State Department Sees WCIT as Opportunity for Compromise

While there is growing concern in Washington and elsewhere over the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), scheduled to meet in Dubai in December, and a move to regulate the Internet, State Department Official Richard Beaird said it’s too early to push the panic button. Beaird, senior deputy U.S. coordinator for international communications and information policy, said compromise is likely. But other speakers laid out their concerns during a FCBA seminar

"One of the things that we need to keep in mind is this is a very classical meeting,” said Beaird, a veteran of meetings like the WCIT. “These sorts of meetings have occurred between nation states for over 500 years. … They by nature have to find a compromise, which [attending nations] can all accommodate."

Beaird said rules for the Internet by their nature must be different from international rules for spectrum. “Whereas government remains prominent in the spectrum world, the trend quite obviously in the telecommunications world, and the broadband world, is toward privatized entities,” he said. “The range of obligations that member nations take on with respect to what is essentially driven by the private sector is very narrow … and we want to keep it that way. We want to make sure there’s a very bright red line between these regulations and how they're looked upon and the radio regulations, which serve an entirely different function.” Beaird said the U.S. position is clear that the Internet should not be subject to regulation. “That’s the position of the United States of America. That in some cases is not shared by others,” he said. “Everyone will soon discover that is not where most of the world is, nor is it practical."

Beaird said the U.S. is preparing a U.S. contribution on the WCIT to be submitted to the ITU by an Aug. 3 deadline.

In a speech in Rome last week, FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell warned that the threats to the Internet are “real” and must be taken seriously (CD June 28 p1). Russia, the European Telecommunication Network Operators’ Association (ETNO) and others want to make changes to the International Telecommunications Regulations, which could lead to regulation of the Internet, McDowell warned.

"I am no more or less encouraged about the outcome of the WCIT after my extensive meetings here in Italy,” McDowell said in an interview from Rome Friday. “There’s still a mindset out there that regulation is needed in the Internet sphere and that comes in a variety of flavors. … There may be some action in the Italian Parliament and that’s something to watch. Italy is important because Telecom Italia drove the ETNO proposal. ETNO is all of European incumbents as well so they all signed off on it or didn’t object. That’s a proposal directly to ITU that other countries will take note of.”

McDowell said the danger will persist beyond December and the upcoming WCIT. “There are a lot of proposals coming through a variety of ways, whether it’s through the ITU … or other U.N. bodies or other treaty negotiations” he said. “The nations that are in favor of expanding international regulation in the Internet sphere hope to look at a variety of avenues and angles to make that happen over the next couple of years. The focus on the December WCIT is a little misleading because the fight will continue after that indefinitely into the future."

"We've looked at the proposals,” said Sally Wentworth of the Internet Society, a former State Department official, at the FCBA session. “The Internet Society has expressed a number of concerns about the potential for some of the proposals to impact the Internet, architecture, operations, content, security, business relations, and in some cases, the free flow of information online.” Given “the fast pace of the Internet” it is not “well suited for a treaty that’s negotiated every 25 years by governments,” Wentworth said.

"I think we're on a trajectory of events where certain governments are trying to use different international meetings as a way to make fundamental changes to different aspects of how the Internet works,” Wentworth said in an interview Friday. “There are challenges at the WCIT “relating to commercial arrangements, related to numbering, related to national regulatory processes.” The threat continues after December, she said. In 2013 and 2014 “there are a host of discussions happening in the ITU, but also within the U.N. General Assembly and elsewhere, that are really going to the heart of the question of what is the role of the United Nations with respect to the Internet and to what extent should the multi-stakeholder model continue to persist or to what extent should the government have a much more direct role and much more extensive control,” Wentworth said.

Public Knowledge President Gigi Sohn said she is following the developments in Dubai closely, though she acknowledged her group “can’t afford the $34,000 it takes to be a sector member” at the ITU. “The U.S. is not going to get what it wants, we're going to lose, if this issue is portrayed as the U.S. government and U.S. corporations against the world,” Sohn said at the FCBA session. Public Knowledge, nonetheless, is reaching out to other groups internationally, she said. “We're talking to our colleagues in those countries and trying to explain to them in a gentle way that some of these proposals will not advance the cause of Internet freedom, will not advance the cause of freedom of expression that many of them have worked very, very hard for.”

Sohn complained about the secret nature of the proceedings leading up to the WCIT. “Pretty much everything we know about these proposals comes from leaked documents,” she said. “Obviously, the ITU has so far refused to make any of these proposals public and … it’s a moving target, right? Proposals are coming in all the time,” she said. “Something this important cannot be done in the cone of secrecy and in the cone of silence.” But Sohn also noted that there is rare agreement among U.S. interests on the dangers posed by Internet regulation. “You've got civil society, industries Public Knowledge fights with to the death everyday at the FCC, U.S. government, are all on the same page,” she said. “We all agree that the ITU should not expand its jurisdiction to encompass Internet regulation."

"I'm more concerned than three months ago because now we are seeing the text of the actual proposals and … they are pretty troubling,” Sohn said Friday. “But I'm also hopeful because I see more awareness and engagement by all sectors in the U.S. and so far we have had very positive conversations with our civil society colleagues in other countries,” she said. “I think the single biggest threats are changes to the definitions section that would generally give the ITU power to regulate the Internet. If those get adopted, the specific provisions matter less."

Aparna Sridhar, Google telecom policy counsel, said at the FCBA session her company opposes changes that would disrupt how the Internet works today. “As a company we're sort of comfortable with the idea that the Internet works,” Sridhar said. “It’s not always perfect. It’s sometimes messy. The governance structure could be more clear sometimes. But out of this sort of somewhat anarchic process we have a really great network that has done really amazing things.” WCIT presents the opportunity “to bring some of our learnings in a more informal sense to the rest of the world and it’s an opportunity we can’t afford to pass up,” she said. “What we want to do is say, ‘There are a lot of ways to do this that don’t necessarily look like a treaty making.”

Sridhar shared her family history as a demonstration of how important the Internet is worldwide. Sridhar said her parents moved to the U.S. in the 1960s. “When I was born, my grandparents found out about my birth by a telegram and the telegram said, ‘Baby born. Stop.’ That’s it,” she said. “That’s obviously something that’s fundamentally different today and it’s something that has obviously made my parents’ lives better, my life better, but also our relatives’ [lives better] in a place where there’s less infrastructure.”

If the FCC wants to head off moves to regulate the Internet “our own domestic policies must be consistent with reliance on the privatized, non-government-control model,” said Free State Foundation President Randolph May who also spoke at the session. “I know that there are real threats to the current privatized, multi-stakeholder Internet governance model that will be put forward at WCIT, and the U.S. must be prepared to rebuff them,” May said Friday. “These threats range from proposals that would impose various forms of economic regulation to those that would give cover to regimes that want to curtail the free flow of information. And, as … Google rightly pointed out, the threats to the current Internet model will persist beyond WCIT.”