Why the UN is Trying to Take over the Internet
August 9, 2012
Forbes 
– HYPERLINK http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrydownes/2012/08/09/why-the-un-is-trying-to-take-over-the-internet/2/ \t _blank http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrydownes/2012/08/09/why-the-un-is-trying-to-take-over-the-internet/2/
Yet another anachronistic regulator is trying to flex its muscles over the Internet.  But this time the U.S. government is actually the one trying to stop them.
That’s right.  It’s the United Nations.  Specifically, the International Telecommunications Union, a 150 year-old bureaucracy http://www.itu.int/en/history/overview/Pages/history.aspx \t _blank that started life establishing telegraph standards.  The ITU has since mutated into coordinating international telephone interconnection and radio spectrum, and became part of the U.N. in 1947.  But it has never had a meaningful role in dealing with the Internet.
At least until now.
That could change dramatically later this year, when 193 member nations and hundreds of non-voting private members will meet in Dubai for the World Conference on International Telecommunications, or WCIT.  The goal of the WCIT is to finalize changes to the International Telecommunications Regulations, an international treaty on communications.
The last major revisions to the ITRs were ratified in 1988, long before the rise of the commercial Internet.  But with months to go before proposed changes to the ITR are closed, member nations and private members of the ITU have already begun lobbying for a vast expansion of Internet powers, including new network taxes, mandatory censorship technologies disguised as security measures, and efforts to undermine the Internet’s longstanding engineering-based governance processes.
Worse, Internet users who object to proposed changes may not even know what to complain about or who to complain to.  Following ITU rules, the proposals are being circulated and deliberated in secret, making it difficult to know what is being proposed and who users can hold accountable.
Fortunately, researchers at http://www.forbes.com/colleges/george-mason-university/ \t _blank George Mason University created http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:H.CON.RES.127.EH: \t _blank WCITLeaks.org for users, advocates, and others with a stake in the outcome of the WCIT.  Since June, WCITLeak’s creators, Jerry Brito and Eli Dourado, http://techliberation.com/2012/06/06/today-were-launching-wcitleaks-org/ \t _blank have published dozens of documents–many of them leaked–exposing some of the worst proposals.
Caught flat-footed, the ITU’s governing Council half-heartedly agreed to publish just one of the documents already leaked, with the names of members making the proposals redacted.  ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun Toure http://techliberation.com/2012/07/24/itu-releases-a-single-wcit-document-calls-themselves-transparent/ \t _blank called that move a “landmark decision,” and insists in the face of the ITU’s secrecy that the agency “is as transparent as organizations are.”
That might give you some sense of just how out of touch the agency really is.  And at least within the U.S., condemnation of the ITU’s dangerously amateurish behavior has been universal.  Republicans and Democrats, Congress, the White House and the http://www.forbes.com/companies/fcc/ \t _blank FCC, along with major industry representatives, consumer advocates, and engineering groups including the highly-respected and international http://www.internetsociety.org/ \t _blank Internet Society, have all raised alarms over both the content and the process of upcoming negotiations.
Last week, the U.S. delegation issued its own http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/196244.pdf \t _blank first round of proposals, making clear that the U.S. “will not support proposals that increase the exercise of control over Internet governance or content.”  That followed passage in the House last week of a http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:H.CON.RES.127.EH: \t _blank strongly-worded anti-WCIT resolution.   The vote in favor of the resolution was unanimous.
The U.S., however, only gets one vote at the WCIT meeting.  And even if the Senate refuses to ratify a new version of the ITRs passed over U.S. objections, other countries will be able to impose new rules on U.S. companies doing business abroad, backed up by the authority of the U.N..  At the very worst, a bad result at the WCIT could lead to a splintered Internet, and the further isolation of developing nations.
Despite the http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/11/technology/debunking-rumors-of-an-internet-takeover.html?pagewanted=all \t _blank calming words of some ITU apologists, the U.N. threat to the Internet, and to U.S. companies, are both very real.
 
Why is this Happening?
From the beginning, the Internet has been governed almost exclusively by the engineers who designed it and who continue to enhance and extend its capabilities.  The core standards and protocols are overseen by the Internet Engineering Task Force.  Website domain names and IP addresses are registered by ICANN.  And the constant redesign of the Web itself is the job of the World Wide Web Consortium.  These are all multi-stakeholder, non-governmental organizations, beholden only to the over two billion Internet users around the world.
It’s not much of a stretch to say that the Internet works as well as it does precisely because it has managed to stay largely immune from interference and oversight from traditional governments—slow-moving, expensive, secretive, jealous, partisan governments.
You know, like the U.N. 
But dramatic changes to that governance model are now being proposed by a dangerous coalition of repressive national governments, highly-regulated overseas telephone companies, and the ITU itself.  All of them would like to see the agency’s authority over the Internet expand, albeit for different reasons.
Countries like Russia, Iran, and China hope to co-opt the ITU into an agency that provides cover for their long-standing efforts to censor Internet content.  The phone companies, meanwhile, are using the WCIT process to propose new ways to tax the most popular Internet content, nearly all of which originates in the U.S.  And the ITU itself is hoping to wrest power from the existing engineering-driven organizations, hoping that countries hostile to the U.S. will help them gain some measure of authority over core Internet functions, including addressing, naming, security and standards.
Success for the ITU and its members on any of these fronts would mean disaster for Internet users worldwide.  Because the Internet has done such a good job of governing itself, traditional regulators including the ITU know next to nothing about its basic technology–packet-switched networks, – HYPERLINK http://www.internetsociety.org/sites/default/files/Internet%20Interconnections%20Proposals%20For%20New%20Interconnection%20Model%20Comes%20Up%20Short.pdf \t _blank settlement-free peering, and IP over everything.   So even if the agency grants itself minimal new authority, it could never exercise it in an informed, timely and non-partisan basis.
That should have been reason enough to make ITU members skeptical about stepping into such deeply technical waters.
But it hasn’t.  As Americans learned in last year’s fight over http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrydownes/2012/01/25/who-really-stopped-sopa-and-why/ \t _blank SOPA and PIPA, and as advocates around the world continue to discover in protests over secret global intellectual property treaties including ACTA and the http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120710/17490519654/how-not-to-build-21st-century-trade-agreement-secret.shtml \t _blank Trans Pacific Partnership, a lack of expertise with the technologies being regulated is no obstacle for would-be regulators.  Especially when they see an opportunity to reassert their relevance, and in the process tap a new vein of taxable activities.
That’s precisely what’s going on in the run-up to WCIT.  As its traditional areas of oversight have migrated to the Internet, the ITU is increasingly without much to do.  And international regulatory bodies, like nature, abhor a vacuum.  So subtly and explicitly, the ITU is looking for ways in which it can extend its authority to the only communications platform that has much of a future—the Internet.
And it has plenty of allies, many of whom would like to see the Internet disappear and who see the ITU as a preferable alternative to an Internet governed by its users.
 
The Worst of the Worst Proposals Reveal Potential for Disaster at WCIT
The worst proposals so far offered by ITU members would expand the scope of the ITRs from establishing general rules for international interchange http://techliberation.com/2012/06/14/troubling-internet-regulations-proposed-for-wcit/ \t _blank to a set of mandatory content-based regulations imposed on member states.
These proposals, supported by Russia, China, and several Arab nations, would require extensive network engineering changes that would give national governments an easy way to act as gatekeeper to Internet traffic coming in or out of their citizen’s computers.  Though the proposals are characterized as combating malware, spam, or other inappropriate content, they are clearly aimed at providing U.N. cover for expanded censorship by national governments.
Evidence of elaborate and extensive Internet censorship, much of it politically-motivated, is not hard to find in many of these countries already.  Egypt, of course, shut down Internet connections during its popular uprising.  China makes little effort to hide its “great firewall.” 
And Russia recently enacted new legislation that gives the central government extensive new powers to block content deemed “extremist.”  Within weeks, the government had used the hastily-enacted law to – HYPERLINK http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120725/20022619836/not-long-after-passing-censorship-legislation-russian-government-censors-all-livejournal.shtml \t _blank block all content from LiveJournal, the country’s most popular blogging site.
Russia in particular has been unapologetic about its ambitions for ITU cover.  Last year, during a meeting between Russian Prime Minister http://www.forbes.com/profile/vladimir-putin/ \t _blank Vladimir Putin and ITU Secretary-General Toure, http://premier.gov.ru/eng/events/news/15601/ \t _blank Putin bluntly told Toure that Russia was keen on the idea of “establishing international control over the Internet using the monitoring and supervisory capability of the International Telecommunications Union.”
 
European Telcos Double Down on Dangerous
The U.S. delegation, http://www.state.gov/e/eb/rls/fs/2012/195921.htm \t _blank led by Ambassador Terry Kramer, has made it clear that it will fight all content-based expansions of ITU power.  “The United States,” according to a document released last week, “will oppose efforts to broaden the scope of the ITRs to empower any censorship of content or impede the free flow of information and ideas.”
Anti-speech proposals, however, are getting unintended support from members hoping to hijack WCIT for economic gain, granting new regulatory powers to the ITU in the process.  In particular, a controversial proposal submitted by the European Telecommunications Network Operators’ Association and made public by WCITLeaks, has been gaining traction.
ETNO describes its proposal as a response to “the challenges of the new Internet economy and the principles that fair compensation is received for carried traffic.”   In essence, it wants the ITU to oversee new taxes for network operations in heavily-regulated European markets–taxes that would be paid by the most popular providers of Internet content.
Specifically, ETNO wants the ITRs changed to require member states and their private network operators to implement a “sending-party-network-pays” model, in which content providers and their ISPs would pay overseas network operators for data requested by their own subscribers, at rates established by the receiving network and enforced by the ITU. The ETNO proposal would effectively tax popular content providers, including http://www.forbes.com/companies/google/ \t _blank Google, YouTube, http://www.forbes.com/companies/facebook/ \t _blank Facebook and others for the privilege of reaching non-U.S. Internet users.
In some sense, ETNO is trying to impose a Frankenstein version of the long-standing and deeply corrupt settlement regime for international long distance, where phone companies (many of them still wholly or partially owned government monopolies) establish and charge per minute rates for incoming calls from other countries.
That system didn’t even work for long-distance, which relies on dedicated circuits and was thus easy to track and to meter.  Many countries http://transition.fcc.gov/Bureaus/International/News_Releases/1997/nrin7028.html \t _blank set absurdly high rates on incoming calls, gouging foreigners, many of them expatriates calling home.  Often, the rationale for these charges was that the money would build better communications infrastructure for developing nations.  But much of the net settlement money disappeared in the slush funds of corrupt regimes.
The ETNO proposal has been http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57449375-83/u.n-could-tax-u.s.-based-web-sites-leaked-docs-show/ \t _blank roundly criticized by technology and engineering groups.  Now, – HYPERLINK http://www.internetsociety.org/sites/default/files/Internet%20Interconnections%20Proposals%20For%20New%20Interconnection%20Model%20Comes%20Up%20Short.pdf \t _blank in a detailed report published last week, ISOC takes strong exception to the technical and business merits of the proposal, which it dismisses as an attempt at “importing the compensation schemes, scams and arbitrage that plague the traditional communications model to the Internet.”
It’s actually worse than that.  What ETNO proposes is the reverse of the failed long-distance system.  Under the long-distance settlements process, the calling party pays for the call—at rates established by the receiving telco.  Under ETNO’s sending-party-network pays scheme, however, the network that responds to a local user’s request for data will be required to pay the receiving network for the privilege of supplying it.  When a local user requests a (free) YouTube video, in other words, the cost of fulfilling that request would be borne by the network that answered the call. 
Even if it made good business sense, the ETNO proposal, according to ISOC, would be “extremely expensive to implement.”  That’s in part because most exchanges between networks rely on settlement-free peering arrangements, many of which aren’t even in writing.  And unlike the dedicated circuit of a phone call, the packet-switching architecture of the Internet, comprised of some 40,000 smaller networks, makes it impossible to keep track of how and from what pathways a response travels.
According to ISOC, “retro-fitting a ‘sender pays’ settlement regime to the Internet is not possible without extensive changes to the infrastructure of the global Internet.”
ISOC is also concerned that the ETNO proposal, on the surface, may be attractive to developing nations, who have largely lost the ability to tax international long distance calls.  Since the ITRs were last modified in 1988, Skype, Google Voice and other IP-based phone services have turned the long-distance model on its head.   Increasingly, phone calls are just another form of data traveling over the Internet.
Developing nations may see sending-party-network-pays as a return to the good old days.  But the more likely outcome is that content providers will simply refuse requests from countries where the expected revenue from its users (e-commerce, ad revenue, subscriptions) is less than the cost imposed by the receiving network.  As the ISOC report puts it, “Sending-party-network-pays could therefore reinforce and make much worse the existing ‘digital divide.’”  Countries who today may largely be requesting content without providing much in return may find their citizens cut off.
 
The WCIT Mantra:  “Please Regulate My Rival”
Despite a firestorm of criticism over the ETNO proposal, http://etno.eu/Default.aspx?tabid=2506 \t _blank the organization continues to insist on the “need for a new eco-system for the Internet,” one that recognizes an “increasing role for the ITU” in global IT issues.  Sources within the WCIT process confirm that ETNO is working hard to build a coalition of countries who might benefit economically or politically from its proposal, including some who don’t fully understand the differences between telephone calls and Internet transit.
So it’s worth asking why ETNO’s European telco members are so determined to extract tribute from largely U.S.-based Internet companies, perhaps at great harm to their own subscribers and those of other countries that are net importers of content. 
In part the answer comes from the failure of Europe’s internal scheme for micromanaging prices that incumbent wireline operators charge for access to their networks by local competitors.  ETNO members operate under a highly-constrained set of rules that its members believe make it impossible to justify investment in next-generation networks, including fiber optics and advanced mobile protocols such as LTE.
Recently, in fact, – HYPERLINK http://www.eurocomms.com/features/analysis/8434-operators-welcome-europes-new-broadband-investment-proposals \t _blank the EU’s top technology regulator acknowledged the unintended disincentives of EU communications regulations and vowed to fix them.  In a briefing on proposed changes to EU policy, Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda, acknowledged that current regulations were too invasive and effectively picked technology winners.  She proposed changes that would make is possible for landline, cable, and mobile networks to compete more freely.
“[W]e cannot predict with any certainty what the best technological solutions will be, nor how they will compete and interact,” Kroes said.  “Incremental solutions may help to address weak demand in the short term – for example, new technology combining fiber and copper, or upgrading TV cable, can be very cost-effective in delivering higher download capacity.”
For now, faced with a crushing burden of internal regulation, ETNO is looking to the ITU to make life equally difficult for everyone else.  The “sending-party-network-pays” proposal, in the end, is an archetypal example of what FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell http://www.fcc.gov/document/commr-mcdowells-speech-possible-itu-regulation-internet \t _blank recently called the “please regulate my rival” approach to policy change.
McDowell sees the ETNO proposal specifically as a dangerous move to make other network operators suffer the same limitations that plague them.  “I can’t imagine why network operators would consciously surrender their autonomy to negotiate commercial agreements to an international regulator,”  McDowell said in a recent speech.  Unless, that is, they have been “regulated too much and for too long” to think of any other way out of their own predicament.
McDowell, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204792404577229074023195322.html \t _blank who was among the first to warn the Internet community of a potentially catastrophic outcome for WCIT, also connects the dots between ETNO’s economic proposals and the political objectives of some ITU member nations.  To be effective, the ETNO proposal would require “an intrusive new mechanism for recording Internet traffic flows on the basis of the value of traffic delivery, presumably determined by the ITU,” McDowell said.
“Such expanded ‘monitoring capabilities’ for the ITU fit perfectly into Mr. Putin’s vision of the Internet of the future,” he said.
For his part, ITU Secretary-General http://techliberation.com/2012/08/01/brazilian-interview-with-toure-on-wcit/ \t _blank Toure told a Brazilian interviewer that he “welcomed” the ETNO proposal.  As for McDowell, Toure dismissed his criticisms, noting that the ITU, unlike the FCC, operates on a “consensus” model.
But that will come as cold comfort in December to billions of Internet users, when a secretive UN agency will convene a rogue’s gallery of repressive governments and economic opportunists, closes its doors, and decides the future of a technology it knows nothing about.
That is, unless Internet users around the world wake up and put a stop to this nonsense.