WCA March 2013

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42 Wire & Cable ASIA – March/April 2013
The ‘open Internet’
under threat?
The adamant American opposition
to any conflation of telecom and
Internet was reflected in a 14th
December statement by the Internet
Society (Reston, Virginia) that a
host of delegations in Dubai had
“made it very clear that Internet
issues did not belong in the ITRs
and that they would not support a
treaty that is inconsistent with the
multi-stakeholder model of Internet
governance.” Terry Kramer, who
headed the American delegation, said
that in their refusal to sign the treaty
the United States and its supporters
had headed off a significant threat to
the “open Internet.”
As noted by Eric Pfanner of the
New York Times, the “messy end”
to the proceedings highlighted
intractable differences of opinion over
the ever-growing importance of digital
communications networks as tools
for personal communications, global
commerce, political proselytisation,
and even unconventional warfare.
(“US Rejects Telecommunications
Treaty,” 13 th December).
But the Internet apparently trumps
every other issue. Hamadoun Touré,
the secretary general of the ITU, told
Mr Pfanner, “The word ‘Internet’ was
repeated throughout this conference
and I believe this is simply a
recognition of the current reality. The
two worlds of telecommunications
and Internet are inextricably linked.”
✆ While no provisions on the
Internet appear in the treaty
text, the non-binding appendix
to the final document does call
on the ITU “to play an active
and constructive role in the
development of broadband and
the multi-stakeholder model of the
Internet.”
On his departure from Dubai the
leader of the American contingent
discounted any direct impact
from a revised treaty. He did not,
Mr Kramer told reporters,
“see a lot of near-term or
intermediate-term risks here,
because it’s not a legally binding
document.”
✆ Additional perspective on the
final document to come out of the
World Conference on International
Telecommunications 2012 was
supplied by the European Com-
mission.
The EC noted in a 14th December
statement that signatory countries
account for only a small proportion
of global telecom traffic.
The revisions to the ITU regu-
lations are not set to go into effect
until 2015.
A need for HetNets to
handle data traffic is seen
boosting annual shipments
of small cells to 5 million
by 2017
According to a report from the
London-based research firm ARC-
chart, rising data traffic and the need
for carriers to deploy heterogeneous
network (HetNet) architecture to
handle the load will lead to 5 million
The World Conference on International Telecommunications 2012 treaty
revision conference ended 14th December with a plurality of International
Telecommunication Union member countries agreeing to sign off in its final
document.
Of the 193 member states of the specialised United Nations agency,
155 were represented at the two-week conference in Dubai; 144 countries,
all current in their dues to the organisation, were eligible to vote; 89 approved
the final document.
Among the countries opposing revisions to the International
Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs) are the United States, the United
Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Denmark, the Czech Republic and Sweden.
Other countries that expressed initial reservation about the revisions include
Japan, India, and all other European nations that sent delegates, including
Germany, France and Poland.
On the other side, support for the proposed revisions was strong among
African, Arab and Latin American countries. Russia, which originated many
of the revisions opposed by the United States, signed the final document, as
did China.
So much for the attendance and voting statistics. What are the revisions
that prompted the East-West and North-South divides within an
organisation whose narrowly defined mission is “strengthening emergency
communications for disaster prevention and mitigation, especially in less
developed regions”?
The main bone of contention was the Internet, the US having consistently
maintained that it should not be mentioned in the proposed treaty revision,
which considers such technical matters as international telephone
connectivity. The US view is that Internet inclusion could lead to curbs on
free speech and replace the bottom-up form of Internet oversight with a
government-led model.
Accordingly, the American delegation withheld its assent to an expansion of
ITR scope from “recognised operating agencies” to “operating agencies,” a
broader term that the US State Department takes to include Internet service
providers.
Before rejecting the proposed treaty, the United States had won several
critical victories in the negotiations. For example, proposals to require
Internet companies to pay telecommunications companies for traffic on their
networks, sought by some African and Asian nations and by European phone
companies, were removed.
Is the Internet a telecommunications service?
The US says not, and rejects its inclusion in an
otherwise technical ITU document