US Focused on Making ITU More Efficient; Emphasis on Key Priorities, State Department Official Says
The State Department remains focused on ITU modernization, Robert Strayer, deputy assistant secretary for cyber and international communications and information policy, told a Wiley Rein conference Monday. Strayer said it's critical for the U.S. to promote the election of an American, Doreen Bogdan-Martin, to a top leadership role at the ITU (see 1710230052). The U.S. also wants better oversight in general of the issues on which the ITU is focused, he said.
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“We want a better overlay between our strategic priorities at the ITU” -- top U.S. priorities like infrastructure and spectrum and “how we’re focusing the budget at the ITU,” Strayer said. Parts of the ITU have hundreds of staffers who “kind of come up with ingenious things they’d like to be working on that are not necessarily the areas we want them focused on,” he said. The U.S. is one of the two largest financial supporters of the ITU, a U.N. agency, Stayer noted. The money needs to be spent on “important priorities” for the U.S., he said.
The work of the upcoming World Radiocommunication Conference is also critical, Strayer said. “The United States is very much impacted by what happens” at the WRC, he said: “It affects all of our industries.” The WRC scheduled for next year is especially important as the first that will be focused mostly on 5G, he said. Agenda items at the upcoming meeting focus on “making sure we have the right kind of spectrum” and addressing propagation and interference issues “that are going to be important for enabling the next generation of technology,” he said.
Strayer said the FCC has done a good job of being “forward leaning” on “pushing spectrum out” to encourage investment in 5G and elsewhere. Strayer said he just returned from the Mobile World Congress. “One of the things I was really struck by was the amount of investment that’s going into those new types of emerging technology sectors that are going to be using 5G,” he said. “It wasn’t just the mobile operators.”
Bogdan-Martin is mounting a campaign to head Telecommunications Development (ITU-D), one of the three ITU sectors. Now chief of ITU's strategic planning and membership department, she's the highest-ranked woman at ITU. The U.S. will also actively promote the reelection of Joanne Wilson to the ITU’s Radio Regulations Board, Strayer said.
The country plans to appoint an ambassador to the upcoming WRC, Strayer said. The hope is someone will be in place before the pre-WRC Conference Preparatory Meeting (CPM) meeting in February. Next spring is also a critical time because the Inter-American Telecommunication Commission (CITEL) will meet to develop regional positions for the WRC, he said.
Pick a date by which the U.S. will have a final position on every agenda item and “stick with it,” was the advice of Decker Anstrom, ambassador to the 2012 and 2015 WRCs. Anstrom said the past two meetings demonstrated WRC's importance. Reaching positions early will improve chances for success, he said. The U.S. should have firm positions before the CPM meeting but has to work out its stance before the April 2019 CITEL meeting, he said.
The nation found in the past two cycles that a number of CITEL positions were “framed, agreed and set” at the first meeting, Anstrom said. “If the United States isn’t prepared to fully engage on the agenda items” by then, CITEL “may move forward anyhow, reducing our regional influence,” he said. If the U.S. isn’t part of the CITEL position, making progress in Geneva at the WRC is difficult, he said. “Not to decide in a timely way is a decision to, perhaps, be left behind.”
The U.S. has to build international support for its positions, Anstrom said. “We don’t have unlimited time and resources or political capital and the U.S. must be disciplined in how to spend each.” Uniting CITEL behind the U.S. “should be our highest geo-political priority,” he said. There was a time when the region would follow the U.S. lead, Anstrom said. “That’s long past and we have to work at it in terms of CITEL,” he said. The U.S. should “consult early and often” with its three closest CITEL allies -- Canada, Mexico and Colombia, he said. “History shows that if the four of us are united, the odds of our position prevailing in CITEL go up considerably.”
Germany and African countries also can be important allies, Anstrom said. “Africa has been a major ally of the U.S. at both WRC-12 and WRC-15.” The U.S. also needs to work with China, Japan and South Korea, he said, noting China will “no doubt” send the largest delegation of any country to the WRC. China “will clearly wield increasing influence,” he said. Japan and Korea “are great allies of the U.S. and we share a major interest in common in 5G,” he said.