WCIT and ICANN issue index (29 November 12)

This is the third in a series of posts on the supposed threat of an ITU/UN take-over of the internet. As I’ve already said in two previous posts (here and here), I think the charges are vastly overblown, although there are interesting things to argue about and legitimate worries to be had.

Facts and Norms

There might also be victories for global internet governance to be had, if we take the ITU’s role seriously and that it, in turn, adopts only regulatory guiding principles that meet a minimum standard of liberal norms governing markets, human rights, a free press and freedom of expression.

The WCIT conference will revise the existing International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs). This whole exercise will comprise retaining, deleting or editing existing regulations or adding new regulations to the list.

We have broken down every proposals for change to its particular regulation or proposed new regulation and placed them on a single page for easy review. Each regulation is listed below with hyperlinks to those individuals pages.

This is the fourth in a series of posts on the potential implications of proposed changes and additions to the ITU’s international telecommunications regulations (ITRs) on the internet (earlier posts are here, here and here).

Note: drop-down menu will only appear when users sign in to .Nxt

Track progress at WCIT in real-time and with the actual words

Starting today and running through to the end of the WCIT conference on 14 December, .Nxt will be making every proposed change to the International Telecommunication Regulations accessible with a single mouse-click.

With hundreds of changes (we count 908 so far) spread across dozens of documents, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible to make sense of what the substantive changes are that will be discussed at the WCIT conference starting on Monday, 3 December 2012. Even if you have the documents, which come in Word doc or PDF format.

So we have inputted every proposed change into a database and broken them out by article in the ITRs, including the many new proposed articles.

Over the past few weeks, a mounting number of commentators in the U.S. have pushed a supposed new threat to an open internet into the spotlight: the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).

According to those raising the alarms, preparations to revise the ITU’s international telecommunications regulations (ITRs) at a meeting this December are being hijacked by a motley assortment of authoritarian countries, legacy telecoms operators, as well as the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and other developing countries. Their goal? To establish “international control over the internet”. Indeed, the issue is deemed so serious that congressional hearings on “International Proposals to Regulate the Internet” were held in the U.S. at the end of last month.

There seem to be three main claims behind the charge.

So which one are you, ITU?

Just when you thought the shouting over the WCIT meeting couldn't get any more shrill…

The conference, run the by the ITU and reviewing the 1988 International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs), starts next week.

But rather than discussions growing more sober and serious as discussions grow close (and despite some IT journalists' efforts to provide honest summaries) the past week has seen an increasingly aggressive stance from US-based groups who fear the conference will adversely impact the Internet… and their influence on the Internet.

The normally diplomatic Vint Cerf (Father of the Internet, ex-ICANN chair and Google's "chief Internet evangelist") stole headlines when he used a Reuters interview to launch an attack on the ITU itself.

ICANN staff and Board has upset large parts of its own organization and again raised concerns about its suitability to manage the domain name system with a series of decisions and "forecasts" regarding its trademark new gTLD program. Following a meeting earlier this month that was announced and saw trademark owners attempt to reopen a multi-year policy process to give themselves greater protections, some were stunned when ICANN appeared to signal it was prepared to change the rules to provide additional protections. At the same time, it also announced it was planning to extend protections on all domain names for IGOs, without waiting for the formal advice it has specifically requested from its own policy body, the GNSO, and following a surprise vote not to provide some of the additional protections by that same body.

Raising further questions about its accountability, ICANN's Board bypassed the second of four independent reviews and this month gave its new CEO carte blanche to try a new approach to the decade-long policy problem of Whois data. The Whois review team is reportedly furious that its has been dismissed with little or no public discussion and following a number of unexplained delays since the report was delivered late last year. The actions mirror those of the Board last year when it attempted to bypass a critical independent report in its accountability and transparency. Only fierce lobbying on the part of key community members and the US government caused that report's recommendations to be accepted and even though only after unexplained delays of over a year. ICANN is obliged to carry out four independent reviews into different aspects of its work under an agreement it has with the US government.

The European Parliament has joined the voices protesting against the upcoming WCIT conference by approving a resolution that some of the proposals under consideration "could seriously threaten the open and competitive nature of the internet".

More worrying for the organization running the conference, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the 12-point resolution incorporates a point repeatedly pushed by the United States in recent weeks - that the organization itself is not the correct place for such discussions.

Point five in the resolution reads:

The ITU, or any other single, centralised international institution, is not the appropriate body to assert regulatory authority over either internet governance or internet traffic flows

The Internet technical community reported early on Thursday that Syria had started disappearing from the Internet. The story was quickly picked up and reported worldwide, leading to fears that the Syrian government was about to embark on a huge campaign against rebels who have been battling the Assad regime for nearly a year. In an eerie reminder of when Egypt's Internet was shutdown at the height of its revolution, the country's IP address blocks stopped responding. A Syrian government representative blamed terrorists for the action but such a swift and controlled collapse of the country's Internet had led observers to conclude it was a deliberate act on the part of the government.