WCIT is Over. Who Won? Nobody Knows.

After two weeks of negotiations, the delegates at the World Conference on International Telecommunications in Dubai produced a 30-page document that 89 countries have signed—except the United States and many allies. So the good guys won, right? It depends who you ask.

“The good guys did not win—the terms are defined in such a way as to allow a significant amount of mischief in the Internet space,” said Vint Cerf, the co-author of the TCP/IP protocol, and a founding father of the Internet itself. Of course, not everyone sees it that way. “The ‘good guys’ (the US, and its allies including Canada and the UK) succeeded in keeping the [International Telecommunication Regulations] away from the Internet, and yet inexplicably chose to dump the whole thing at the end,” Milton Mueller, a professor at the Syracuse University School of Information Studies, told Ars. “This was a mistake, in my humble opinion, and will make us look isolated.” For some odd reason, the only official list of countries that did or didn't sign the agreement at the conference is this French-language chart. Assuming it's correct, the "Final Acts" at WCIT-12 has 89 signatories, including Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Mali, Senegal, Venezuela, Jamaica, Jordan, Singapore, and many others. Who didn't sign? The US, the UK, Canada, the European Union, Peru, the Philippines, Malawi, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, India, and others.