Behind closed doors, decisions will be made next week that could threaten the global, open internet. This isn’t a sky-is-falling cry: There could be very real consequences both in how we use the internet and how it’s governed.
A relatively unknown United Nations agency called the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) is hosting the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) from Dec. 3 to 14. And it’s an opaque, government-controlled event.
The goal is to update a decades-old treaty, the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs). But certain countries appear to be attempting a quiet "coup" in updating the ITRs – one that could violate our rights online while leaving users less secure and with slower service.
It’s worth acknowledging that the ITU does a lot of important work. It sets spectrum and technology standards, has done much to improve global interoperability and efficiency, and helped increase access to information and communication technologies in developing nations.
And let’s face it: Given the dominance of the U.S. government, the current model of internet governance is not perfect, and urgently needs to include more voices from around the world.
Yet there’s an incurable, inherent problem with the ITU: Only governments get to vote. And that’s antithetical to how decisions about the internet are made. The ITU’s very nature should disqualify it from deciding how the internet is governed, especially when those decisions would be made by way of a binding international treaty.
But it’s the process here that reveals the most about the ITU priorities, and who can participate.
#### Brett Solomon
##### About
Brett Solomon is the executive director of [Access](https://www.accessnow.org), an international NGO that defends and extends the digital rights of users around the world.
It’s missing information transparency. As an international NGO, we had to fight just to read the proposals. It’s only through leaks that we’ve been able to gain access to the actual documents to be debated at the WCIT.
It limits stakeholder input. When the governments first meet, they will decide whether to shut out communities and experts who are not on government delegations – potentially excluding those who helped build and maintain the internet in the first place. Policies like these make the WCIT anathema to the “multi-stakeholder” process where all sectors are consulted – a model endorsed at the UN World Summit on Information Society (WSIS), which, ironically, was convened by the ITU.
It costs money. While Secretary-General Touré notes here in Wired that 700 private organizations are ITU members, he neglects to mention the membership cost: $2,100 to $35,000 annually – as well as the fact that sector members can’t vote. This exorbitant fee effectively excludes most users and human rights groups from participating.
It centralizes and slows things. Decisions made at the WCIT could put internet policymaking under a top-down international regulatory regime, replacing decades of merit-based, multi-stakeholder agreements. The current model of internet governance – the method by which norms and decision-making procedures are made and enforced – isn’t perfect. But it does allow for efficient, open, and sensible changes. Governments are anything but nimble, let alone open, in their decision-making processes.
The Proposals Raise Serious Concerns
Those are just concerns about the process. When you look at some of the proposals themselves, it’s downright frightening.
If these proposals are adopted, we could end up with an internet that suits the interests of governments and large telecoms over those of billions of global internet users.
By giving the ITU and its member states more control over cybersecurity, some of the government proposals legitimize dangerous responses to cybercrime, spam, and other ills. Just look around the world: These proposals reflect how governments justify censoring and spying on their citizens.
>Governments are anything but nimble, let alone open, in their decision-making processes.
And it’s not as if these cybersecurity proposals will make us safer online. The coordinated response to 2009’s Conficker worm was built on relationships between developers and other stakeholders, according to the Center for Democracy and Technology. Today’s taskforces and conferences feature a broad set of perspectives – law-enforcement officials, technologists, lawyers, companies, academics, and human-rights advocates – that develop evolving standards and implement them.
So it would be far from ideal to entrust this responsibility to a less-adaptable, government-controlled body – particularly as certain member states tend to use security as a foil for repression.
Some of the more alarming government proposals come from Russia and its regional group, the RCC. In its national submission, Russia states that government “shall have equal rights to manage the Internet” and the RCC explicitly proposes restrictions on public access to telecommunications when used for “undermining the sovereignty, national security, territorial integrity and public safety of other States, or to divulge information of a sensitive nature” (New Article 5A.5). This language is clearly ripe for abuse and could violate free expression commitments, recognized under Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
The internet is so efficient in part because packets swiftly traverse the network without being confined to a pre-determined route. At present, 99 percent of computer servers communicate via a handshake, and the fastest route for your data wins.
A proposal by the Arab States, though, would give governments the “right to know how its traffic is routed” (Modified Article 3.3). This threatens the viability of these informal handshake arrangements, potentially creating a series of bottlenecks resulting in increased surveillance, slower connection speeds, and increased costs to users.
>A larger geopolitical fight is playing out. Only this time it’s a battle over bits, and the free and open internet is at stake.
Other proposals, pushed by some major European telecoms, would increase costs to send content – potentially cutting off large swaths of the world from some online services and media. Developing countries could suffer billions of dollars in lost growth, and lose access to the online tools that aid free expression and political participation. In these ways, decisions at the WCIT could reverse the liberalization of international telecom regulation and provisions that have occurred since the ITRs were last negotiated in 1988.
We Need More Openness, Not Less
The ITU and its member states have attempted to respond to our criticisms and other challenges about the WCIT, but they fail to address the critical flaw: It’s a closed, government-controlled agency that should not be making decisions about internet policy.
Such decisions necessarily require the participation of governments and the private sector and civil society.
Expanding affordable access and securing networks (which the ITU has stated are their main goals), are extremely important. And in a perfect world, all governments would arrive in Dubai with their citizens’ best interests in mind.
But that’s not what’s happening. Repressive governments want to assail the disruptive power of the internet, our common platform for expression, and they’re all jostling to get the upper hand through this treaty.
So what we’re seeing is a larger geopolitical fight playing out at the WCIT. Only this time it’s a battle over bits, and the free and open internet is at stake.
This is why WCIT delegates need to stand strong and keep harmful amendments out of the ITRs. We also urge users to learn more about the WCIT at WhatistheITU.org and to sign the Statement to Protect Global Internet Freedom.
Wired Opinion Editor: Sonal Chokshi @smc90
