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

Mon May 28 04:52:09 EDT 2012

Reposting Wolfgang's excellent analysis to the correct list address.

My interpretation of the ITU's comments on the 18th was as follows:

'If governments want more oversight and EC in IG, come to the ITU, we
can give it to them' (paraphrased and interpreted)

It might be worth discussing which aspects of internet technical
governance overlaps with the work of the ITU. Can someone post on this?
 There must be some elements emerging from the convergence between
telecoms and IP that the ITU must address?

As for the transparency. Definitely Wolfgang.. ITRs should not be
renegotiated behind closed doors. Therefore the letter that several CSOs
sent to Mr. Toure on 17 May.

Anriette

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: AW: [governance] US hearing on International Proposals to
Regulate the Internet
Date: Mon, 28 May 2012 10:35:37 +0200
From: "Kleinwächter, Wolfgang"
<wolfgang.kleinwaechter at medienkomm.uni-halle.de>
To: governance at lists.cpsr.org, Anriette Esterhuysen <anriette at apc.org>,
governance at lists.cpsr.org

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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