[Chapter-delegates] NEWS ARTICLE: Forbes: Why is the UN Trying to Take over the Internet?

[Carlos A. Afonso]

And unfortunately repetitive...

--c.a.

On 08/09/2012 07:38 PM, Ken Krechmer wrote:
> In my view, a very poor and ridiculously biased article.
> As noted the ITU is a treaty organization of the UN.  That is, its
> members are national governments, not people or non-governmental
> organizations.  The ITU is not a regulator, which regulates some aspect
> within a nation.  The strongest document the ITU can produce is a
> "recommendation."  The ITU is an international standardization
> organization (one of three, the other two are IEC and ISO) which
> produces recommendations which do not have the regulatory force of
> national standards. In addition the ITU is strongly consensus based, not
> majority rule.   There is no way the ITU can, or wishes to (see
> interview http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8vsgV5jQKE), "take over the
> Internet".
> 
> While the above is accurate, it does not address the desires of
> individual countries to exert control over the Internet, sometimes for
> reasons that are not in line with US values.  In is in this case that
> the ISOC should be vigilant and active in maintaining the independence
> of the Internet.  The ITU is an excellent forum for the US and other
> countries to do just that.
> 
> Please don't cast the ITU as the problem. Specific individual countries,
> who also limit the ITU's ability to distribute all documents. are the
> problem.  The ITU is the messenger and a forum that has been successful
> for almost 150 years, in keeping individual countries from limiting
> communications.
> 
> Ken Krechmer
> SFBayISOC Chapter Treasurer
> 
> Full disclosure:  I have participated in ITU technical standardization
> committee meetings since the late 1970's
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> cover at isoc.org wrote:
>> Below is an article from Forbes that focuses on several hot topics
>> pertaining to WCIT, including the issue of ITU control over the
>> Internet. The Internet Society is referenced throughout the article.
>>
>> Forbes: Why is the UN Trying to Take over the Internet?
>> By Larry Downes, August 9, 2012
>>
>> http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrydownes/2012/08/09/why-the-un-is-trying-to-take-over-the-internet/
>>
>>
>> Yet another anachronistic regulator is trying to flex its muscles over
>> the Internet. But this time the U.S. government is actually the one
>> trying to stop them.
>>
>> That’s right. It’s the United Nations. Specifically, the International
>> Telecommunications Union, a 150 year-old bureaucracy that started life
>> establishing telegraph standards. The ITU has since mutated into
>> coordinating international telephone interconnection and radio
>> spectrum, and became part of the U.N. in 1947. But it has never had a
>> meaningful role in dealing with the Internet.
>>
>> At least until now.
>>
>> That could change dramatically later this year, when 193 member
>> nations and hundreds of non-voting private members will meet in Dubai
>> for the World Conference on International Telecommunications, or WCIT.
>> The goal of the WCIT is to finalize changes to the International
>> Telecommunications Regulations, an international treaty on
>> communications.
>>
>> The last major revisions to the ITRs were ratified in 1988, long
>> before the rise of the commercial Internet. But with months to go
>> before proposed changes to the ITR are closed, member nations and
>> private members of the ITU have already begun lobbying for a vast
>> expansion of Internet powers, including new network taxes, mandatory
>> censorship technologies disguised as security measures, and efforts to
>> undermine the Internet’s longstanding engineering-based governance
>> processes.
>>
>> Worse, Internet users who object to proposed changes may not even know
>> what to complain about or who to complain to. Following ITU rules, the
>> proposals are being circulated and deliberated in secret, making it
>> difficult to know what is being proposed and who users can hold
>> accountable.
>>
>> Fortunately, researchers at George Mason University created
>> WCITLeaks.org for users, advocates, and others with a stake in the
>> outcome of the WCIT. Since June, WCITLeak’s creators, Jerry Brito and
>> Eli Dourado, have published dozens of documents–many of them
>> leaked–exposing some of the worst proposals.
>>
>> Caught flat-footed, the ITU’s governing Council half-heartedly agreed
>> to publish just one of the documents already leaked, with the names of
>> members making the proposals redacted. ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun
>> Toure called that move a “landmark decision,” and insists in the face
>> of the ITU’s secrecy that the agency “is as transparent as
>> organizations are.”
>>
>> That might give you some sense of just how out of touch the agency
>> really is. And at least within the U.S., condemnation of the ITU’s
>> dangerously amateurish behavior has been universal. Republicans and
>> Democrats, Congress, the White House and the FCC, along with major
>> industry representatives, consumer advocates, and engineering groups
>> including the highly-respected and international Internet Society,
>> have all raised alarms over both the content and the process of
>> upcoming negotiations.
>>
>> Last week, the U.S. delegation issued its own first round of
>> proposals, making clear that the U.S. “will not support proposals that
>> increase the exercise of control over Internet governance or content.”
>> That followed passage in the House last week of a strongly-worded
>> anti-WCIT resolution. The vote in favor of the resolution was unanimous.
>>
>> The U.S., however, only gets one vote at the WCIT meeting. And even if
>> the Senate refuses to ratify a new version of the ITRs passed over
>> U.S. objections, other countries will be able to impose new rules on
>> U.S. companies doing business abroad, backed up by the authority of
>> the U.N.. At the very worst, a bad result at the WCIT could lead to a
>> splintered Internet, and the further isolation of developing nations.
>>
>> Despite the calming words of some ITU apologists, the U.N. threat to
>> the Internet, and to U.S. companies, are both very real.
>>
>> Why is this Happening?
>>
>> From the beginning, the Internet has been governed almost exclusively
>> by the engineers who designed it and who continue to enhance and
>> extend its capabilities. The core standards and protocols are overseen
>> by the Internet Engineering Task Force. Website domain names and IP
>> addresses are registered by ICANN. And the constant redesign of the
>> Web itself is the job of the World Wide Web Consortium. These are all
>> multi-stakeholder, non-governmental organizations, beholden only to
>> the over two billion Internet users around the world.
>>
>> It’s not much of a stretch to say that the Internet works as well as
>> it does precisely because it has managed to stay largely immune from
>> interference and oversight from traditional governments—slow-moving,
>> expensive, secretive, jealous, partisan governments.
>>
>> You know, like the U.N.
>>
>> But dramatic changes to that governance model are now being proposed
>> by a dangerous coalition of repressive national governments,
>> highly-regulated overseas telephone companies, and the ITU itself. All
>> of them would like to see the agency’s authority over the Internet
>> expand, albeit for different reasons.
>>
>> Countries like Russia, Iran, and China hope to co-opt the ITU into an
>> agency that provides cover for their long-standing efforts to censor
>> Internet content. The phone companies, meanwhile, are using the WCIT
>> process to propose new ways to tax the most popular Internet content,
>> nearly all of which originates in the U.S.
>>
>> And the ITU itself is hoping to wrest power from the existing
>> engineering-driven organizations, hoping that countries hostile to the
>> U.S. will help them gain some measure of authority over core Internet
>> functions, including addressing, naming, security and standards.
>>
>> Success for the ITU and its members on any of these fronts would mean
>> disaster for Internet users worldwide. Because the Internet has done
>> such a good job of governing itself, traditional regulators including
>> the ITU know next to nothing about its basic
>> technology–packet-switched networks, settlement-free peering, and IP
>> over everything. So even if the agency grants itself minimal new
>> authority, it could never exercise it in an informed, timely and
>> non-partisan basis.
>>
>> That should have been reason enough to make ITU members skeptical
>> about stepping into such deeply technical waters.
>>
>> But it hasn’t. As Americans learned in last year’s fight over SOPA and
>> PIPA, and as advocates around the world continue to discover in
>> protests over secret global intellectual property treaties including
>> ACTA and the Trans Pacific Partnership, a lack of expertise with the
>> technologies being regulated is no obstacle for would-be regulators.
>> Especially when they see an opportunity to reassert their relevance,
>> and in the process tap a new vein of taxable activities.
>>
>> That’s precisely what’s going on in the run-up to WCIT. As its
>> traditional areas of oversight have migrated to the Internet, the ITU
>> is increasingly without much to do. And international regulatory
>> bodies, like nature, abhor a vacuum. So subtly and explicitly, the ITU
>> is looking for ways in which it can extend its authority to the only
>> communications platform that has much of a future—the Internet.
>>
>> And it has plenty of allies, many of whom would like to see the
>> Internet disappear and who see the ITU as a preferable alternative to
>> an Internet governed by its users.
>>
>> The Worst of the Worst Proposals Reveal Potential for Disaster at WCIT
>>
>> The worst proposals so far offered by ITU members would expand the
>> scope of the ITRs from establishing general rules for international
>> interchange to a set of mandatory content-based regulations imposed on
>> member states.
>>
>> These proposals, supported by Russia, China, and several Arab nations,
>> would require extensive network engineering changes that would give
>> national governments an easy way to act as gatekeeper to Internet
>> traffic coming in or out of their citizen’s computers. Though the
>> proposals are characterized as combating malware, spam, or other
>> inappropriate content, they are clearly aimed at providing U.N. cover
>> for expanded censorship by national governments.
>>
>> Evidence of elaborate and extensive Internet censorship, much of it
>> politically-motivated, is not hard to find in many of these countries
>> already. Egypt, of course, shut down Internet connections during its
>> popular uprising. China makes little effort to hide its “great firewall.”
>>
>> And Russia recently enacted new legislation that gives the central
>> government extensive new powers to block content deemed “extremist.”
>> Within weeks, the government had used the hastily-enacted law to block
>> all content from LiveJournal, the country’s most popular blogging site.
>>
>> Russia in particular has been unapologetic about its ambitions for ITU
>> cover. Last year, during a meeting between Russian Prime Minister
>> Vladimir Putin and ITU Secretary-General Toure, Putin bluntly told
>> Toure that Russia was keen on the idea of “establishing international
>> control over the Internet using the monitoring and supervisory
>> capability of the International Telecommunications Union.”
>>
>> European Telcos Double Down on Dangerous
>>
>> The U.S. delegation, led by Ambassador Terry Kramer, has made it clear
>> that it will fight all content-based expansions of ITU power. “The
>> United States,” according to a document released last week, “will
>> oppose efforts to broaden the scope of the ITRs to empower any
>> censorship of content or impede the free flow of information and ideas.”
>>
>> Anti-speech proposals, however, are getting unintended support from
>> members hoping to hijack WCIT for economic gain, granting new
>> regulatory powers to the ITU in the process. In particular, a
>> controversial proposal submitted by the European Telecommunications
>> Network Operators’ Association and made public by WCITLeaks, has been
>> gaining traction.
>>
>> ETNO describes its proposal as a response to “the challenges of the
>> new Internet economy and the principles that fair compensation is
>> received for carried traffic.” In essence, it wants the ITU to oversee
>> new taxes for network operations in heavily-regulated European
>> markets–taxes that would be paid by the most popular providers of
>> Internet content.
>>
>> Specifically, ETNO wants the ITRs changed to require member states and
>> their private network operators to implement a
>> “sending-party-network-pays” model, in which content providers and
>> their ISPs would pay overseas network operators for data requested by
>> their own subscribers, at rates established by the receiving network
>> and enforced by the ITU. The ETNO proposal would effectively tax
>> popular content providers, including Google, YouTube, Facebook and
>> others for the privilege of reaching non-U.S. Internet users.
>>
>> In some sense, ETNO is trying to impose a Frankenstein version of the
>> long-standing and deeply corrupt settlement regime for international
>> long distance, where phone companies (many of them still wholly or
>> partially owned government monopolies) establish and charge per minute
>> rates for incoming calls from other countries.
>>
>> That system didn’t even work for long-distance, which relies on
>> dedicated circuits and was thus easy to track and to meter. Many
>> countries set absurdly high rates on incoming calls, gouging
>> foreigners, many of them expatriates calling home. Often, the
>> rationale for these charges was that the money would build better
>> communications infrastructure for developing nations. But much of the
>> net settlement money disappeared in the slush funds of corrupt regimes.
>>
>> The ETNO proposal has been roundly criticized by technology and
>> engineering groups. Now, in a detailed report published last week,
>> ISOC takes strong exception to the technical and business merits of
>> the proposal, which it dismisses as an attempt at “importing the
>> compensation schemes, scams and arbitrage that plague the traditional
>> communications model to the Internet.”
>>
>> It’s actually worse than that. What ETNO proposes is the reverse of
>> the failed long-distance system. Under the long-distance settlements
>> process, the calling party pays for the call—at rates established by
>> the receiving telco. Under ETNO’s sending-party-network pays scheme,
>> however, the network that responds to a local user’s request for data
>> will be required to pay the receiving network for the privilege of
>> supplying it. When a local user requests a (free) YouTube video, in
>> other words, the cost of fulfilling that request would be borne by the
>> network that answered the call.
>>
>> Even if it made good business sense, the ETNO proposal, according to
>> ISOC, would be “extremely expensive to implement.” That’s in part
>> because most exchanges between networks rely on settlement-free
>> peering arrangements, many of which aren’t even in writing. And unlike
>> the dedicated circuit of a phone call, the packet-switching
>> architecture of the Internet, comprised of some 40,000 smaller
>> networks, makes it impossible to keep track of how and from what
>> pathways a response travels.
>>
>> According to ISOC, “retro-fitting a ‘sender pays’ settlement regime to
>> the Internet is not possible without extensive changes to the
>> infrastructure of the global Internet.”
>>
>> ISOC is also concerned that the ETNO proposal, on the surface, may be
>> attractive to developing nations, who have largely lost the ability to
>> tax international long distance calls. Since the ITRs were last
>> modified in 1988, Skype, Google Voice and other IP-based phone
>> services have turned the long-distance model on its head.
>> Increasingly, phone calls are just another form of data traveling over
>> the Internet.
>>
>> Developing nations may see sending-party-network-pays as a return to
>> the good old days. But the more likely outcome is that content
>> providers will simply refuse requests from countries where the
>> expected revenue from its users (e-commerce, ad revenue,
>> subscriptions) is less than the cost imposed by the receiving network.
>> As the ISOC report puts it, “Sending-party-network-pays could
>> therefore reinforce and make much worse the existing ‘digital
>> divide.’” Countries who today may largely be requesting content
>> without providing much in return may find their citizens cut off.
>>
>> The WCIT Mantra: “Please Regulate My Rival”
>>
>> Despite a firestorm of criticism over the ETNO proposal, the
>> organization continues to insist on the “need for a new eco-system for
>> the Internet,” one that recognizes an “increasing role for the ITU” in
>> global IT issues. Sources within the WCIT process confirm that ETNO is
>> working hard to build a coalition of countries who might benefit
>> economically or politically from its proposal, including some who
>> don’t fully understand the differences between telephone calls and
>> Internet transit.
>>
>> So it’s worth asking why ETNO’s European telco members are so
>> determined to extract tribute from largely U.S.-based Internet
>> companies, perhaps at great harm to their own subscribers and those of
>> other countries that are net importers of content.
>>
>> In part the answer comes from the failure of Europe’s internal scheme
>> for micromanaging prices that incumbent wireline operators charge for
>> access to their networks by local competitors. ETNO members operate
>> under a highly-constrained set of rules that its members believe make
>> it impossible to justify investment in next-generation networks,
>> including fiber optics and advanced mobile protocols such as LTE.
>>
>> Recently, in fact, the EU’s top technology regulator acknowledged the
>> unintended disincentives of EU communications regulations and vowed to
>> fix them. In a briefing on proposed changes to EU policy, Neelie
>> Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission responsible for the
>> Digital Agenda, acknowledged that current regulations were too
>> invasive and effectively picked technology winners. She proposed
>> changes that would make is possible for landline, cable, and mobile
>> networks to compete more freely.
>>
>> “[W]e cannot predict with any certainty what the best technological
>> solutions will be, nor how they will compete and interact,” Kroes
>> said. “Incremental solutions may help to address weak demand in the
>> short term – for example, new technology combining fiber and copper,
>> or upgrading TV cable, can be very cost-effective in delivering higher
>> download capacity.”
>>
>> For now, faced with a crushing burden of internal regulation, ETNO is
>> looking to the ITU to make life equally difficult for everyone else.
>> The “sending-party-network-pays” proposal, in the end, is an
>> archetypal example of what FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell recently
>> called the “please regulate my rival” approach to policy change.
>>
>> McDowell sees the ETNO proposal specifically as a dangerous move to
>> make other network operators suffer the same limitations that plague
>> them. “I can’t imagine why network operators would consciously
>> surrender their autonomy to negotiate commercial agreements to an
>> international regulator,” McDowell said in a recent speech. Unless,
>> that is, they have been “regulated too much and for too long” to think
>> of any other way out of their own predicament.
>>
>> McDowell, who was among the first to warn the Internet community of a
>> potentially catastrophic outcome for WCIT, also connects the dots
>> between ETNO’s economic proposals and the political objectives of some
>> ITU member nations. To be effective, the ETNO proposal would require
>> “an intrusive new mechanism for recording Internet traffic flows on
>> the basis of the value of traffic delivery, presumably determined by
>> the ITU,” McDowell said.
>>
>> “Such expanded ‘monitoring capabilities’ for the ITU fit perfectly
>> into Mr. Putin’s vision of the Internet of the future,” he said.
>>
>> For his part, ITU Secretary-General Toure told a Brazilian interviewer
>> that he “welcomed” the ETNO proposal. As for McDowell, Toure dismissed
>> his criticisms, noting that the ITU, unlike the FCC, operates on a
>> “consensus” model.
>>
>> But that will come as cold comfort in December to billions of Internet
>> users, when a secretive UN agency will convene a rogue’s gallery of
>> repressive governments and economic opportunists, closes its doors,
>> and decides the future of a technology it knows nothing about.
>>
>> That is, unless Internet users around the world wake up and put a stop
>> to this nonsense.
>>
>> ###
>>
>>
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