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

Mon May 28 12:38:54 EDT 2012

To support Milton's blogpost and main point: ipso facto, if ITU's International Telecommunications Regulations (note the 'R' word) are the subject to talks to extend them to the Internet; ie WCIT - then the hearing on 'international proposals to regulate the Internet' has a perfectly reasonable title.   

It's also no surprise the House committee will hold a hearing on that topic and invite the usual suspects of an FCC Commissioner, Ambassador Gross, and ISOC to discuss.

And finally, as Milton noted,  the ITU has always been trying to get in the international Internet regulation game, after unsuccessfully attempting to squash the Net like a bug, back at the dawn of Internet time.  

The level of mobilization of business is unsurprising to me, since as Parminder notes, the Internet is among other things, big business these days.  

Lee

________________________________________
From: governance-request at lists.igcaucus.org [governance-request at lists.igcaucus.org] on behalf of Milton L Mueller [mueller at syr.edu]
Sent: Monday, May 28, 2012 11:37 AM
To: governance at lists.igcaucus.org
Subject: RE: [governance] US hearing on International Proposals to Regulate the Internet

I was at the Google Internet at Liberty conference in Washington DC last week, which had a surprising number of international participants.
ITU and WCIT was a major topic there, including a debate with an ITU rep.
The discussions there prompted me to write this analysis:
http://www.internetgovernance.org/2012/05/24/threat-analysis-of-itus-wcit-part-1-historical-context/

The US hearing would be of course about WCIT, not ICANN and DNS, IP addresses. As you can tell from my blog post, I find it a bit difficult to understand the level of mobilization going on here.

> -----Original Message-----
>
> 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=954
> > 3
> >
> > 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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