On the Results at the WCIT

[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.