December 2012

The Internet seems to be an even more divisive than cold-war ideology.

The World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai, where the ITU met to renegotiate the ITR, ended in failure in the early hours of December 14th. The main issue was to what extent the internet should feature in the treaty. America and its allies wanted to keep it from being so much as mentioned—mainly out of fear that any reference to it whatsoever would embolden governments to censor the internet and meddle with its infrastructure. America’s willingness to stand up for the internet should be welcomed. But it has to be said that in doing so it also defended its interests: no other country benefits as much from the status quo in the online world.

Since much of the internet’s infrastructure is based in America and most of its traffic zips through it, America is in a unique position to eavesdrop, should it be so inclined. America’s internet firms also capture most of the profit pool of the online industry. The immediate impact of the WCIT’s failure will be minor. In the medium term, however, the outcome of the conference in Dubai will weaken the ITU—which may not be such a good thing. Among all the controversy it was forgotten that the organization actually does very useful work, for instance in managing the international radio-frequency spectrum and developing technical standards. And some of the good ideas about which the delegations could agree may now fail to come to fruition.

The most important result of the conference has been to demonstrate that the world now splits into two camps when it comes to the internet: one is comprised of more authoritarian countries, which would like to turn back the clock and regain sovereignty over their own national bits of the internet; the other wants to keep the internet and its governance as it is. This sounds much like a digital version of the cold war. The funny thing is that the leading countries in the two camps are the same two that were at loggerheads until the iron curtain parted. One must hope that the failure of the WCIT is not a first step towards raising a digital one.

[Commentary] So a considerable number of countries, including the United States, have refused to sign the new International Telecommunication Regulations ("ITRs"), which together form a new version of the international treaty on telecommunications. More have indicated they will need further instructions from their national capitals before deciding whether or not to sign.

In the end, the new ITRs and the documents circulated with them contain a number of provisions that seem to have raised enough concerns for the United States, Canada, the UK, New Zealand, Australia, Sweden, Costa Rica, and Denmark, at least, to refuse to sign them.

These provisions include:

• A paragraph in the Preamble stating the Member States have the right to access international telecommunications services;
• An article (5A) on the "Security and robustness of networks";
• An Article (5B) on "Unsolicited bulk electronic communications";
• A Resolution (3) entitled "To foster an enabling environment for the greater growth of the Internet" that recommends the ITU "play an active role in the development of broadband and the multistakeholder model of the Internet. (Note that the resolutions aren't formally parts of the ITRs, but they accompany them)

These map to a large extent, though not exactly, to specific issues that the United States mentioned in its press conference as being "critical" to its position:

• Internet governance can only be handled by multi-stakeholder organizations;
• Spam, a form of unsolicited bulk communication, is nonetheless also a form of content, and regulating it at the international level could lead to regulation of other forms of content and speech;
• The ITRs aren't the right place to address network security issues, since they can easily have bad effects on communications without actually improving security;
• The Internet Resolution was a direct extension of the ITU's scope to the Internet, despite early assurances that this was not on the table.

A new Resolution tabled at the World Conference on International Telecommunications underlines the importance for travelers to be aware of a single well-known number to access local emergency services if the need ever arises. The formulation of the Resolution at WCIT-12 instructs the Director of the Telecommunication Standardization Bureau to take the necessary action in order that ITU-T Study Group 2 can continue exploring the option of introducing a single globally harmonized emergency number for access to emergency services in the future. During the WCIT-12 negotiations, a preliminary draft of the proposed Resolution was tabled to Member States. The Resolution – which is a standard mechanism by which a conference instructs its subordinate organs and the executive to take some form of action – invites Member States to introduce, in addition to their existing national emergency numbers, a globally harmonized national number for access to emergency services, taking into consideration the relevant ITU-T Recommendations.

On December 13, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies sent a letter to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski urging the FCC to develop a robust record on minority and female broadcast media ownership before it considers relaxing rules intended to promote media ownership diversity. The Joint center notes the recent release of the FCC’s broadcast ownership report, but said the report does not contain reliable data dispositive of either how relaxing the FCC’s media ownership rules will favor minority and female broadcast ownership or whether relaxing the rules would not buttress existing market entry barriers.