End of WCIT Not End of U.S. Effort to Promote Multistakeholder Internet Governance, Kramer Says

The revised International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs) that emerged last week from the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) may have contained “poison pills” on the Internet and other controversial issues, but that does not mean the U.S. should stop advocating for its vision on such issues, said Terry Kramer, head of the U.S. WCIT delegation, Wednesday during an Internet Society event. “There’s a bigger discussion here about the benefits of the Internet that will carry the day I believe fundamentally,” he said in his first public comments since WCIT concluded Friday. “It is a long game that has to be played. We need to see the commercial benefits, the human benefits, et cetera."

The U.S. was among 55 of 144 eligible members of the ITU that chose not to sign -- or are undecided about signing -- the revised ITRs when WCIT concluded. Eighty-nine other eligible ITU members signed the document, including Brazil, China and the Russian Federation. The reluctance of so many ITU members to sign the treaty-level document is a clear signal that there are problems with the final version that came out of WCIT, Kramer said. “I would hardly call 89 nations of 193 [total members of the ITU] a broad consensus,” he said. Delegations that remain undecided on the ITRs are consulting with their home governments (CD Dec 17 p1). If a total of 30-40 nations decide not to sign the document at all, that will send a “strong statement,” Kramer said.

The late addition of an additional paragraph in the ITRs’ preamble, which recognized the right of member countries to access “international telecommunication services,” may have driven many of the current 55 non-signatories away from ratifying the treaty, said David Gross, chair of the Ad Hoc WCIT Working Group and a member of the U.S. WCIT delegation, during a Georgetown University event Wednesday. The paragraph appeared to create a new human right that did not previously exist in U.N. human rights law, potentially driving away some erstwhile supporters of the revised treaty, Gross said. Iran’s call for a vote on the proposal may have also shifted loyalties, as it went against a well-established principle of revising the ITRs based on consensus, he said. “Thanks to Iran, we were not isolated” with a few other allies, Gross said. In that vote, 77 delegations supported inclusion of the paragraph, while 33 opposed it. Another eight delegations abstained (CD Dec 14 p1).

Even though there were items in the revised ITRs that the U.S. fundamentally opposed -- the document’s scope, sections on network security and spam, as well as a non-binding Internet governance resolution -- the final document was “not as bad as we feared” prior to WCIT and during the conference, Kramer said. The revised ITRs actually turned out to be a “high-level” document on the telecom issues the original treaty focused on, he said. The “sender party pays” and “quality of service” traffic compensation proposals originally advocated by the European Telecommunications Network Operators’ Association also failed to make it into the final ITRs, even after a group of nations in Africa and the Middle East actively supported them, Kramer said. The final ITRs also did not contain a “shocking” proposal from the Russian Federation on Internet governance, although that manifested itself in the non-binding resolution that the U.S. cited as one of its reasons for not signing the document, he said.

Kramer said he’s disappointed Internet governance issues “weren’t taken off the table” at WCIT, but it’s important that the U.S. engage with “swing states” in Africa and Latin America to advocate for the multistakeholder Internet governance model, as well as broadband deployment and other issues he feels should have gotten more attention during the conference. “Telecom and the Internet are global,” Kramer said. “We need to be talking in global terms, we need to be engaging with other countries -- many countries we may not agree with. But we need to understand the issues, because when the Internet does well, everybody does better. But we need to stay in the game, having that continued dialogue."

Much of that dialogue will come as the ITU plans out the actual implementation of the revised ITRs, which do not take effect until Jan. 1, 2015. The ITU plans to discuss implementation at its next Plenipotentiary Conference, which is scheduled for Oct. 20-Nov. 7, 2014, in Busan, South Korea. That event will be “extremely important” not only to determining how the ITRs affect global telecom policy, but also how the ITU moves forward, said Sally Wentworth, Internet Society senior manager-public policy. ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun Touré will also be a major force in determining the effect of the ITRs and the ITU’s future, Kramer said. “I think that if he’s a forward-looking leader, he'll realize that the telecom charter is the right area and these other areas are going to get him nowhere in terms of broader support,” Kramer said.