Russia export controls and sanctions

Inmarsat’s IsatDock Pro docking stations were successfully installed at the Antarctic Polar Station in Russia. The stations are designed to “support accessing voice services via Bluetooth, RJ11/POTS [plain old TV service], handsfree speakerphone or the active privacy handset,” said Beam Communications, the Australia-based product manufacturer. The docks also provide phone charging, USB data ports and built-in ringer antennae, Beam said in a news release Tuesday (http://xrl.us/bntats).

The “on-the-ground” reality of revising the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs) is more mundane than many press reports indicate, but there are still plenty of proposals the U.S. remains concerned about, said Kathryn O'Brien, FCC assistant International Bureau chief. ITU members are to revise the ITRs at the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), which begins Dec. 3 in Dubai. “You may have seen some references in the press to this U.N. conference in Dubai in December, and concerns about the U.N. ’taking over the Internet,'” O'Brien said Wednesday at a Federal Communications Bar Association forum. “There is no sort of U.N. takeover of Internet governance, the specific functions of [the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)] at this particular conference. … But there are still huge, huge areas in this conference for the U.S., for the government and private sector, to worry about."

Restrictions on Internet freedom continue to grow -- and the threats against it are shifting, said human rights group Freedom House’s 2012 report on worldwide Internet freedom. The report said Estonia had the most Internet freedom in the past year, followed by the U.S. and Germany. Iran was found to have the least online freedom, followed by Cuba, China and Syria. The report, released Monday, assessed events and shifts in the Internet freedom situation in 47 countries between January 2011 and May 2012. Researchers evaluated the situation in each country and assigned a numerical score, with 100 being the worst possible score. Estonia scored 10, while Iran scored 90; the U.S. scored 12, according to Freedom House (http://xrl.us/bnq8xh).The more repressive governments on the list continue to use traditional censorship methods like filtering and blocking content, but they are now supplementing those with “nuanced” tactics, Sanja Kelly, the report’s lead author, said at a Freedom House event Monday. Governments are increasingly engaging in proactive manipulation of online content, including hiring pro-government bloggers to attack anti-government bloggers’ credibility and paying people to bombard anti-government blogs with false information, she said. That tactic had previously only been found in Russia and China, but has now spread into countries like Iran and Belarus, said Freedom House. The report said 19 of the 47 assessed countries had passed new laws impacting Internet freedom since January 2011. Those have included a new law in Malaysia that holds intermediaries like ISPs responsible for “seditious” comments users post online, Kelly said. “As a consequence, in some of the environments we've seen some of the intermediaries almost voluntarily taking down the content they fear will get them into trouble."

The Inter-American Telecommunication Commission (CITEL) agreed with the U.S. earlier this month on many core components of how the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs) should be revised at the upcoming World Conference on International Telecommunications, Terry Kramer, head of the U.S.’s WCIT delegation, said Friday. CITEL met in San Salvador, El Salvador, to determine its position ahead of WCIT, which begins Dec. 3 in Dubai. The U.S. delegation has been meeting with regional groups like CITEL and other ITU member nations to get them to adopt the U.S.’s position on the ITRs, which it outlined in formal documents filed with WCIT in early August (CD Aug 6 p2). The U.S. is likely to file an updated set of documents on its position in mid-November, Kramer said.

The U.S. is negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement under the “presumption that data should move,” said Deputy Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Telecom and Electronic Commerce Policy Jonathan McHale. “There’s some protectionist challenges we have to meet.” He cited governments that demand that data storage companies locate their servers in those countries to sell products and services to their citizens. In many cases, these kinds of protectionist policies can harm not just American companies, but also foreign users, he said at an event at George Washington University on Friday: “There really is a strong understanding that all the commercial entities in these countries and the consumers benefit” from having a free flow of information across borders.

The Democrats and Republicans agree on most fundamental aspects of Internet policy, industry policy experts said Thursday night at an Internet Society event hosted by Google’s Washington office. That lack of fundamental disagreement has mostly kept Internet issues on the backburner over the course of the parties’ 2012 campaigns for president and Congress, even though Internet issues continue to infiltrate other areas of national policy, they said. The Internet Society had intended to bring in surrogates from the campaigns of President Barack Obama and Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, but eventually decided to bring in former members of the Obama and George W. Bush administrations to articulate their parties’ positions, said Georgetown University professor and panel moderator Michael Nelson. None of the panelists were speaking on behalf of the Obama or Romney campaigns, he said.

Italy and Switzerland were added to an annual online piracy watch list published by the Congressional International Anti-piracy Caucus Thursday (http://xrl.us/bnqn3v). The two countries join China, Russia and Ukraine on a list of nations whose policies and legal frameworks fail to protect the intellectual property rights of U.S. creators, the caucus said. “The lack of enforcement of intellectual property rights in these countries causes grave harm to American creators and to our economy as a whole,” said the report authored by Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., and Orrin Hatch, R-Utah., and Reps. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and Bob Goodlatte, R-Va. “I wish it could be said that the 2012 International Anti-Piracy Watch List contained some promising news,” said Hatch in a prepared statement. “Unfortunately, this year’s watch list confirms that copyright piracy continues to spread at an alarming pace.” The report did note improvements from the governments in Spain and Canada to modernize their legal frameworks and address the piracy of U.S. digital music, videos, software, games and books.

Common misconceptions and “paranoia” on how the upcoming World Conference on International Telecommunications could affect the scope of Internet governance and censorship have distracted from important telecom issues that delegates to the WCIT will deal with when it meets in December, ITU officials said Monday. They called a news conference in Geneva with accompanying videoconference to “dispel the myths” about WCIT and proposed revisions to the treaty-level International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs).

SES signed a capacity agreement with Romantis to support the connectivity needs across Russia and Central Asia. Germany-based Romantis will use 24 MHz of Ku-band capacity on SES’s NSS-12 satellite at 57 degrees east “to deliver a variety of communication services across the region,” SES said.

Chinese ISPs spent $715 million on Gigabit Passive Optical Network equipment last year, Infonetics Research said in a new report. “This is just the tip of the iceberg,” Infonetics Research analyst Jeff Heynen said in a news release. “This market holds massive potential for fiber-to-the-home, with around 300 million Chinese citizens expected to migrate to urban areas over the next 15 years, definitely making China the dominant region for FTTH deployments.” BRIC countries represented half of all global GPON equipment revenue in 2011, with Russia’s GPON equipment spending rising 79 percent over 2010, Infonetics Research said. Brazil was another bright spot, Heynen said. “We expect long-term strength there driven by a solid economy, increased competition from cable operators, and the upcoming World Cup and Olympics events,” he said (http://xrl.us/bnk5if).