DUBAI, United Arab Emirates -- World Conference on International Telecommunications Chair Mohamed Al Ghanim presented a draft of future International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs), saying “we have a breakthrough.” But Internet operators and the Internet Society immediately said they had major concerns about the text.
Russia export controls and sanctions
The use of export controls and sanctions on Russia has surged since the country's invasion of Crimea in 2014, and especially its invasion of Ukraine in in February 2022. Similar export controls and sanctions have been imposed by U.S. allies, including the EU, U.K. and Japan. The following is a listing of recent articles in Export Compliance Daily on export controls and sanctions imposed on Russia:
DUBAI -- After a full week of negotiations at the World Conference on International Telecommunication with little progress, “delegations are frustrated,” conference Chairman Mohamed Nasser Al Ghanim told us Monday. “This is the night,” one delegate said after Al Ghanim announced a late Monday night session.
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.
Tech groups cheered Senate passage Thursday of permanent normal trade relations with the Russian Federation through a House-approved bill (HR-6156) that also addresses Internet filtering, blocking, corruption and human rights. The U.S. Trade Representative will report yearly on “Russian discrimination against U.S. digital trade,” the Computer and Communications Industry Association said Thursday. Online censorship is “both a human rights issue and a trade barrier issue,” CCIA President Ed Black said: The USTR provision is a “good first step toward building in better provisions to discourage” censorship in trade relations. Russia is one of the largest importers of information and communications technology and an important market for U.S. companies, said Kevin Richards, TechAmerica senior vice president-federal government affairs: “The U.S. technology industry can realize the full benefits of Russia’s WTO membership, ensuring a level playing field in the ninth largest economy in the world."
Russia submitted its proposal for a new “Internet chapter” in the future International Telecommunication Regulations (ITR) on the second day of the World Conference on International Telecommunications in Dubai. Russia said in its presentation by Victor Strelets of the Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications “the Internet system is an inalienable part of the telecommunications infrastructure.”
The U.S. could find itself in a position where it has to offer compromises this week as the World Conference on International Telecommunications gets started in Dubai, observers say. They noted that Ambassador Terry Kramer has indicated the U.S. will stand firm on Internet governance at WCIT, though he must answer to the State Department and the Obama administration. If the U.S. decides it must move toward compromise, the decision won’t be Kramer’s alone.
The iPhone 5 will ship in South Korea Friday and more than 50 additional countries are being added this month, Apple said Monday. The additional markets include Brazil, Russia and Taiwan, it said. China is getting the iPhone 5 Dec. 14, Apple said Friday. The iPhone 5 is already available in 47 countries including the U.S., Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan and the U.K., it said.
Nearly three dozen new reports of numbering misuse were submitted to the ITU Telecommunication Standardization Bureau the week of Nov. 26 in the run-up to the World Conference on International Telecommunications, we've learned. Preparatory discussions had identified numbering misuse as an area the conference could address. The reports detail artificial inflation of traffic, fraud, misrouting of traffic and other problems associated with a variety of numbering ranges. The apparent misuse came from the U.K., Aruba, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Latvia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Maldives, Belarus, Somalia, Madagascar, Myanmar, Zimbabwe, Austria, Bulgaria, Cuba and others. The reports were submitted by Canada, Poland, the Czech Republic, Russia, India, Malta, Turkey, Andorra and Switzerland.
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."
New ITU-T study group leadership was appointed during the World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly, a blog post said (http://bit.ly/RlFoB3). Sherif Guinena of Egypt will replace Marie-Therese Alajouanine of France as chair of the ITU-T study group on numbering. Alajouanine had been appointed to a second and final term four years ago. Vice chairmen come from South Korea, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Azerbaijan, Tanzania, Brazil, the U.K. and China. Seiichi Tsugawa of Japan will replace Kishik Park of South Korea’s Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute as chairman of the ITU-T study group on economic and policy issues. Park was also chairman for two four-year terms. The study groups are the two most involved in policy issues. Vice chairmen come from Argentina, Ivory Coast, South Korea, Tanzania, Egypt, France and Russia. Leslie Martinkovics of Verizon became vice-chairman, it said. Ahmed Zeddam of France was named chairman of the ITU-T study group on environment and climate change, it said. Arthur Webster with the NTIA was appointed to a second four-year term as chairman of the study group on broadcast cable and TV, the blog said. Wei Feng of China’s Huawei Technologies was appointed to a second four-year term as chairman of the study group on protocols and test specifications. Kwame Baah-Acheamfour of Ghana was appointed chairman of the study group on performance and quality of service and experience. Chae-Sub Lee was appointed to a second four-year term as chairman of the study group on future networks. Steve Trowbridge of Alcatel-Lucent in the U.S. was appointed chairman of the study group on transport and access. Yushi Naito was appointed to a second four-year term as chairman of the study group on multimedia. Arkadiy Kremer of the Russian Association of Networks and Services was appointed to a second four-year term as chairman of the study group on security. Bruce Gracie of Industry Canada was appointed to a second four-year term as chairman of the Telecommunication Standardization Advisory Group. China won the most leadership posts with 10. South Korea had nine, Japan eight, followed by the U.S. with seven. Russia, France and the UAE each got five. Egypt, the U.K. and Germany each won four slots. Other countries won a lesser number of slots. Sudan won two leadership slots, including one in the ITU-T study group on security.