WCA March 2013

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 14 th 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 14 th 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

The ‘open Internet’ under threat?

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

The adamant American opposition to any conflation of telecom and Internet was reflected in a 14 th 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

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Wire & Cable ASIA – March/April 2013