U.S. Should Seek ‘Destruction’ of ITU, Former White House Official Says

The U.S. should formally seek to “dismantle” the ITU, said former U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer Andrew McLaughlin Thursday. “Sometimes you need some destruction; you need to burn the forest in order to grow the new pine trees,” he said during a Future Tense forum on Internet governance. Future Tense is a program of the New America Foundation. “In the case of the ITU, I think it’s very much the case that its day is gone. The U.S. should formally commit itself to hastening” its demise. The ITU was set up to coordinate regulation of international telecommunications, but it has become outdated in the Internet age, McLaughlin said. “For an Internet way of doing policy coordination, you have to accept that there will be lots of conversations happening in lots of different places, and no one body is the place where this is all going to happen efficiently."

The ITU’s structure allows each member state a single vote on many issues, including proposed revisions to the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs), McLaughlin said. Delegates to the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) will begin considering proposed revisions to the ITRs Monday in Dubai. It will be difficult to convince other countries that a move away from the ITU structure is necessary, McLaughlin said. “That’s hard to convey to my Indonesian friend, to say we're going to take away this thing where you know you get a guaranteed 10 minutes at the mic and a vote, to move to a world where you're assured of nothing, you're one of everybody."

A move away from the ITU is necessary to ensure that the U.N. body does not continue to be used by authoritarian regimes as a conduit for Internet censorship, he said. Critics have charged that nations like China and Russia are using proposed revisions to the ITRs that deal with cybersecurity as a way to legitimize censorship efforts. The ITU has also failed to become sufficiently transparent, particularly during WCIT preparations, he said. A perceived lack of public access to WCIT documents led Internet policy information site .Nxt to vow a full release of the documents in the lead-up to the conference (CD Nov 26 p3).

Formal U.S. backing of a move to dismantle the ITU may not lead to a decrease in censorship by authoritarian nations, said Ellery Biddle, a policy analyst with the Center for Democracy and Technology. “I'm not sold,” she said. “I think, as we've all agreed here, governments are going to continue to do what they want to do. I worry that they will be even more angry at the U.S. than they already are if something like that happened, and that ultimately leads to worse results for the people."

The U.S. should align itself with Internet users, rather than the governments that try to oppress them, McLaughlin said. “Rolling back the ITU is part of that battle. And it would be smart long-term national strategy for the U.S., smart long-term economic strategy for the world, and a good way for us to try to live to the fullest the values we espouse no matter how imperfectly as a country."

Dismantling the ITU is not an effective way to solve problems with problematic states, Terry Kramer, head of the U.S. WCIT delegation, told reporters Thursday. “I don’t think, per se, the ITU is the problem,” he said. “The ITU does some very important work on best practice sharing, on some development activities in developing markets."

The proposals some ITU member states have submitted for consideration at WCIT are the real issue, Kramer said. A set of Russian Federation proposals are the “most shocking and most disappointing,” Kramer said. The U.S. and others are concerned the Russian proposals would alter the current Internet addressing model and other Internet governance issues (CD Nov 21 p7). The Russian proposals would set a precedent on government interventions into content and traffic routing and would open the door to censorship, Kramer said. The Russian proposals also most clearly go against ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun Touré’s past statements about WCIT not being the appropriate forum to address Internet governance, Kramer said. Other “alarming” proposals also remain on the table, including the “sender-party-pays” proposal originally championed by the European Telecommunications Network Operators’ Association (ETNO) and subsequently taken up by nations in Africa and the Middle East, he said. “A paid model would be the result” of those proposals.Even as the ITU has publicly disavowed claims that it’s attempting to use WCIT to take control of the Internet, the controversy has allowed the U.N. agency to grasp at a way to remain relevant, said Milton Mueller, a member of the Internet Governance Project’s Scientific Committee. “This is their death rally,” he said. “Their hands are coming up above the water, saying ‘What can we grab onto here? Oh my God we've got [revisions to] the ITRs coming up, we can stick something about the Internet into those.'”