Jerry Brito

Announcing the new WCITLeaks.org

As you might know, a few months ago Eli Dourado and I launched WCITLeaks.org, a site meant to bring transparency to the UN’s World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT, pronounced wicket). Today we’re relaunching a new and improved version of the site.

At the conference in December, world governments will consider proposals to increase government control of the Internet. The father of the Internet, Vint Cerf, has warned that “Such proposals raise the prospect of policies that enable government controls but greatly diminish the ‘permissionless innovation’ that underlies extraordinary Internet-based economic growth to say nothing of trampling human rights.”

Sadly, though, those proposals have been kept secret by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), which is hosting the meeting. WCITLeaks.org gave those in possession of such documents a way to make them available to the public. To date we have published about 11 percent of ITU documents related to the WCIT. But we think there’s more we can do.

The new WCITLeaks also provides a resource bank with links to analysis and advocacy materials from civil society, and a news page populated both with broad overviews of the issue and recent headlines. The hope is that WCITLeaks.org can serve as a clearinghouse for information related to the conference, as well as future efforts by the ITU to regulate the Internet.

In a couple of weeks, the ITU will be holding a press conference to discuss the WCIT because, they say, “there is quite a lot of misinformation being circulated concerning the agenda and process of the conference.” They invite journalists to “Join this global discussion to find out what’s REALLY going to be discussed[.]”

It’s amazing, but they are holding a press conference to dispel “misinformation” about what’s going to be discussed at the conference, and what’s going to be discussed at the conference is—wait for it—in the documents they keep secret! If the ITU is serious about dispelling any misinformation, the best way to do that is not with a press conference but by making all documents related to the WCIT public.

Until then, WCITLeaks.org will continue to serve as a resource where citizens can inform themselves by reading the secret government’s proposals, and now also by perusing news, policy analyses, and advocacy materials from a broad spectrum of civil society groups. We hope you will help us spread the word about the site, and submit documents and links you think should be included. Thanks for your help!

The UN’s ‘Internet takeover’ and the politics of Kumbaya

When it comes to the UN exerting greater control over Internet governance, all of us who follow Internet policy in the U.S. seem to be on the same page: keep the Internet free of UN control. Many folks have remarked how rare this moment of agreement among all sides—right, left, and center—can be. And Congress seized that moment yesterday, unanimously approving a bi-partisan resolution calling on the Secretary of State to “to promote a global Internet free from government control[.]”

However, below the surface of this “Kumbaya moment,” astute observers will have noticed quite a bit of eye-rolling. Adam Thierer and I wrote a piece for The Atlantic pointing out the obvious fact that when a unanimous Congress votes “to promote a global Internet free from government control,” they are being hypocrites. That’s a pretty uncontroversial statement, as far as I can tell, but of course no one likes a skunk at the garden party.

Here’s our friend Steve DelBianco writing at CircleID:

Today a key committee in the US Congress approved a resolution opposing United Nations “control over the Internet.” While some in the Internet community have dismissed the bipartisan effort as mere political grandstanding, recent actions by some UN Member States show that lawmakers have good reason to be worried.

For the record, I fully support, commend, and endorse the Congressional resolution and the idea that the UN and all governments should keep their paws off the Internet. I certainly don’t dismiss the effort. That said, because I am capable of critical thought, I can simultaneously entertain the idea that politicians in Congress are also engaging in grandstanding and will likely forget their august resolution next time they vote on cybersecurity, copyright, privacy, net neutrality, or child safety bills.

So what is the recent action that DelBianco says should have lawmakers worried?

Last month, UN voting member Ethiopia made it a crime — punishable by 15 years in prison — to make calls over the Internet. The Ethiopian government cited national security concerns, but also made it clear that it wants to protect the revenues of the state-owned telecom monopoly.

And this gets to the next point of contention. Milton Mueller has been getting some heat because he is pointing out the also obvious fact that the UN is not about to take over the Internet, and that the issues around WCIT are much more subtle than the headlines would lead you to believe. The fact that Ethiopia is enforcing such a terrible law is evidence itself that state governments are the real threat to the Internet, and that they don’t need permission from the UN to regulate the Internet.

And even if they did need it, they have it. As ITU Secretary-General Houman Touré pointed out in his speech yesterday, “Such restrictions are permitted by article 34 of the ITU’s Constitution, which provides that Member States reserve the right to cut off, in accordance with their national law, any private telecommunications which may appear dangerous to the security of the State, or contrary to its laws, to public order or to decency.”

But all this does not mean that folks like Milton, Adam, Eli Dourado, and I are not in complete agreement with DelBianco, FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell, Gigi Sohn, and the rest who are sounding the alarm about WCIT. It’s just that we want to be more specific about what the exact threats are, and we don’t want to overstate the case because we fear that could eventually backfire.

The real threat is not that the UN will take over the Internet per se, but that autocratic states like Russia, China and Iran will use the process to further legitimize their existing programs of censorship, as well as the idea of interconnection charges.

In a happy accident of history, the Internet was designed by academics and engineers, not governments and telcos. Now they want to say, “Thanks for setting it up, we’ll take it from here.” They can’t take control overnight at a single conference—and maybe never given the Internet’s decentralized architecture—but they can start setting the stage for more and more government regulation, perhaps even resulting splinternets (an issue beyond the scope of this post). That’s the subtle threat WCIT and subsequent conferences pose.

The question then is, why update the ITRs at all? All evidence suggests that the only reason to revisit the ITRs is to bring the Internet under their umbrella. The main thing to be negotiated at WCIT, it seems, is how much regulation of the Internet the ITRs will legitimize, not whether to do so at all. I know it will be hard for our diplomats to acknowledge other states’ concerns about security, piracy, fairness, etc., and at the same time be firm that WCIT is not the place to deal with those issues, but that’s what they should do.

An update on WCITLeaks.org

So far we have received and published four documents. That doesn’t sound like much, but they are very interesting ones. Eli and I are very happy with how our little project has turned out so far.

Thanks to all of you who have spread the word about WCITLeaks. The site was received positively in the Twitterverse, and we’ve garnered some press coverage, including these stories:

• C-Net: U.N. could tax U.S.-based Web sites, leaked docs show
• Reason: Is the UN Planning to Regulate the Internet? WCITLeaks Aims to Find Out.
• Techdirt: The Threat Of A UN Internet Takeover Is Only ‘Vague’ Because The UN Shares No Details
• TechPresident: A Wikileaks for the U.N.’s Would-Be Internet Regulators
• Bloomberg BNA: ‘WCITLeaks’ Website Attempts To Bring Transparency to WCIT Proposals (sadly behind a paywall)

A couple of pointers: If you want to understand what the WCIT is really all about, the one piece you have to read is this post by Milton Mueller. It’s the best explanation of what’s at stake. And if you want to understand the International Telecommunication Union’s lack of transparency, check out this article by Patrick Ryan and Jacob Glick.

Today we’re launching WCITLeaks.org

As you may have heard, the UN is trying to take over the internet. Well, that’s not really true, but member states of the UN’s International Telecommunications Union (ITU) are definitely going to negotiate an agreement related to the Internet at the World Conference on International Communications (WCIT - pronounced ‘wicket’) this December in Dubai. U.S. officials have warned that some member states, including Russia and China, have put forth proposals to regulate the Internet. Vint Cerf has warned that “Such proposals raise the prospect of policies that enable government controls but greatly diminish the ‘permissionless innovation’ that underlies extraordinary Internet-based economic growth to say nothing of trampling human rights.”

So what are these proposals? Well, we don’t know exactly. To see them, you have to have access to the ITU’s password protected website. This lack of transparency brings to mind secret negotiations like the one that gave us ACTA, and several civil society groups have written to the ITU demanding access to the documents.

The proposals are not classified and it’s not illegal to share them. In fact, they often are shared. At a recent panel discussion that I attended, the State Department’s Richard Beaird said, “Access to the proposals, of course, as I have done and others have done, is if you ask me, I will give you those proposals. I don’t want to have a flood of requests coming in from the room or those int he television audience.”

At the time, I tweeted: “If someone will pass them to me, I volunteer to host a site with gov WCIT proposals.” It seemed weird to me that someone wasn’t collecting and publishing the documents, like how opencrs.com does with Congressional Research Service reports. I promptly forgot about the idea, but was reminded yesterday when Milton Mueller wrote this post urging the U.S. to make documents available. He wrote:

Today, IGP has learned that the U.S. government is in possession of a document that brings together descriptions of all the WCIT proposals emerging from the ITU’s Council Working Group. The document, known as TD 64, compiles all the proposals on the table into a single document without attributing them to any specific government. No law or treaty stops the US government from making this document available to the public. We urge the U.S. government to release TD 64 of the ITU Council Working Group immediately.

Of course, while it’s not illegal, publishing these documents is probably not considered polite in the rarefied diplomatic circles of the ITU. So, I thought we’d give folks with access to the documents a helping hand.

Yesterday Eli Dourado and I spent a couple of hours putting together a website at WCITLeaks.org. The idea is simple: If you have a WCIT or ITU related document you’d like to share, submit it anonymously and we will publish it. That’s it. We hope you find it useful and that you’ll spread the word.

How does the UN take control of the Internet?

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell warns that several countries, including Brazil, Russia, China, and India, would like the UN to have a larger role in Internet governance. McDowell makes many of the same points I made in TIME.com last week and I agree with him completely. Here’s one thing he says that I find interesting:

Merely saying “no” to any changes to the current structure of Internet governance is likely to be a losing proposition. A more successful strategy would be for proponents of Internet freedom and prosperity within every nation to encourage a dialogue among all interested parties, including governments and the ITU, to broaden the multi-stakeholder umbrella with the goal of reaching consensus to address reasonable concerns. As part of this conversation, we should underscore the tremendous benefits that the Internet has yielded for the developing world through the multi-stakeholder model.

I’m not so sure about that. SOPA/PIPA showed that a “no compromises” approach can sometimes work. And it seems like the news today that the EU is pulling out of ACTA under pressure from netizens underscores that. ITU control of the Internet is ten times the threat that SOPA ever was, so I’m not sure we should rule out merely saying “no”. Dialog is always a good thing, but why should we enter a conversation agreeing we’re going to give in on some margin to states like China and Russia?

Here’s a question that remains a mystery to me: Assuming every other country agrees to centralize control of the Internet, wouldn’t true control require the U.S. handing over the root to the UN? Why would we ever do that? And what does it mean to “Subsume 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”? These are volunteer-run non-profits. How can they be “subsumed” by the ITU? Why would they submit?

And even if they are subsumed, all the power they now employ is merely putting out technical recommendations. It is the voluntary adhesion to these recommendations by the thousands of networks that make up the Internet which make them powerful. How would you mandate compliance with new standards from a centralized global body? Would nations have to make it illegal to belong to a rebel IETF putting out recs to compete with the ITU? I’m having a hard time envisioning how you ‘repeal and replace’ such a large, distributed, and successful bottom-up process.

UPDATE: Milton Mueller responds:

@jerrybrito the Internet is in no danger of being “taken over” by the UN. This meme is the twin brother of the “digital pearl harbor” meme

— Milton Mueller (@miltonmueller) February 25, 2012

Will the UN take over Net governance?

Over at TIME.com I write that we should keep a close eye on moves by Russia, China and other countries to move Internet governance to the UN:

All this year, and culminating in December at the World Conference on International Telecommunications in Dubai, the nations of the world will be negotiating a treaty to govern international telecommunications services between countries. It is widely believed that some countries, including Russia and China, will take the opportunity to push for U.N. control of Internet governance. Such a turn of events would certainly be troubling. …

It’s amazing to think about it, but no state governs the Internet today. Decisions about its architecture are made by consensus among engineers and other volunteers. And that, in fact, is what has kept it open and free.

“Upending the fundamentals of the multi-stakeholder model is likely to Balkanize the Internet at best, and suffocate it at worst,” FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell said recently in a speech. “A top-down, centralized, international regulatory overlay is antithetical to the architecture of the Net, which is a global network of networks without borders. No government, let alone an intergovernmental body, can make decisions in lightning-fast Internet time.”

Read the whole thing at TIME.com.