[LINK] ITU State of Play

[Stephen Loosley]

"Has the United Nations taken over the Internet yet?"
    Impress at your next dinner party with this primer on what's happening at the ITU gabfest

    
        
            By
            
                Kieren McCarthy,
        
        
            30 Oct 2014
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/10/30/itu_plenipot_primer


For the past five days, and the next nine, dozens of government 
representatives are in Busan, Korea discussing changes to the 
international telecommunications regime.


It is the Plenipotentiary
 conference of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the arm 
of the United Nations that tries to coordinate telecoms efforts globally
 to the benefit of all.

    
        


        
    
  

And below we will parse out exactly what is going on and what threads of conversation are worth following.


For
 most of its near-150-year history the ITU has been the preserve of 
bureaucrats and telecoms execs and has rarely, if ever, entered the 
broader public's consciousness.


But then the internet came along 
and ruined everything by building the most effective and extraordinary 
communications network the world has ever known. And it did so entirely 
outside of this cosy world. Parts of the ITU have been trying to get 
back control every since.
Last time aroundThe last 
Plenipotentiary in 2010 in Guadalajara became controversial because of a
 number of efforts by governments (most notably Russia and Saudi Arabia)
 to pull control of parts of the internet under the auspices of the ITU.
 As an arm of the United Nations (UN), the ITU's main decisions are 
decided by the world's governments, so a UN-led evolution of the 
internet would slowly but inevitably equate to a government-controlled 
internet - something that a lot of internet users (and some governments)
 did not want.


At the end of that conference, after a lot of 
wrangling, things stayed pretty much the same and there was even the 
mention of some of the world's key Internet bodies in a footnote to a 
resolution (this may sound like small beans but in the complicated world
 of the UN it was a big step).


The fight was then pushed forward 
to 2012 and another ITU conference, the World Conference on 
International Telecommunications (WCIT,) at which the goal was to update
 an old international treaty on telecoms regulations. The same 
governments as two years earlier tried again to pull the internet under 
these regulations (and hence expand the ITU's control over them), which 
ultimately resulted in a big split between the world's governments with 
approximately one third refusing to sign the end result.


Which leads us to the 2014 Plenipotentiary in Busan, Korea.


What
 is critical to understand straight away is that several hundred people 
spending all day every day in a multitude of rooms talking about a 
relatively small set of issues creates an extraordinary amount of 
discussion and documents.


It is extremely difficult to follow. To give an indication, here is a graphic created by crowdsourced policy analyst Sam Dickinson trying to capture all of the concurrent discussions and working groups going on at any given time.


http://regmedia.co.uk/2014/10/30/wg-plenary-chart-v1-s.jpg


As you can see there are 10 groups working to consolidate all the 
different ideas and proposals put forward by member states; and 9 "ad 
hoc groups" (AHGs) thrashing out areas of disagreeing in the hope of 
providing an agreed final text in time for the closing session on 7 
November.


The reality is that you, as an internet user, are only 
likely to be interested in one of these working groups: number 7. Number
 7 is looking at all the internet-related resolutions: 101, 102, 133, 
180 and four proposed new resolutions (although there are many, many 
more issues on the table as this matrix by the Internet Society makes clear).


What
 you probably also need to know at this stage is that the ITU does a lot
 of its work by going back and revising old resolutions. The theory is 
that at any given point you have a series of resolutions that provide 
the current best thinking on telecoms policy. In reality, this process 
is often used to define a battleground.


Here's what you need to know about each of those resolutions:

  

Resolution 101: Internet Protocol-based networks.



Russia wants to make the ITU a provider of IP addresses 
(everything attached to the Internet needs an IP address). There are 
currently five organizations - representing five regions of the world - 
that do this job, called Regional Internet Registries (RIRs). They feel 
they have things under control and so does the internet community. But 
some governments want the ITU to adopt this role as a way of sticking 
the UN into the machinery of internet governance.


Once inside, the
 ITU could start handing out IP address blocks through its own systems 
and potentially bypass the current system. And it could possibly do so 
on terms that favor governments. All in all it is an unnecessary change 
that would sow discord.


Some governments are also using this 
resolution as an opportunity to poke and embarrass the United States 
over the mass online surveillance that was revealed by Edward Snowden 
last year.


Risk of disruption: High

Chances of success: Low
Resolution 102: The ITU's role
 with regard to international public policy issues pertaining to the 
Internet and the management of Internet resources, including domain 
names and addressesThis is the big beast in terms of the 
internet governance. Broadly speaking some governments want to make it 
so that all "public policy issues" as they pertain to the Internet are 
left solely in the hands of the world's governments.


This approach
 would undermine the current systems for running and governing the 
internet and so, unsurprisingly, many users are not happy about it.


At the moment all the work done in this area by the ITU is through the Council Working Group on the Internet (CWG-Internet), which is closed to member states only, although others are allowed to send it documents to be considered.


There
 is an effort afoot to expand the CWG-Internet to other groups and to 
make its documents readily available. The idea behind that is that it 
would make it 100 times harder in future for the CWG-Internet to try to 
push through something unseen (which it has tried to do repeatedly in 
the past).


Risk of disruption: High

Chances of success: Medium, although there are a lot of suggested changes so it's hard to know exactly where the ball will fall at the moment.
Resolution 133: Role of administrations of Member States in the management of internationalized (multilingual) domain namesThis
 one could actually work in everyone's favor. This resolution has been a
 battleground in the past. But due to the fact that ICANN has - finally -
 started putting a lot of new internet extensions online that use other 
languages/scripts, such as Chinese, Arabic, Cyrillic, and so on, the 
world's governments are actually feeling quite happy about how things 
are going.


That doesn't mean that some of them won't seek to 
extend their influence over this critical issue or try to figure out a 
way to bypass the current internet governance systems. But in general 
the new top-level domains are working well and it's a sign that maybe 
the current systems don't need changing, simply improving.


It may 
also see existing internet organizations pulled a little bit more into 
the ITU's world which can only be a good thing as neither group is going
 away any time soon.


Risk of disruption: Medium

Chances of success: High
Resolution 180: Facilitating the transition from IPv4 to IPv6Again,
 this is an area where governments are seeking to insert the ITU into 
the current internet governance systems, ostensibly to help with the 
rollout of the next generation of the internet.


What should be 
pointed out is that the ITU, for all the criticism it receives from the 
internet world, is far more effective at expanding technology into 
developing countries than the Internet industry (which is focused on its
 customers in rich Western nations) will ever be.


With luck, this will be one area where warring parties can see the value that each side can bring.


Risk of disruption: Medium

Chances of success: Medium
New resolution98: ITU’s Role in realizing Secure Information SocietyOne
 more effort to include the ITU in IP addressing systems. In this case, 
India has proposed the entire system is changed so IP addresses are more
 traceable. This issue has come up before and the internet community has
 complained about it but India's seems determined that it is a good 
idea. It isn't.


(Article Comment: This would match well with the rollout of IPv6. Governments/ITU could 
have fine control of the mapping between IPv6 address and the 
user/group/location. When the IoT is upon us, 'they' will know how many 
slices of toast you've made and when.)




There are some others but depending on what 
happens in the next few days, they may become something or may be 
nothing. We'll keep you posted.
And so what is happening on the ground?So, in terms of the actual discussions that have been had so far. What has actually happened?
Well, we would sum it up as: lots of talking, lots of disagreement, some progress, and big fights coming next week.


Hopefully this primer will mean that when the updates do come in that you'll be able to understand what is going on.


It
 should also be noted that there are a range of good resolutions and 
good proposed changes, and that the ITU often does an excellent job in 
areas such as capacity building and spectrum allocation. 



And it is 
slowly changing and improving. 



But who wants to hear about that? ®


--


Cheers,
Stephen