Page 116 - Agenda 21

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Russia, Iran and Arab countries are trying to hijack a U.N. agency that has nothing to do with the
Internet.

For more than a year, these countries have lobbied an agency called the International
Telecommunications Union to take over the rules and workings of the Internet. Created in 1865 as the
International Telegraph Union, the ITU last drafted a treaty on communications in 1988, before the
commercial Internet, when telecommunications meant voice telephone calls via national telephone
monopolies.

Next week the ITU holds a negotiating conference in Dubai, and past months have brought many leaks
of proposals for a new treaty. U.S. congressional resolutions and much of the commentary, including
in this column, have focused on proposals by authoritarian governments to censor the Internet. Just
as objectionable are proposals that ignore how the Internet works, threatening its smooth and open
operations.

Having the Internet rewired by bureaucrats would be like handing a Stradivarius to a gorilla. The
Internet is made up of 40,000 networks that interconnect among 425,000 global routes, cheaply and
efficiently delivering messages and other digital content among more than two billion people around
the world, with some 500,000 new users a day.

Many of the engineers and developers who built and operate these networks belong to virtual
committees and task forces coordinated by an international nonprofit called the Internet Society. The
society is home to the Internet Engineering Task Force (the main provider of global technical
standards) and other volunteer groups such as the Internet Architecture Board and the Internet
Research Task Force. Another key nongovernmental group is Icann, which assigns Internet addresses
and domain names.

The self-regulating Internet means no one has to ask for permission to launch a website, and no
government can tell network operators how to do their jobs. The arrangement has made the Internet a
rare place of permissionless innovation. As former Federal Communications Commission Chairman
William Kennard recently pointed out, 90% of cooperative "peering" agreements among networks are
"made on a handshake," adjusting informally as needs change.

Proposals for the new ITU treaty run to more than 200 pages. One idea is to apply the ITU's long-
distance telephone rules to the Internet by creating a "sender-party-pays" rule. International phone
calls include a fee from the originating country to the local phone company at the receiving end. Under
a sender-pays approach, U.S.-based websites would pay a local network for each visitor from overseas,
effectively taxing firms such as Google and Facebook. The idea is technically impractical because
unlike phone networks, the Internet doesn't recognize national borders. But authoritarians are
pushing the tax, hoping their citizens will be cut off from U.S. websites that decide foreign visitors are
too expensive to serve.

Regimes such as Russia and Iran also want an ITU rule letting them monitor Internet traffic routed
through or to their countries, allowing them to eavesdrop or block access.

"The Internet is highly complex and highly technical," Sally Wentworth of the Internet Society told me
recently, "yet governments are the only ones making decisions at the ITU, putting the Internet at their
mercy." She says the developers and engineers who actually run the Internet find it "mind boggling"
that governments would claim control. As the Internet Society warns, "Technology moves faster than
any treaty process ever can."”

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