In an article published by Forbes Magazine, Larry Downes rightly denounces efforts by the International Telecommunications Union to gain control over the Internet. The main bone of contention seems to be a proposal to make senders pay a fee to receiving countries – for content the users in those countries request. Since most Internet content originates in the US, this would amount to heavy taxation of US providers. Another fear is that international political regulation of the Internet would establish cover for countries attempting to censor content they don’t want their citizens to access.
The article seems a bit sanctimonious as the US is well on its way of establishing its own version of control, including a presidential “kill switch” for the Internet. It feels a bit like the pot calling the kettle black.
From the article:
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.
… 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.
As Americans learned in last year’s fight over SOPA and PIPA, and as advocates around the world continue to discover in protests over secret global intellectual property treaties including ACTA and the 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.
The worst proposals so far offered by ITU members would expand the scope of the ITRs from establishing general rules for international interchange 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.
Read the whole article on Forbes: