December 2012

Ambassador Terry Kramer said the United States will be working "day and night" to ensure new Internet regulations are kept out of a United Nations treaty.

"Fundamentally the conference, to us, should not be dealing with the Internet sector," Ambassador Kramer told reporters on a conference call from Dubai, where the treaty is being negotiated at a conference hosted by the United Nations International Telecommunications Union. He is leading the U.S. delegation at the conference. Ambassador Kramer shot down a report that the U.S. and Canada failed to win backing from other countries for a proposal to keep the Internet out of the treaty. The two countries are pushing to keep the focus of the negotiations on telecommunications networks, so that the updated rules would only apply to major operators like AT&T and Verizon. He said the U.S. opposed a Russian proposal that calls for national governments to assume greater authority over key Internet functions, such as assigning domain names.

[Commentary] As the ITU's World Conference on International Telecommunications ("WCIT") gets underway, it's clear that the efforts by global civil society groups on behalf of transparency and free expression have had at least something of an impact.

Most importantly for those wanting to follow the discussions at home, the ITU agreed to webcast is plenary sessions and the meetings of the "Review Committee," which is the committee that will be discussing proposed changes to the International Telecommunications Regulations ("ITRs"). And it's nice to note that Hamadoun Touré, the Secretary General of the ITU, emphasized the involvement of civil society in his opening remarks (including a mention of Public Knowledge by name). On more substantive matters, the plenary session debated for an hour on how best to express the importance of free expression within the language of the ITRs, and to reassure the world that nothing done at the WCIT will compromise that fundamental right.

[Commentary] At the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai, delegates will consider proposals to amend the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs,) binding rules that govern telecommunications network practices around the world.

While ITRs are currently limited to the telephone network, several WCIT proposals would expand their scope, making them apply broadly across the entire Internet ecosystem. The ITRs were last amended in 1988, before the Internet was a public system and before many of the most important telecommunications systems and networks we use today were even invented. ITRs have not historically applied to the Internet, which has developed its own international governance institutions, so it’s peculiar that some nations want to extend them so radically at this stage. In the new world of mobile networks and the Internet, the commercial sector is the network operator and each nation makes its own regulations governing networks. Shifting control of regulatory policy to a global body of regulators pressed by nations with parochial and often mercantilist Interests is not an improvement. If any change needs to be made at all in the ITRs with respect to the Internet, it should be limited to creating a firewall between the authority of ITU and the operation of the Internet. The Internet’s organic governance system has proved to be quite effective, in no small part due to its close proximity to the Internet’s technical standards and business practices. Technologies that enable rapid rates of change need the ability to adapt to changing conditions quickly; an international treaty organization that convenes once every fifteen years does not fit the bill. The ITU is facing obsolescence as we begin to retire the telephone networks that have been its sole focus since the phase-out of the telegraph, but this existential crisis does not justify a wholesale restructuring of Internet governance.

The US telephone network the Bell System built and ran for almost a century is dying, replaced by technology that propels Internet messages. Rules underpinning that old order should expire with it, AT&T says.

Its argument has skipped from state capital to state capital and could arrive in force at the Federal Communications Commission, which is considering a request from the modern-day AT&T to establish test zones where rules of the Ma Bell era wouldn’t apply. “We have to be able to start this transition from the old to the new,” Jim Cicconi, AT&T senior executive vice president, said Nov. 27 during a discussion at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based policy group. “The underlying statutes really aren’t designed for the current situation.” The debate over whether rules of the copper-line era should apply to today’s fiber-optic and Internet-based networks centers on the changes in an industry whose service for decades was guaranteed by government rules, rather than driven by competition.