[Chapter-delegates] FCC Commissioner McDowell testimony on ITRs

[Joly MacFie]

http://www.cable360.net/ct/51207.html

Speaking before the Subcommittee on Financial Services and General
Government of the House Committee on Appropriations yesterday, Republican
FCC Commissioner Robert M. McDowell laid out his agency's plans

<snip>

*>> International Regulation of the Internet*

"The Internet has historically flourished within a deregulatory regime not
only within our country but internationally as well. In fact, the
long-standing international consensus has been to keep governments from
regulating core functions of the Internet’s ecosystem.

"Unfortunately, some nations, such as China, Russia, India, Iran and Saudi
Arabia, have been pushing to reverse this consensus by giving the
International Telecommunication Union (ITU) regulatory jurisdiction over
Internet governance.

"In 1988, delegates from 114 countries gathered in Australia to agree to a
treaty that set the stage for dramatic liberalization of international
telecommunications. As a result, the Internet was insulated from government
control and quickly became the greatest deregulatory success story of all
time.

"Today, however, several countries within the 193 member states of the ITU
want to renegotiate the 1988 treaty to expand its reach into previously
unregulated areas. A few specifics are as follows:

• Subject cyber security and data privacy to international control;
• Allow foreign phone companies to charge fees for ‘international’ Internet
traffic, perhaps even on a ‘per-click’ basis for certain Web destinations,
with the goal of generating revenue for state-owned phone companies and
government treasuries;
• Impose unprecedented economic regulations such as mandates for rates,
terms and conditions for currently unregulated traffic-swapping agreements
known as ‘peering;’
• Establish for the first time ITU dominion over important functions of
multi-stakeholder Internet governance entities such as the Internet
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the nonprofit entity that
coordinates the .com and .org Web addresses of the world;
• Subsume under intergovernmental control many functions of the Internet
Engineering Task Force, the Internet Society and other multi-stakeholder
groups that establish the engineering and technical standards that allow
the Internet to work; and
• Regulate international mobile roaming rates and practices.

"These efforts could ultimately partition the Internet between countries
that live under an intergovernmental regulatory regime and those member
states that decide to opt out. Such a legal structure would be devastating
to global free trade and rising living standards. It would also create an
engineering morass."



(love the expression "engineering morass" :)

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