as an umbrella treaty for all kinds of transborder telecommunication. It needs ratification and is legally binding. The WCIT Prep Committee had several meetings, the final one will be in June 2012 just at the eve of the ICANN meeting in Prague. It is "behind closed doors". A key problem is that the short text of the ITR regulations include a lot of "definitions". By extending the scope of the "defined categories" for international telecommunication the risk is high that you extend ITRs to the Internet. With other words, if you do not like the existing Internet mechanisms, there is no need to attack them directly, it is much easier to undermine them by introducing an addtional regulatiry layer (in a legally binding form). With the ITR you give governments a legal incentive to "re-nationalize" the Internet and you open the door for a split into a "governmental led part of the Internet" (under the ITU) and a "multistakeholder led part of the Internet" (under ICANN).  
 
The ITU-ICANN relationship is still unsettled and full of mistrust, The ITU (and ICANN) didn´t do anything to implement the ITU resolution from 2010 (Guadalajara) which called for new forms of collaboration. Did the ITU made any serious statement in the UNCSTD consultatitons on "enhanced cooperation"? In Geneva last week it was announced that the ITU will come to the ICANN meeting in Prague. So lets wait an see what they have to say. 
 
 
Here is a para. from my intervention in Geneva::
 
"EU Commissioner Nelly Kroes, in a speech recently in Berlin, called the protest of tens of thousands of people against ACTA a "wake up call for Brussels". The EU obviously starts to realize that in a multistakeholder Internet environment one can no longer negotiate issues of general interests, which affect two billions of Internet users, by governments only behind closed doors. Madame Kroes declared in Berlin that ACTA in its present form can not survive. The ITU should learn from this. If you negotiate the ITRs behind closed doors, we will probably see in 2013 another wave of public protest around the world. Two years ago, nobody knew what ACTA means. Today it is a symbol for a wrong approach to manage global issues related to the Internet. Today nobody knows what ITR means. Tomorrow it could become a symbol for a wrong approach to regulate the Internet. Again: If you want to have a sustainable renewal of the ITRs, open the doors to the ITR negotiations. Otherwise the year 2013 could see a "wake up call for Geneva". 
 
 
Wolfgang
  

________________________________

Von: governance at lists.cpsr.org im Auftrag von Anriette Esterhuysen
Gesendet: Mo 28.05.2012 09:21
An: governance at lists.cpsr.org
Betreff: Re: [governance] US hearing on International Proposals to Regulate the Internet



Thanks for posting this, Jeremy.
Not very promising. And I wonder which proposals they are going to
discuss. Personally I don't think that any proposals to date, not CIRP
or IBSA or IT for Change or others made on Sunday qualify as proposals
for 'regulating the internet'.

Perhaps the Saudi Arabia comments are closest to this direction.

Countries who proposed UN oversight on the 18th, such as South Africa
and Iran always qualified that they are arguing for intergovernmental
oversight of internet public policy and that this role should not
include technical management of the internet. It is in fact the 'public
policy oversight' that I am concerned about, particularly as they are
proposing to locate this in the ITU.

The distorted FCC reaction to talk of the ITU taking over and
'regulating' the internet only sets serious discussion about
international cooperation, and rooting internet policy in existing
international agreements, back.

It has also been clear from following this process that governments that
were open to non-ITU options are increasingly going for a pro-ITU option
because their concerns are not taken seriously in other spaces.

Anriette



On 28/05/2012 04:56, Jeremy Malcolm wrote:
> Speaking of inclusive and multi-stakeholder debates on Internet
> governance reform, this will not be happening on 31 May at the US House
> Committee on Energy and Commerce, when there will be a hearing on
> "International Proposals to Regulate the Internet" with the following
> (closed) list of witnesses:
>
> The Honorable Robert McDowell
> Commissioner
> Federal Communications Commission
>
> The Honorable David A. Gross
> Former U.S. Coordinator
> International Communications and Information Policy
>
> Ms. Sally Shipman Wentworth
> Senior Manager, Public Policy
> Internet Society
>
> http://energycommerce.house.gov/hearings/hearingdetail.aspx?NewsID=9543
>
> The event will be streamed at http://energycommerce.house.gov/ and it
> may be worth at least following and tweeting about it (there is a tweet
> box on the front page of the site).
>
> As an aside, the Energy and Commerce Committee site is full of partisan
> slurs again "Obamacare", environmentalists, anti-nuclear activists and
> the like.
>
> We can expect the depth of intellectual debate at this hearing to rise
> to the level of "America invented the Internet, we don't want no UN
> bureaucrats from Iran or China meddling with it!".
>

--
------------------------------------------------------
anriette esterhuysen anriette at apc.org
executive director, association for progressive communications
www.apc.org
po box 29755, melville 2109
south africa
tel/fax +27 11 726 1692
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