Next Battle over Net Ramps Up Worldwide

While Congress is consumed by the online piracy battle, an arguably more important fight over the future of the Internet is quietly unfolding abroad.

 

In the coming months, countries will negotiate a treaty that will dictate how the Internet is managed. Currently, a collection of technical bodies govern the Web, deciding issues such as domain name management and technical protocols — and do so in a manner that, experts agree, is mostly devoid of politics.

 

But if Russia, India and other countries have their way, that could all change. Models under discussion would potentially give governments more power over Web content and the pipes through which it flows. Critics fret that countries might try to use that new power to monetize Web traffic.

 

The end result, American officials warn, would be an Internet more susceptible to censorship and less potent as a tool to foster democracy.

 

“I am very concerned, and I don’t say that lightly,” said David Gross, a former ambassador charged with coordinating international communications and information policy. “The possibility that something bad will come out of this is at least 50-50.”

 

Consider, critics say, what Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin had to say on the matter.

 

“If we are going to talk about the democratization of international relations, I think a critical sphere is information exchange and global control over such exchange,” Putin said to Hamadoun Toure, secretary-general of the International Telecommunication Union, last summer, according to a transcript of the meeting on the Russian government’s website.

 

The countries pressing for the change counter that regulatory power over the Web is disproportionately concentrated in U.S.-based organizations. Given the global nature of the Web, that authority should be more broadly shared, they say.

 

There is a “sense that the U.S. has an inordinately primary position in how the Internet is administered,” said Brian Cute, head of the Public Interest Registry, which manages .org sites. “That sentiment is driving many of the actors in this negotiation.”

 

If the pro-regulation countries realize their agenda, the ITU is the international body that would assume more power over the Internet. The ITU is under the auspices of the United Nations.

 

One of the group’s ideas is to establish “international control over the Internet using the monitoring and supervisory capabilities of the ITU,” Putin said.

 

In recent speeches, telecom officials have issued a clarion call to the tech industry, urging companies to wage a public campaign to fend off an Orwellian approach to Internet management. But few seem to be listening.

 

“Nobody here in the United States even knows what’s going on,” Kathy Brown, a government affairs executive at Verizon, said at a recent forum on Internet governance held at the Brookings Institution. “The biggest threat is that we are not paying attention.”

 

Leading up to a December conference to be held in Dubai, ITU member countries will negotiate the terms of a new set of rules called International Telecommunication Regulations. The next major meeting of the process, the World Radiocommunication Conference, will take place in Geneva next week.

 

The treaty that potentially emerges would replace one crafted in 1988 that set the basic parameters for interconnection of international telephone networks.

 

The issue, telecom experts say, is not only about stopping governments from monkeying with the plumbing of the Web. At stake, they say, is an Internet management system that for decades has allowed the Internet to thrive as a freewheeling, open medium.

 

“Part of the challenge is to defend the bottom-up governance model,” said Phil Weiser, formerly a senior adviser on technology issues to the White House. “If we aren’t vigilant about it and taking this issue seriously, we will find ourselves playing defense and there is real margin for error.”

 

A group of nongovernmental bodies — including the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Society and others — currently share governance of the Internet.

 

“The multi-stakeholder model puts citizens, industry and government on an equal level,” Cute said. “Government, historically, has been viewed as having the final word. This recalibration of the relationship is revolutionary.”

 

“It does represent on some level a loss of control from the old paradigm,” added Cute, who argues that the cooperative relationship between government, industry and society is the “secret sauce” that makes the Internet so successful.

 

Advocates of the current system say nonpolitical, scientific standards-setting bodies have the expertise needed to keep the Net nimble and sharp.

 

“We need the people who live the space, who are there trying to move information and using it, to inform us about what’s going to work,” Mark Cooper, research director at the Consumer Federation of America, said at the Brookings event.

 

Some countries may have a financial incentive to impose telephony-era rules in an Internet protocol world. As the number of international calls has dwindled with the rise of Internet communication, countries have seen revenue streams from terminating phone calls dry up.

 

“Many governments have called for the ITU to play a greater role in regulating peering and termination charges in order to compensate for lost telecommunication fees,” Larry Strickling, head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, said in a recent speech.

 

But the economic incentives might extend beyond that.

 

“A developing country might like the idea of being able to charge a Google or a Facebook on a per-click basis so their local phone company, which might be owned by their local government, can make more money,” Republican FCC Commissioner Rob McDowell said in a recent interview.

 

As Strickling and other U.S. officials try to draw attention to this international crossroads, some worry that the U.S. may not be the most credible disseminator of the message it wants to send about Internet governance.

 

They say recent moves by U.S. government and business officials have given naysayers abroad fodder to argue that the U.S. is the one trying to exert control over the Web. One example: the Federal Communications Commission’s adoption of open Internet rules.

 

“Net neutrality complicated the picture,” McDowell said. “It becomes a matter of the U.S. saying, ‘It’s OK for us to enter this space, based on what we find reasonable, but it’s not OK for China to do something similar, based on what they find reasonable.’”

 

Others say that domestic opposition to the process behind ICANN’s domain-name expansion, as well as the possibility of adopting intellectual property legislation that critics say would meddle with the Web, could also undermine the open Internet governance model America wants to promote.

 

“When parties ask us to overturn the outcomes of these processes, no matter how well intentioned the request, they are providing ‘ammunition’ to other countries who would like to see governments take control of the Internet,” Strickling said recently in light of the opposition to ICANN.

 

While the conversation about international Web governance remains on the fringes of the tech community, industry professionals well versed on the topic are watching anxiously.

 

“Any kind of additional state involvement with Internet governance,” McDowell said, “starts to undermine the long-held bipartisan and international consensus that government should keep their hands off their Internet.”