Delay in Asia-Pacific Telecommunity’s WCIT Proposals Could Diminish Organization’s Influence, Gross Says

Last week’s Asia-Pacific Telecommunity meeting did not end with a formal set of proposals for the upcoming World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), potentially damaging the region’s influence in the lead-up to the conference, said David Gross, former State Department international communications and information coordinator. But the general consensus coming out of the meeting bodes well for the U.S. position on whether the conference, led by the ITU, should adopt controversial proposals to change how the Internet is regulated, he said. Gross said he attended the Asia-Pacific meeting in Bangkok as chair of the Ad Hoc World Conference on International Telecommunications Working Group, which represents 15 major multinational telecom and Internet companies.

Asia-Pacific, which represents 38 nations in Asia and Oceania, had planned to decide by Wednesday what the organization would support proposing to update the ITU’s treaty-level International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs). However, it took the group far longer than they expected to go through the proposals and decide on the language they wanted to use, Gross said. “But the consensus I heard last week out of Bangkok was that they agree with the United States and with others that the treaty should be left at a very high level and should be a modernization for the 21st century of the telephony-based needs” of the original ITRs adopted in 1988, he said.

The U.S. delegation to WCIT said in an Aug. 3 filing that it did not support changing the ITRs in a way that would affect how the Internet is governed, saying it existed “beyond the scope or mandate of the ITRs or the International Telecommunication Union” (CD Aug 6 p2). U.S. officials had previously said they were concerned some member nations, including China and Russia, would propose rules that would increase regulation of the Internet (CD July 2 p1), though Gross said no delegation is proposing the ITU “take over” Internet control. China continues to push a proposal related to security issues, though that nation’s delegation claims it’s not trying to use the proposal as a way to control the Internet, Gross said.

Another proposal, from the European carrier trade association ETNO, got no support at the Asia-Pacific meeting, Gross said. “Korea spoke very much against it, Australia was against it, Japan was very much against it,” he said. “No one expressed any support for it at the meeting.” The ETNO proposal would replace the current system of voluntary agreements between carriers to exchange Internet traffic. The new system would be more rigid and would allow carriers to impose “sender party pays” fees that would make the sender of any Internet content pay for the content’s transmission -- a profound change from how Internet economics currently work, Gross said.

Asia-Pacific would have been the first regional organization to make formal WCIT proposals if the organization had finished on time, Gross said. APT will not meet again until the end of October or beginning of November, at the end of the preparatory process, he said. WCIT will be Dec. 3-14 in Dubai. “Obviously, many other regions would have taken notice of it and used that as the basis for some of their submissions,” Gross said. “So they go from potentially being the global leader to probably being really irrelevant as a region to the process.” That does not mean individual nations served by APT will see their own influence diminished -- individual national delegations may also submit their own proposals independent of their regional organization, he said. Other regions will meet throughout September to decide on their own proposals, including CITEL, the regional group for North and South America. The ITU scheduled a meeting for the regional organizations in early October to allow additional discussion and an exchange of information, Gross said.