Behind closed doors at the UN's attempted "takeover of the Internet

[Commentary] The first few days of the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) were mostly, for me, spent figuring out how everything worked.

The highest-level meeting was the Plenary, which established several committees, of which Committee 5 (COM5) did the substantive work of revising treaty text. COM5 established two working groups that split up the treaty text between them. At each official meeting, the name of the game was consensus. Where consensus could not be reached on a particular issue, an ad hoc group was created to deal with that issue. The ad hoc group would spend additional time trying to forge a consensus. If a particular meeting could not find language that every member state could agree to, it would report back to the next-highest level meeting with the contentious text in square brackets. The first five days of the conference followed a pattern. Any issue not immediately agreed to on the first day was referred to COM5. Any issue not immediately agreed to in COM5 was referred to a working group, which referred them to ad hoc groups. Because there was little consensus, the ad hoc groups reported back to the working groups with proposals that were filled with brackets, and this bracketed text likewise worked its way back up through COM5 to the Plenary.

The host country United Arab Emirates (UAE) dropped a bombshell. It announced that it was putting forward a new “multi-regional common proposal,” a complete rewrite of the treaty to substitute for all the bracketed text we had worked on. It had support from numerous member states. Bahrain, Russia, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Oman all expressed support for the document, which was not yet available for inspection.