Adminstration Officials Cheer Outcome of ITU Plenipotentiary

It's been a “very important year” for Internet governance and the ITU Plenipotentiary in Busan, South Korea, was the “highlight,” NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling said on a panel Thursday hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations and sponsored by Google. All panelists, including Daniel Sepulveda, U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for economic and business affairs, called the ITU conference a success. Sepulveda said cybersecurity issues aren’t in the “remit” of the ITU. The conference emphasized that ITU wouldn’t be inserted into areas of content control, he said. Strickling said ICANN’s accountability proposal process has been “slower” than its corresponding Internet Assigned Numbers Authority transition proposal and called the latter process “almost metaphysical.” He said ICANN and NTIA are relying on the ICANN community to develop the proposal (see 1410140062), and they weren’t trying to “steer it in any particular direction.” The debates over Internet governance and cybersecurity issues are far from over, said Christopher Painter, State Department cyber issues coordinator. Countries that are considering “drawing sovereign boundaries around cyberspace” have become much more active in Internet governance debates, he said.