There were a “few areas of success” after nearly a week...

There were a “few areas of success” after nearly a week of work on the future International Telecommunication Regulations, said Terry Kramer, head of the U.S. delegation at the Dubai World Conference on International Telecommunications, in a Thursday press briefing. Kramer sees progress on the “overall wording of the preamble” of the future ITRs and also an “agreement on the definition of telecommunication.” But he acknowledged there might still be people “talking about ICT,” a concept the U.S. is rejecting for potential confusion between pure infrastructure providers and companies involved in processing or even VoIP providers like Skype. Kramer said: “If there is a dispute, we need to go back to the fundamental of the treaty,” which is “How do we advance broadband and the telecom infrastructure?” No consensus has emerged on whether the ITRs should address recognized operating agencies -- public network providers like AT&T or Verizon -- or operating agencies, including private Internet providers and government network providers. “That issue has [more] left to be worked on,” he said. While a lot of time was spent in bilateral meetings talking through this issue, Kramer said “we are not keen to get in any discussions about the Russian proposal because we think it is out of scope.” Russia proposed an Internet-related chapter. He called a short-time outage of one of the ITU websites Wednesday a helpful reminder of the need to solve the growing cybersecurity issues by cooperation of a variety of organizations. Cybersecurity was not supported as a topic in the ITRs, he said, out of the concern that what was a “seemingly harmless proposal” could develop into a situation where the monitoring of traffic and content would get governments into “making judgments about that content.” At the official press briefing of the ITU earlier Thursday, Joshua Peprah, director of the National Communications Authority of Ghana, said the ad hoc group working on Article 6, the charging and accounting schemes, would work Friday and Saturday and bring back potential results Monday.