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‘Focused Plan’ Needed

U.S. Should Continue Global Engagement on Telecom and Internet Policy, U.S. WCIT Delegation Head Says

The U.S. will need to make global engagement a priority as it makes its case for its vision on Internet and telecom governance issues following last month’s World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), said Terry Kramer, head of the U.S.’s WCIT delegation, during a news conference Thursday. Kramer has been in Washington, holding a series of final briefings with government officials and members of the telecom industry on the outcome of WCIT and the revised International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs) produced at the conference in Dubai, which ended Dec. 14. Those briefings are Kramer’s last acts as head of the delegation; he said his appointment to the position ends Friday.

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Suggestions that the U.S. should not engage with the ITU, which led WCIT, will cause “long-term problems,” Kramer said. “Are there issues that we don’t agree with the ITU? Absolutely. But there’s a lot of important work that’s going on in the radio sector that I think is critical; there’s a lot of important work in the development sector. We need to make sure that our dialogue continues on a global basis.” The U.S. was among the 55 nations that decided not to sign the revised ITRs at the end of WCIT due to objections over Internet-related language in the final treaty that the U.S. and its allies had objected to, including well before the conference began (CD Dec 17 p1). Controversy over proposed Internet governance language and perceptions that the ITU was not allowing enough transparency at WCIT led former U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer Andrew McLaughlin to suggest in late November that the U.S. seek the ITU’s “destruction."

Instead of ignoring the ITU, the U.S. needs to have a “focused plan” for dealing with the U.N. agency in the lead up to future forums that will determine how the revised ITRs affect global telecom and Internet policy, Kramer said. The U.S. needs to say “here is the landscape we're in, these are the key strategic priorities we have globally” and then figure out “what do we need to go do, what are the priorities here and how do we need to carry forward with these other fora where these issues are going to be discussed,” he said. Other nations still view the U.S. as a leader on global telecom and Internet policy issues, even if they do not always agree with U.S. positions, Kramer said. “We need to take advantage of that leadership opportunity,” he said.

Multistakeholder organizations and bilateral meetings should become settings for post-WCIT discussion of global telecom and Internet policy issues, Kramer said. The U.S. needs to leverage its global partners like the EU and NATO, as well as support groups like the Internet Society and the Internet Governance Forum in order to advance its vision of the multistakeholder Internet governance model, he said. “The more and more that we can see that those organizations have got full global outreach, have got capabilities that can enhance other governments … that will be very important,” Kramer said.

Cybersecurity, a major topic of discussion at WCIT, is an issue that’s “bigger and bigger every day” -- and the U.S. should continue the dialogue on how to best address it, Kramer said. “We're going to need to advance what are the solutions there and identify the best organizations” to address the problem, he said. The revised ITRs included a provision on network security that the U.S. objected to, arguing that addressing cybersecurity in the treaty was inappropriate because there was not a “one-size-fits-all” solution and that including language on the issue could lead to further content censorship at the hands of some governments. “The more, I think, that we can really point to multistakeholder organizations that can provide a level of understanding and awareness and best practices on problems there will be helpful, and helping them solve those problems … so that we don’t have an environment where there’s just one organization that’s a solution, like the ITU,” Kramer said.

The U.S. should also continue to look for ways to stimulate broadband deployment and Internet access use globally, particularly in developing nations, he said. Concerns about how to pay for broadband deployment and other telecom infrastructure advancements led some nations in Africa and the Middle East to support a controversial “sender-party-pays” proposal on Internet traffic compensation originally suggested by the European Telecommunications Network Operators’ Association (ETNO). That proposal -- and a similar one on quality of service -- did not appear in the finalized ITRs. But “sender-party-pays” could come back again in future policy discussions, Kramer said. “You still have got nations that are saying ‘We need help building out our networks,” he said. “To be proactive in all this, we need to be more engaged with what that broadband access plan is.”