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

[Anriette Esterhuysen]

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 09:30, 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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