[Chapter-delegates] What ISOC is doing

Tue Jul 6 12:23:31 PDT 2021

Veni is right. The United States is leading the way to emphasize government
to government deals on running the Internet. Current press reports are that
the US is trying to make a deal with the Russians on security, as
international hacks are becoming a greater problem. We also tried to move
Internet policy discussions to the intergovernmental groups dominated by
the US and allies.

The Russians and Chinese are looking for a major role in governing the
Internet as well. The cold war is back, mostly in trade, and ISOC is wise
to avoid choosing sides. Rather, we should bring the public interest into
the center of all Internet rulemaking.

We have a remarkable opportunity to do that at the ITU, where the
Secretary-General suggested we send as many as 100 delegates to the major
events. He pointed out we are full "sector members" and publicly encouraged
our CEO, Kathy Brown, to use that to bring the non-governmental sector into
further prominence at the ITU.

ISOC is sensibly trying to heal the breach with ITU, the UN agency for the
Internet. The US IGF will feature a keynote by Doreen Bogdan-Martin, an
American telecommunications expert who’s currently director of the ITU’s
development bureau. The Trump regime strongly supported her at the ITU and
began twisting arms to get nations to support her. She is a smart,
hardworking woman. Her record at the ITU is talk, not action, while I would
seek a more active role for ITU.

We can and should exercise power at the ITU, accrediting as many
experienced ISOC members and public advocates as can get to the meetings.
I've spent weeks at ITU meetings, accredited as press, and discovered that
the leaders and delegates were very open to my ideas. I met one on one with
almost all the senior staff. If you are informed and courteous, you can
have impact at ITU meetings.

There is essentially no public interest presence at the very important
ITU-T Study Groups, nominally the ultimate arbiter of international
standards. We should at minimum have 2 or 3 volunteers at each Study group.
They actually do much more than the big meetings we attend, which are
talkfests.

If a few dozen good people attended from ISOC, that would play a major role
in the process. Only once in 20 years has ITU come down to a vote of
nations (WCIT in 2012.) US Ambassador Phil Verveer told me ITU was perhaps
the best example of an International organization that is open and
approaches the "multi-stakeholder" ideal. (Some disagree, probably
including Veni. My response: let's make it so.)

Ignatius is wrong that Russia is trying to control the Internet, however.
Neither Russia nor Russia + China control the ITU. African and Latin
American countries have a stronger presence than they do. India in
particular has a very strong presence. The US and the EU have a
defacto veto, as ITU practice is to make decisions by consensus. That 2012
Treaty vote is the one exception this century.

On Tue, Jul 6, 2021 at 8:10 AM Veni Markovski via Chapter-delegates <
chapter-delegates at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> Hi, everyone.
> Andrew and I exchanged 2 emails in another list (I CC:ed my response to
> him in this group, as I believe it is relevant), but I thought this
> discussion is better to take place among the chapters and Andrew in this
> list.
>
> ISOC Bulgaria is concerned when seeing attempts for moving the
> multistakeholder model of Internet governance to a multilateral one. We see
> it at the ITU, and we see it at the UN. Some major newspapers have written
> about it - see for example this article:
> https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/05/04/russias-plot-control-internet-is-no-longer-secret/.
> Since it may require subscription, I am copying the text below.
>
> It would be good to know: a) what ISOC is doing with regards to this
> issue, b) what chapters see in their respected countries, and c) how
> chapters could help ISOC, assuming that it is doing something.
>
> best,
> v/
>
> Russia’s plot to control the Internet is no longer a secret
> by David Ignatius
>
> Russia’s campaign to control the Internet isn’t just a secret intelligence
> gambit any longer. It’s an explicit goal, proclaimed by Russian President
> Vladimir Putin as a key element of the Kremlin’s foreign policy.
>
> Putin complained during his annual address
> <http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/65418> to the Russian federal
> assembly on April 21 that the United States and other western countries are
> “stubbornly rejecting Russia’s numerous proposals to establish an
> international dialogue on information and cybersecurity. We have come up
> with these proposals many times. They avoid even discussing this matter.”
>
> Asking for “international dialogue” takes some nerve, coming from the
> world’s biggest cyberbully — a country that notoriously meddled in the
> 2016, 2018 and 2020 U.S. elections, and has engaged in similar Internet
> mischief throughout the world. Controlling the “information space,” as the
> Russians sometimes call it, has long been an intelligence priority for
> Moscow.
>
> Russia is waging its cyberdiplomacy offensive on two fronts: First, the
> United Nations has embraced Russia’s proposal to write a new treaty
> governing cybercrime, to replace the 2001 Budapest convention that Moscow
> rejected because it was too intrusive. And second, Russia is lobbying for
> its candidate to head the U.N.’s International Telecommunications Union
> (ITU) and use it to supplant the current private group, known as ICANN
> <https://www.icann.org/en>, that coordinates Internet addresses.
>
> These international regulatory battles sound obscure, but they will help
> determine who writes the rules for Internet communications for the rest of
> the 21st century. The fundamental question is whether the governance
> process will benefit authoritarian states that want to control information
> or the advocates of openness and freedom.
>
> Secretary of State Antony Blinken stressed on Tuesday the importance of
> this contest. “There are relatively few items that are ultimately going to
> have a greater impact on the lives of people around the world than the ITU
> post. It may seem dry and esoteric, but it’s anything but. And so we’re
> very, very actively engaged on this front,” Blinken said in an email
> message, elaborating on comments he made to me during an April 7 interview
> <https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/antony-blinken-offers-a-window-on-how-bidens-foreign-policy-decisions-will-be-made/2021/04/08/dce01208-98a7-11eb-b28d-bfa7bb5cb2a5_story.html?itid=lk_inline_manual_10>
> .
>
> Russia outlined its ITU game plan in unusually forthright comments by
> Ernst Chernukhin, the foreign ministry’s special coordinator for political
> use of information and communications technology. He spoke on April 21
> <https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/ge-007-29apr21-en.pdf>, the
> same day Putin made his speech.
>
> “The optimal option . . . would be transferring Internet management
> prerogatives specifically to the ITU, as it is a specialized U.N. body,
> which has the needed expertise on these issues,” Chernukhin said. “This
> strategic objective may be achieved by electing or promoting the Russian
> candidate to the position of the ITU Secretary-General in the 2022
> elections . . . and by holding the 2025 anniversary U.N. Internet
> Governance Forum in Russia.”
>
> Russia’s candidate
> <https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/ge-007-29apr21-en.pdf> for
> ITU secretary-general is Rashid Ismailov, a former deputy chief of the
> Russian communications ministry and a former executive at the Chinese
> telecommunications company Huawei. In announcing Ismailov’s candidacy on
> April 7, Maxim Parshin, the current deputy minister, underlined Moscow’s
> governance takeover plan: “We believe it is important to define an entity,
> within the U.N. framework, that would develop and implement legal norms and
> standards in the field of Internet governance. We think that the ITU could
> become such an entity.”
>
> The Biden administration’s candidate for the ITU post is Doreen
> Bogdan-Martin, an American telecommunications expert who’s currently
> director of the ITU’s development bureau. The State Department, which has
> sometimes been lackadaisical in such international regulatory contests, is campaigning
> aggressively
> <https://www.state.gov/u-s-support-for-itu-secretary-general-candidacy-of-doreen-bogdan-martin/> for
> Bogdan-Martin, and officials hope she’ll have sufficient support in Africa,
> Europe, Latin America and elsewhere to win the post. The election will take
> place at an ITU gathering late next year in Romania.
>
> Internet technical governance today is managed by ICANN, which stands for
> Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. This gathering of
> engineers and other experts was founded in 1998
> <https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/02/01/russia-internet-rules-united-nations/?itid=lk_inline_manual_19> to
> supervise domain names for the Defense Department’s ARPANET system, and it
> operated under a contract with the Commerce Department until 2016, when it
> went fully private.
>
> The American roots of the Internet seem to both upset Putin and fuel
> conspiratorial talk. The Russian leader said during a 2014 interview
> translated <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMj8Er6uh5c> by RT that the
> Internet “first appeared as a special CIA project . . . and the special
> services are still at the center of things.” Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s
> former president, complained in a February interview
> <https://interfax.com/newsroom/exclusive-interviews/70952/>: “The
> Internet emerged at a certain time, and undoubtedly the key rights to
> control are in the United States.”
>
> Russia is ready to rumble over the rules that will shape the future of
> Internet communications. Fortunately, the Biden administration seems
> determined to fight back hard to maintain fair and open rules.
>
>
>
> --
>
> Best regards,
> Venihttps://www.veni.com
> pgp:5BA1366E veni at veni.com
>
> The opinions expressed above are those of the
> author, not of any organizations, associated
> with or related to him in any given way.
>
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