The ITU WCIT And Internet Freedom

[Commentary] Very few people ever heard of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) until recently – and with good reason. For more than 100 years, the ITU managed quite nicely serving as the forum for countries and telecom carriers to coordinate insanely-technical-mind-numbingly-boring-but-really-really-important stuff related to making the phone network work internationally, distributing satellite slots, and trying to harmonize what frequencies countries allocate to what services. But now the ITU has suddenly become very interesting.

Why? Because the ITU members will hold a rare meeting -- the World Conference on International Communications (WCIT) – where the 193 member countries will vote on whether to amend the current ITU rules ("ITRs") that set the framework for all this extremely important boringness. Unclear for now – especially in the pre-game – is whether and how the WCIT represents a potential threat to freedom of expression online. Even without the concern that the ITU will somehow “take over the Internet,” certain WCIT proposals advanced by a number of regimes that engage in Internet censorship threaten the future of free expression online. These proposals, from the Russian Federation and several Arab states, would for the first time explicitly embrace the concept that governments have a right to control online communications and disrupt Internet access services. This would reverse the trend of the last few years increasingly finding that such actions violate fundamental human rights – a valuable tool in trying to pressure repressive regimes to stop using such tactics.