Battle for control of the internet spills into the open at WCIT

UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon stakes claim to the internet in opening day of WCIT

The World Congress on Information Technology (WCIT) has opened today, but has been overshadowed by allegations that the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) is plotting to take control of the internet at the behest of states like China, Russia and others.

Those plans were made clear in the mercifully brief opening speech to the Congress given by United Nations (UN) secretary-general Ban Ki-moon. He said that the objective of the conference was to "ensure universal access to the benefits of information and communication technology – including for the two-thirds of the world's population currently not online."

He continued: "The management of information and communication technology should be transparent, democratic and inclusive of all stakeholders. I am pleased that you have taken steps to open the process – including the vital voices of civil society and the private sector. The UN system stands behind the goal of an open internet."

Ban Ki-moon added that the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights "guarantees freedom of expression across all media and all frontiers" – which will be news to people in most countries of the world – and went on, "the free flow of information and ideas is essential – for peace, for development, for our common progress... We must continue to work together and find consensus on how to most effectively keep cyberspace open, accessible, affordable and secure".

Devil in the detail

However, much of the devil will be in the detail of those words, which various countries and special interest groups have used as a cover to push their particular demands.

This year's WCIT is particularly important as its purpose is to negotiate new international telecom regulations. Lobbyists of all stripes, therefore, including repressive national governments and telecoms companies sidelined by the popularity of the internet, have also poured unprecedented efforts into behind-the-scenes lobbying campaigns in a bid to have the rules bent in their favour.

For example, the European Telecommunications Network Operators (ETNO), of which Vodafone is a member, is lobbying to make internet companies pay for the bandwidth generated by user demand under the "sender pays" principle. That would place Google with a huge bill for sending YouTube videos around the world – rather than the internet service provider from where the request originated from.

Telecoms companies argue that the amount of "commodity" bandwidth they need to build to support fast-increasing amounts of traffic requires regulation to establish a universal payment mechanism between network carriers. This would be similar to the interconnection rules that govern international telephone calls – rules that also make international phone calls very expensive.

Google and other content providers, meanwhile, have been lobbying against such proposals as it would mean they would either have to drastically curtail their activities or to charge users in some way.

More ominously, a number of national governments are demanding that the internet's key government organisations should be placed under the "democratic" control of the ITU, away from the US, so that all countries' governments would be able to decide how it develops according to majority vote.

Battle for control of the internet spills into the open at WCIT

UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon stakes claim to the internet in opening day of WCIT

The Russian government, meanwhile, has lobbied for the ITU to recognise the right of national governments to take control of the internet within their jurisdiction. In many respects, this would merely recognise the reality on the ground in many countries.

But alongside proposals for mandatory identity management, so that people could not use the internet anonymously, and calls for "deep packet inspection" of all internet data in the name of combating cybercrime, it would effectively undermine only commerce and put companies at greater risk of corporate espionage – especially state-sponsored corporate espionage.

Campaigning for the status quo

And most of this lobbying and jostling for power has taken place behind closed doors in the run-up to WCIT.

A number of organisations have lobbied against any significant changes to the status quo. Many of them question whether the internet needs the kind of governance by quango that the UN, the ITU and a number of governments are seeking.

"Mozilla lauds the professed aims of the conference. But we question the very assumption that a 'binding global treaty', enacted by member states alone, will be beneficial for the internet or for global society," wrote Harvey Anderson, vice president of business affairs and general counsel for Mozilla, in the Mozilla blog.

He added: "The internet needed no treaty to come into existence, to expand, to flourish, and to transform global society. The internet needed no convocation of governments to facilitate the professed aims of the new treaty. There is no reason to believe that a treaty will fill any current need or cure any current defect."

Google, meanwhile, published a post on its blog from Vint Cerf, the "father of the internet": "Starting in 1973, when my colleagues and I proposed the technology behind the internet, we advocated for an open standard to connect computer networks together. This wasn't merely philosophical; it was also practical. Our protocols were designed to make the networks of the internet non-proprietary and interoperable. They avoided 'lock-in', and allowed for contributions from many sources," he wrote.

This engineering is why the internet does not need a governing body like the ITU in the same way that the telegraph industry did 150 years ago, which was what the ITU was originally set up to govern. "This openness is why the internet creates so much value today. Because it is borderless and belongs to everyone, it has brought unprecedented freedoms to billions of people worldwide: the freedom to create and innovate, to organise and influence, to speak and be heard," wrote Cerf.

Far from opening up the internet to more people, the ITU would do the opposite – approximately one-third of the world's people have acquired internet access in fewer than 20 years thanks to the way that it works, relatively free from government and bureaucratic intervention, claimed Cerf.

Nevertheless, the ITU claims that it only wants to spread the use of the internet beyond the "rich" world. "The brutal truth is that the internet remains largely [the] rich world's privilege," Dr Hamadoun Toure, secretary-general of the ITU, said before the WCIT convened. He added: "[The] ITU wants to change that."

Battle for control of the internet spills into the open at WCIT

UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon stakes claim to the internet in opening day of WCIT

In an opinion article in Wired magazine, published earlier this year, Toure said that the ITU merely wanted to bring the internet to more people. "With over 90 per cent of the world's people now within reach of mobile phones, the challenge today is bringing internet access to the two-thirds of the world's population that is still offline. This challenge is compounded by the need to ensure connectivity is affordable and safe for all."

He continued: "The sole focus of the [WCIT] is making regulations valuable to all stakeholders, creating a robust pillar to support future growth in global communications... The conference will address issues that relate to improving online access and connectivity for everyone."

However, he added that while the ITU had no desire to usurp or take control of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the US company that assigns domain names and internet protocol addresses, it did want to revise global telecoms treaties in order to make internet access more affordable and to combat spam and other internet security threats.

"Proposals here range from combating spam and improving network security to mandating identification of communications' origins," he wrote. "Governments are looking for more effective frameworks to combat fraud and other crimes."

Background to WCIT 2012

The ITU, which falls under the auspices of the UN, is the organisation that draws up the treaties and regulations governing global communications.

It has been seeking greater influence and, ultimately, regulatory control of the internet since it rose to prominence in the 1990s. Since the last major revision of ITU regulations in 1988, it has made repeated attempts at the behest of some of its members to make a power-grab for the internet.

In response, the US government, under whose auspices the internet was conceived and commercialised, has put governance under the control of an arm's-length organisation, ICANN.

ICANN was created in September 1998 to oversee a number of internet-related tasks previously performed directly on behalf of the US government.

Its principal roles are to coordinate allocation of internet protocol (IP) address spaces (both IPv4 and IPv6) and assignment of address blocks to regional internet registries, for maintaining registries of internet protocol identifiers, and for the management of the top-level domain name space (DNS root zone), which includes the operation of root name-servers.

Most recently, it has also overseen the auction of new generic top-level domains (TLDs), which has drawn some criticism from certain countries that have objected to a number of proposed new domains.

And, according to the memorandum of understanding between the US Department of Commerce and ICANN when it was founded, its primary principles of operation also include: