An attempt by national
governments to establish a worldwide policy for oversight of the Internet
collapsed yesterday after many Western countries said a compromise plan gave
too much power to United Nations and other officials.
Delegates
from the United States, UK, Australia and other countries took the floor on the
next to last day of a UN conference in Dubai to reject revisions to a treaty
governing international phone calls and data traffic.
“It’s
with a heavy heart and a sense of missed opportunities that the US must
communicate that it’s not able to sign the agreement in the current form,” said
Terry Kramer, the US ambassador to the gathering of the UN’s International
Telecommunication Union.
While
other countries will sign the treaty today, the absence of so many of the
largest economies means that the document, already watered down to suit much of
the West, will have little practical force.
“It
will bring some legal concerns between countries that have and haven’t signed
the treaty,” said a South American delegate who declined to be identified.
Though
technologists who had raised alarms about the proceedings preferred no deal to
one that would have legitimized more government censorship and surveillance,
the failure to reach an accord could increase the chance that the Internet will
work very differently in different regions.
“Maybe
in the future we could come to a fragmented Internet,” delegate Andrey
Mukhanov, a top international official at Russia’s Ministry of Telecom and Mass
Communications, told Reuters. “That would be negative for all, and I hope our
American, European colleagues come to a constructive position.”
Delegates
from the United States and other holdout countries said they would continue to
press at other international gatherings in support of what they call a
“multi-stakeholder model,” in which private industry groups set standards and
play a large role in the development of the medium.
Countries
that had been seeking an expansion of the ITU role reacted with some bitterness
to the failure to reach a consensus.
Tariq
al-Awadhi of the United Arab Emirates, head of the Arab States’ delegation,
said his group had been “double-crossed” by the US bloc after it had agreed to
a compromise deal that moved Internet issues out of the main treaty and into a
nonbinding resolution saying the ITU should be part of the multi-stakeholder
model.
“Unfortunately,
those countries breached the compromise package and destroyed it totally,” said
Awadhi. “We have given everything and are not getting anything.”
Awadhi
said the treaty should have covered all forms of telecommunications, including
voice over Internet protocol and Internet-based instant messaging services.
“They are using telecom network and using telecom services,” he said.
Kramer
told reporters that the United States had negotiated in good faith but that
there were several issues that made agreement impossible, including the
resolution’s recognition of an ITU role.
He
said a section on reducing the unwanted emails known as spam, for example,
opened the door toward government monitoring and blocking of political or
religious messages.
One of
the last major sources of US objection, a clause that might have given
countries the right to administer website addresses, was struck from the treaty
during attempts to salvage the deal.
The
turnabout was a defeat for ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun Touré, who had
previously predicted that “light-touch” Internet regulation would emerge from
the conference.
But he
said the 12-day meeting “has succeeded in bringing unprecedented public
attention to the different and important perspectives that govern global
communications.”
Among
the countries that said they could not sign, at least without consulting
officials in their capitals, were most nations in Western Europe along with
Canada, Philippines, Poland, Egypt, Kenya and Czech Republic.
The US
bloc’s coordinated snub followed a vote that approved an African proposal to
add a sentence in a treaty relating to human rights.
Western
delegates said that effectively reintroduced a contentious proposal that had
said no country should be allowed to unilaterally deny another country access
to communications networks, which they said stretched too far into the
political realm.
“We
prefer no resolution on the Internet at all, and I’m extremely concerned that
the language just adopted opens the possibility of Internet and content
issues,” Simon Towler, head of the UK delegation, said after the African
proposal was passed.
