Leaked Proposals Set Stage for UN Squabble Over Internet Freedom

The United States is battling proposed United Nations regulations that could place new burdens and restrictions Internet companies and users.

The trouble is rooted the decision of the U.N.'s International Telecommunication Union to overhaul International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs), outline the principles governing the way international voice, data and video traffic handled.

More 190 ITU members will consider the ITRs the organization's forthcoming world conference international telecommunications (WCIT), to be held Dubai in December.

Information about the proposals presented the ITU by various members was published on WCITleaks.org, a website up jointly by Eli Dourado and Jerry Brito, researchers George Mason University Mercatus Center to combat the apparent secrecy surrounding those proposals.

What's Being Proposed
Russia has proposed ITU member states ensure the public has unrestricted access and use of international telecommunication services in cases where international telecommunication services are used for the of interfering in the internal affairs or undermining the sovereignty, national security, territorial integrity and public safety other states, or to divulge information of sensitive nature.

The European Telecommunications Network Operators' Association (ETNO) submitted a proposal , in effect, will require content providers Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) and Facebook (Nasdaq: FB) to invest infrastructure to offset the demands such content, videos, make on Internet bandwidth.

America Stakes Out Its Position
The proposed changes to the ITRs have stirred opposition in the United States.

The U.S. House of Representatives' Energy and commerce Committee voted earlier this week approve House Concurrent Resolution 127. This states that the proposals would diminish the freedom of expression the Internet in favor government control content, contrary to international law. It resolves that U.S. representatives should work to implement U.S. policy, is to promote a global Internet free from government control, among things.

What Is Internet Freedom?
It's not clear, , that American opposition some of the proposals tabled the ITU will advance the cause of freedom.

the Russian proposal, for example. It basically comes against third-party interference in a country's internal affairs and state-sponsored hacking.

One U.S. objection this proposal, though, is that its wording could let a country repress political opposition and cite the ITRs support. is that it appears to contradict Article 19 of the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This states that everyone has right to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through media regardless of frontiers.

However, the U.S. government itself monitors and regulates Internet use, so "some of Congress' statements WCIT have a strong odor hypocrisy," said Eli Dourado, a research fellow the George Mason University Mercatus Center.

"The United States has so opposed cyberwar treaties, because the U.S. is likely to rather well in a cyberwar, and because cyberwar can a substitute for actual war, which can cost many lives," Dourado pointed out.

"As the Stuxnet and Flame incidents remind us, in the U.S. also conduct some those attacks [to steal other countries' national and commercial secrets]," Milton Mueller, a professor the Syracuse University School of Information Studies who's involved the Internet Governance Project (IGP), told TechNewsWorld.

Also, the Russian proposal would expand the scope of ITU, which currently doesn't have any jurisdiction of Internet, Dourado told TechNewsWorld. Further, the U.S. "believes the appropriate forum national security concerns is the [U.N.] Security Council, it has a veto, not the ITU, where it does not."

Corporate Man
The U.S. objects ETNO's proposal to make content providers invest in infrastructure because "this would have effect of making Internet communications much expensive for providers of Internet content and other Internet services," Mark MacCarthy, vice president for public policy at the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), told TechNewsWorld. "The U.S. role should to resist this change."

America's objections are partly on business but "the issue is more complicated" than , the Mercatus Center's Dourado suggested. Among things, the ETNO proposal would decrease the quality of consumers' access the Internet by reducing the incentive develop local content caches.

The ETNO proposal "is a good idea" because "we want Internet interconnection agreements to remain contractual and market-driven and not get the morass of having them set by national or international regulators," the IGP's Mueller said.

any event, the ITRs don't have much clout Internet governance because "the U.N. by itself has little enforcement power, other than what its member states do for it," Mueller pointed .


Adapted and abridged from: TechNewsWorld, June 22, 2012.