Who Threatens Internet Freedom?
By Sheldon Richman Friday, October 05, 2012
Two months from now the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) will convene in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, sponsored by the UN’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU). Depending on whom you believe, this is either the gravest threat to the Internet to date or a justifiable effort to free the Internet from U.S. domination.
In fact, there is truth on both sides of the controversy. Consequently, the best way to foster Internet freedom is to trust neither the UN nor the U.S. government, but to pursue a third way that has an important precedent in world history.
The WCIT will explore proposals to extend the 1988 International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs), which cover wired telephone systems, to the Internet. The ITU says the conference will present “a key opportunity to increase collaboration between countries, to help countries reach new levels of economic and social development through efficient telecom services, and to make the ITRs more relevant and valuable to ITU members, to help them respond to the challenges of a fast-evolving ICT environment.”
“When an invention becomes used by billions across the world,” ITU secretary-general Hamadoun Touré explained to Michael Joseph Gross of Vanity Fair, “it no longer remains the sole property of one nation, however powerful that nation might be. There should be a mechanism where many countries have an opportunity to have a say. I think that’s democratic.”
But not everyone sees the WCIT as benign. In August the U.S. House passed H.Con.Res. 127, 414-0, responding to the planned conference by resolving that the Obama administration “should . . . promote a global Internet free from government control . . . .” The resolution warned that the WCIT “would fundamentally alter the governance and operation of the Internet; . . . justify under international law increased government control over the Internet. . . [and] diminish the freedom of _expression_ on the Internet in favor of government control over content, contrary to international law.” (The Senate has not acted.)
Members of the House were not alone in their anxiety. Other critics warned that centralized regulation of the Internet would imperil the benefits that come from its private decentralized governance in which all “stakeholders” have a voice.
Google vice president Vinton Cerf, a father of the Internet, expressed concern before the House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology: “The Internet’s success has generated a worrying desire by some countries’ governments to create new international rules that would jeopardize the network’s innovative evolution and its multi-faceted success.”
Noting that “the Internet developed outside of traditional telecommunications regulation,” Robert Pepper, Cisco Systems vice president for global technology policy, warns of the WCIT’s “grave threat to the Internet as we know it”:
If these radical changes are adopted, the results could be devastating. It could break the global Internet into unconnected islands of national or regional networks, extend telecommunications regulations to computing, or lead to onerous government regulation of the Internet. . . . We should be extremely wary of any actions that dramatically alter the global Internet landscape and stem the growth, innovation and dynamism of the Internet today.
Pepper sees the WCIT as “well-intentioned,” but not everyone does. Robert M. McDowell of the Federal Communications Commission last February wrote in the Wall Street Journal:
Even though Internet-based technologies are improving billions of lives everywhere, some governments feel excluded and want more control.
And let’s face it, strong-arm regimes are threatened by popular outcries for political freedom that are empowered by unfettered Internet connectivity. They have formed impressive coalitions, and their efforts have progressed significantly.
McDowell cites the interest of authoritarian Russia and China in such “chilling” WCIT proposals as “Subject[ing] cyber security and data privacy to international control . . .; Allow[ing] foreign phone companies to charge fees for ‘international’ Internet traffic . . . with the goal of generating revenue for state-owned phone companies and government treasuries; Impos[ing] unprecedented economic regulations such as mandates for rates, terms and conditions for currently unregulated traffic-swapping agreements known as ‘peering.’ [and] Subsum[ing] under intergovernmental control many functions of the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Society and other multi-stakeholder groups that establish the engineering and technical standards that allow the Internet to work.”
“Russia, along with China, North Korea, Iran and other notably nondemocratic countries, are advocating for international regulation of the Internet . . . ,” writes Edward J. Black, president and CEO, Computer and Communications Industry Association, in The Huffington Post. “These countries are also asking for a ‘cyber arms control treaty.’ But the real goal is to give governments the international legal cover to declare information they don't like a ‘danger to the state’ and therefore the equivalent of cyber warfare so they can censor it.”
This is a reasonable concern, considering that Egypt, Iran, and other countries have interfered with the Internet when democratic opposition rose up in recent years.
Yet some view this criticism by Americans with suspicion. Richi Jennings, an English columnist for Computerworld, responded to McDowell’s “alarmist opinion piece” and its “foaming-at-the-mouth grab-bag of unsubstantiated ‘fears.’” What Americans are afraid of losing, Jennings says, is control of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). He writes: “It’s, frankly, ridiculous that, 20 years after Al Gore’s committee freed the Internet from its non-commercial straitjacket, we’re still shackled with U.S. control over this key function” the Internet domain name system. Jennings adds:
Yes, all right-thinking countries should be wary of signing international treaties that sanction oppression and unnecessary regulation. On the other hand, those of us who live outside the U.S. continue to be concerned that we’re relying on a not-so-benevolent dictatorship.
Nation states can already censor the Internet, and they can already spy on their citizens. No new set of ITU regulations would change that.
I wonder if Mr. McDowell, a U.S. government employee, sees the irony in complaining about censorship and spying, when it’s his employer [the FCC] that’s among the most prolific Internet censors and wire-tappers?
Some American telecommunications analysts also smell hypocrisy. Jerry Brito and Adam Thierer, senior research fellows at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, penned “A Note to Congress: The United Nations Isn’t a Serious Threat to Internet Freedombut You Are” in The Atlantic. “The reality is that Congress increasingly has its paws all over the Internet. Lawmakers and regulators are busier than ever trying to expand the horizons of cyber-control across the board: copyright mandates, cybersecurity rules, privacy regulations, speech controls, and much more,” they wrote.
The authors refer to Congress’s unsuccessful attempt to permit the closing of access to suspect foreign websites, without due process, in order to combat content piracy ( SOPA and PIPA) and the pressure on “American companies to block WikiLeaks.” (The threat to free _expression_ and innovation from intellectual “property” law is grossly unappreciated.) And recall that last year Sen. Joseph Lieberman and two colleagues proposed legislation to empower the executive branch to remove “critical” websites and components from the Internet in a cyber emergency. (The effort was abandoned after it was compared to Egypt’s shutdown of the Internet.)
“While the congressional resolution is commendable,” Brito and Thierer write, “these examples make clear that congress would do well to heed its own cries of alarm. The most serious threat to Internet freedom is not the hypothetical specter of United Nations control, but the very real creeping cyber-statism at work in the legislatures of the United States and other nations.”
Just last month, Freedom House voiced similar concerns about the U.S. government in its global survey of Internet freedom. For example, “ The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) requires telephone companies, broadband carriers, and interconnected Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) providers to design their systems so that communications can be easily intercepted when government agencies have the legal authority to do so.” Also, “social networks and microblogging sites have become more prominent targets for government monitoring of citizen activities.”
The USA PATRIOT Act gave the government power to compel Internet service providers to surrender information about their customers, such as web-browsing histories.
So which form of Internet governance is to most feared: UN regulation or the U.S.-tilted status quo?
There’s a third and better way that would avoid government regulation entirely. Its model is the Law Merchant, the sophisticated system of private commercial law and conflict resolution generated by global merchants without government help after the fall of the Roman Empire. A modern-day example is private arbitration, which is popular with business people worldwide because it bypassed the costly inefficiency of government courts.
The greatness of the Internet lies in decentralized governance, private property, and broad stakeholder participation, as Ron Paul’s Campaign for Liberty manifesto, “The Technology Revolution,” declares. Eternal vigilance is required against the constant threat posed by individual governments and coalitions of them. Both the U.S. government and the International Telecommunication Union should back off.
http://www.theprojecttorestoreamerica.com/ --
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