If you care about the future of the Internet, you should be paying attention to what’s happening in Busan, South Korea, right now.
You may not have heard much about the Plenipotentiary Conference of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a little-known, specialized agency of the UN. But high-profile Internet policy issues like cybersecurity, interconnection, and net neutrality are on the agenda as over 3000 delegates from 175 countries meet in Korea during the next three weeks. Although the ITU plenipotentiary is often described as a largely administrative meeting, the stakes of this conference are big: it could significantly impact global debates about these issues and the future of the multi-stakeholder model of Internet governance.
The Plenipotentiary Conference, held every four years, is the highest-level policy meeting of the ITU, which is the UN agency responsible for making sure that all global telecommunications traffic can work together. For starters, Member States “decide on the future role of the organization,” set policy priorities, plan strategy and finances, and hold elections, including picking a new Secretary-General for the organization.
Like any global UN convening, the preparation for the Plenipotentiary has been ongoing for months. Drafts have been traded, meetings held to solidify national and regional positions, all leading up to a three week marathon of intergovernmental negotiations in Busan. But decisions will be made by the end of the conference. Already this week they’ve elected a new Secretary General and working groups are being established to consider a wide-range of issues, including those related to the Internet.
First of all, what’s the future of the ITU in Internet governance itself?
Whether and how the ITU should be involved in Internet governance at all has been a contentious issue for years. In 2012, during the renegotiation of a key telecommunications treaty at the ITU’s World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), a stark division emerged over whether the text would be revised to include references to the Internet, which some argued would then dramatically expand the scope of the ITU’s role in the global multi-stakeholder Internet governance system. A wide range of stakeholders, including the United States and many European countries (as well as civil society groups from around the world), argued that the ITU is not the right place to discuss Internet public policy and that broadening its mandate could harm the open and free Internet. Several changes to the final treaty text — including the late-night adoption of a non-binding resolution on the Internet — ultimately led to a split, with 89 states signing the revised treaty and 55 others publicly opposing it, including the United States. (For more on what happened at the WCIT and the shifting diplomatic coalitions that have emerged since, see OTI’s interactive map on Visualizing Swing States in the Global Internet Governance Debate.)
The plenipotentiary is unlikely to be as dramatic as the WCIT, but there has been continued pressure during the past two years for the ITU to play a larger role in Internet governance issues, including cyber-security, content regulation, and surveillance. Russia, Iran, and China have long advocated for the ITU to become a go-to forum to discuss these questions, at least in part because the ITU is primarily a multilateral forum, rather than a multi-stakeholder one, which gives governments a greater amount of influence than the business community, civil society, and the network of technical organizations that manage most of the Internet’s key functions. Other countries like South Korea and Brazil have offered proposals that could expand the ITU’s mandate to cover online content and to address concerns about surveillance post-Snowden. And there are a large number of developing countries that support the ITU’s role because of its proven track record on promoting infrastructure investment and affordable access to the Internet. These countries will look to change existing resolutions to include more explicit references to these issues, and may even try to change the way “information and communications technology” is defined and used throughout various ITU documents, which could broadly impact the scope of the ITU’s work on Internet-related topics.
Cybersecurity and Cybercrime
Cybersecurity is likely to be another key topic dominating the conversation at the Plenipotentiary. In the past, the ITU has focused its efforts in this area on helping countries develop and strengthen their technical and legal capacity to address security threats. But the growth of transnational cybercrime and other cyberattacks has also increased demand for additional international mechanisms such as the development of a global cybersecurity treaty,. There will likely be debate about whether the ITU is the right forum to start these discussions, especially given the broad range of existing regional and international efforts to address cybercrime and cybersecurity. What’s more, any changes proposed in the name of security, combatting spam, or child online protection will have to be scrutinized to ensure that they aren’t being used by authoritarian governments as a backdoor way to justify censorship, monitoring of dissidents, or other activity that impedes the free flow of information online.
Interconnection and net neutrality
There are also a number of proposals that would make changes to the way global interconnection and routing are addressed by the ITU. Before the WCIT, several proposals emerged that would have allowed companies to enter into commercial agreements with differentiated quality of service delivery on the Internet or impose fees on network operators to deliver traffic to other networks (often referred to as “Sender Pays” proposals), ostensibly to increase revenue for developing countries that could be used to pay for infrastructure investment. Although these proposals did not gain much traction in 2012, variations of them have reappeared in advance of the plenipotentiary, largely through resolutions that make references to “balancing” interconnection fees charged between developing and developed countries. Promoting investment and competition in unserved and underserved areas of the world is critically important, but it’s not clear how regulating interconnection at a global level would address infrastructure gaps. Critics have also pointed out that these changes could ultimately increase the cost of transporting Internet traffic around the globe and undermine the principle of network neutrality.
Ultimately, concerns about these and other Internet-related issues that will be discussed at the Plenipotentiary Conference come in two primary forms. There are the nitty gritty questions about the language and scope of the hundreds of draft proposals that are on the table at the conference. And there’s the broader debate about where and how these conversations should take place in the future, especially given past criticism of the ITU for being one of the least transparent and most government-dominated bodies in the broader Internet governance ecosystem. We’ve seen some positive changes recently, including last week’s announcement by the ITU Secretary General that they will open up more of the plenipotentiary process to observers and remote participation after pressure from civil society. But there’s still a long way to go — in the next three weeks, and in years to come.
