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<h1 class="titlelink"><a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2011/12/issues-for-2012-1-should-the-u.php" title="Permanent link to Issues for 2012 #1: Should the UN Govern the Internet?">Issues for 2012 #1: Should the UN Govern the Internet?</a></h1>
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By <a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/author/scott-fulton.php" rel="author">Scott M. Fulton, III</a> / December 21, 2011 4:00 PM
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<p id="channel-intro-text"><a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2011/12/issues-for-2012-1-should-the-u.php">http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2011/12/issues-for-2012-1-should-the-u.php</a><br></p>
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<p><img alt="United Nations seal (150 sq).jpg" src="http://rww.readwriteweb.netdna-cdn.com/enterprise/United%20Nations%20seal%20%28150%20sq%29.jpg" class="mt-image-left" style="float: left; margin: 0 20px 20px 0;" height="150" width="150">"The
communications public policy effort that may affect all of us the most
in 2012... will take place far from our shores," stated U.S. Federal
Communications Commissioner Robert McDowell, in a speech in Washington
before a bar association two weeks ago. "As we sit here today, scores
of countries, including China, Russia and India, are pushing hard for
international regulation of Internet governance."</p>
<p>We talk a lot, almost <i>ad nauseum</i>, about the "free and open Internet." What we sometimes fail to take into account is that freedom has many... shall we say, <i>facets</i>,
which cast different shades of light at different angles. From one
angle, the story looks like this: The free Internet is threatened by
the incursion of governments that would seek to suppress individual
freedoms through the systematic restructuring of Web services, with the
burden being placed on service providers to comply. But that's not
coming from Comm. McDowell, or from the opponents of SOPA legislation.
It's the new populist battle cry of Vladimir Putin, the Russian Prime
Minister seeking once again to become President.</p>
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<p>The <a href="http://www.itu.int/en/Pages/default.aspx">International Telecommunications Union</a>
(ITU) is the world's principal standards maintenance organization for
electronic communications, and has been so since 1865. Today, it is an
agency of the United Nations. Not all that long ago, when the act of
going online was largely a function of the telephone, it was ITU (and
its predecessor, CCITT) that managed the multi-stakeholder process of
standardizing signal processing with telephone modems. The syntax of
today's e-mail addresses, using the <code>@</code> symbol, is a direct descendant of a CCITT standard. It is no minor player.</p>
<p>Last June 15 at U.N. Headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, the ITU's
Secretary-General, Hamadoun Toure, met with the Russian Prime Minister
for what began as an innocuous photo-op. It's at photo-ops like these
where Putin (a man whose own publicists share photos of him fly fishing
with his shirt off) likes to lob verbal grenades to see how long it
takes them to go off. It was here that he lobbed a big one, and the
blast hasn't even really happened yet.</p>
<p><img alt="110615 Putin with Hamadoun Toure.jpeg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/110615%20Putin%20with%20Hamadoun%20Toure.jpeg" class="mt-image-right" style="float: right; margin: 0 0 20px 20px;" height="273" width="395">"We are thankful to you for the ideas that you have proposed for discussion," Mr. Putin told Toure, according to <a href="http://premier.gov.ru/eng/events/news/15601/">the Russian government's official English-language transcript</a>.
"One of them is establishing international control over the Internet
using the monitoring and supervisory capabilities of the International
Telecommunication Union. 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. This is
certainly a priority on the international agenda."</p>
<p>"Global control" is Putin-ese for a kind of transparent, but
centralized, governance system. For example, Russia's proposed global
nuclear nonproliferation regime, which is opened up for international
cooperation but centralized around Russia, is called the Global Control
System. It is the counterpart of former U.S. President George H.W.
Bush's <a href="http://www.sweetliberty.org/issues/war/bushsr.htm">"New World Order."</a></p>
<p>In a live public forum last week, Mr. Putin gave another interesting
hint about his vision for Internet governance. Asked what his
government could do about the rise of objectionable content over the
Web, Mr. Putin suggested that it is not government's place to do
anything about it directly. Instead, he argued, government should offer
a proactive alternative. "There is only one way to confront [<i>the problem</i>]," <a href="http://www.publiciti.ru/en/news/1vladimir-putin-about-internet-conversation-with-putin-2011-putin-russia36">Russian news service Publiciti translates him as saying</a>. "That is by offering other options and solutions on the same platform, and by doing it much more creative and interesting."</p>
<p>But because the Internet mirrors society now, he continued, law
enforcement agencies should have as much jurisdiction in virtual society
as they do in actual society, saying, "Culture or even incivility of
what is going on, on the Internet, is the same what is happening on
roads [in our cities]... Law enforcement agencies have to watch what is
happening on the Internet, such as pedophilia and other problems."</p>
<p>He's not really wrong, in some ways, depending on how the light hits
you. But Mr. Putin also leaves open the possibility of a kind of agency
only a former Soviet bureaucrat could appreciate: a bureaucratic agency
to reduce the spread of bureaucratic agencies. And that sent up red
flags (with a little gold emblem in the corner) at Comm. McDowell's
office. As he noted in his speech two weeks ago:</p>
<blockquote>Even though Internet-based technologies are improving
billions of lives everywhere, some governments feel left out. They have
formed impressive coalitions, and their efforts have progressed
significantly. So merely saying "no" to any changes to the current
structure of Internet governance is likely to be a losing proposition...
Accordingly, we should encourage a dialogue among all interested
parties and broaden the multi-stakeholder umbrella to find ways to
address all reasonable concerns. As part of this conversation, we
should underscore the tremendous benefits that the Internet has yielded
for the developing world through the multi-stakeholder model. Upending
the fundamentals of the multi-stakeholder model is likely to Balkanize
the Internet at best, and suffocate it at worst. A top-down,
centralized, international regulatory overlay is antithetical to the
architecture of the Net, which is a global network of networks without
borders. No government, let alone an intergovernmental body, can make
decisions in lightning-fast Internet time. Economic and political
progress everywhere, but especially in the developing world, would grind
to a halt as engineering and business decisions inevitably would become
politicized within a global regulatory body.</blockquote>
<p>But proponents of ITU governance are touting the failure of the
multi-stakeholder model - as represented by ICANN, the steward of the
Internet's domain hierarchy - by citing the recent, and much
anticipated, chaos surrounding the opening up of the .XXX top-level
domain. Now stakeholders whose livelihood depends on their being
disassociated with pornography (for example, Penn State University) are
just as much in the market for .XXX domain names as adult content
publishers. And top-level domain registrars are going so far as to
market those domains for non-adult publishers for that very purpose,
even on television, with the tagline, "Get yours... before someone else
does!"</p>
<p>It's the infusion of Western commercialism and the corruption that capitalism brings forth... all over again.</p>
<p>In <a href="http://www.cisco.com/web/about/ac123/ac147/archived_issues/ipj_8-1/internet_governance.html">an historically replete and comprehensive overview of the subject</a>
recently posted to Cisco's corporate blog, Geoff Huston, chief
scientist with the Asia/Pacific Network Information Center, cites the
dangers ahead if Putin and others continue their success at
characterizing ICANN as a disaster:</p>
<blockquote>There are still the lingering concerns that if ICANN, as a
private-sector entity, were to once more explore positioning itself on
the brink of imminent demise, the collective task of picking up the
pieces and continuing to support the operation of the Internet is one
that appears to have a very uncomfortable level of uncertainty. In
addition, the perception of ICANN as an entity whose single purpose is
to maintain an entrenched advantaged position of the United States and
of U.S.-based enterprises in the global Internet has been widely
promulgated. It is often portrayed that ICANN offers no viable
mechanisms for other national or regional interests at a governmental
level to alter this somewhat disturbing picture of international
imbalance. Although other aspects of international activity fall under
various political or trading frameworks, and national and regional
interests and positions can be collectively considered and negotiated,
critics of ICANN point out that the message ICANN sends to the rest of
the world is that the United States is withholding the Internet from
conventional international governance processes. Skeptical commentators
interpret the U.S. administration's use of ICANN as at best a delaying
technique to gain time to further strengthen the position of U.S.-based
enterprises across a lucrative global Internet market, aided and abetted
by a compliant industry body that masquerades as an international
standards organization.</blockquote>