Jimm Phillips

The U.S. will not sign on to the revised International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs) adopted at Thursday’s session of the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), said U.S. delegation head Terry Kramer Thursday. Delegations from Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark and the United Kingdom also immediately said their nations would not sign the treaty-level document. Delegations from Costa Rica, Kenya, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Qatar, Sweden and Poland also expressed concerns about the revised ITRs, but wanted to consult with their national governments before deciding whether to sign. Egypt’s delegation also said it was concerned about the revised ITRs, but its position on signing the document was not immediately clear from its statement following the document’s adoption. Nations that already support the amended ITRs are expected to sign the treaty Friday in Dubai. The amended treaty will take effect Jan. 1, 2015.

It’s time for government agencies to “think very seriously” about patent assertion entities’ (PAEs) activities and how they impact society, FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said Monday during a joint FTC/Department of Justice workshop. The agencies held the workshop as part of an ongoing effort to determine the effect of PAEs and determine whether the government needs to employ new methods to minimize what they see as harm caused by PAEs. High-quality intellectual property rights are crucial to U.S. innovation, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO) chief economist said. PAE-generated lawsuits are eating up a growing chunk of some technology companies’ legal budgets, several high-tech executives said, as a PAE executive said the model helps some patent developers get paid.

A United Arab Emirates-led proposal for a “new” version of the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs) threw a further wrench into talks Friday at the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai, even as debate over existing proposals had led to little progress. The UAE said during a plenary meeting that its proposal was borne out of its own frustrations over the lack of progress at the conference toward revising the existing ITRs, which have not been revised since 1988. WCIT began Dec. 3 and runs through this Friday. Discussions during the conference have thus far remained stuck on whether to change the scope of the treaty-level document from applying only to “recognized” operating agencies to applying to all operating agencies. The U.S. opposes any change in scope because it would make the ITRs apply to Internet providers, which would in turn allow the ITRs to stray into Internet governance issues (CD Dec 7 p18).

T-Mobile USA will begin offering Apple products on its network in 2013, Deutsche Telekom CEO René Obermann said Thursday at a webcast conference in Germany. T-Mobile CEO John Legere implied in a separate presentation during the conference that the products T-Mobile offers will include the iPhone, but did not say what other devices it might make available. “When we do announce what we're going to deploy, it will clearly be better and more effective” than recent media reports have suggested, he said. A T-Mobile spokesman said additional information on T-Mobile’s Apple offerings would be available later. An Apple spokesman confirmed that T-Mobile would begin carrying the company’s products next year, but declined to discuss specific models.

AT&T is raising its expectations for full-year smartphone sales after what AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph de la Vega said has been a record-setting first two months of Q4. The carrier sold 6.4 million smartphones during October and November, already making Q4 AT&T’s second best quarter for smartphone sales; quarterly figures typically improve even more during December, de la Vega said Wednesday during an investor conference. The carrier now forecasts it will sell 26 million smartphones for the year, 1 million more than previously expected, de la Vega said. “Excitement is at an all-time high,” he said. “I feel very good about momentum going into December.” The growth in smartphone sales came as a result of an improved supply of Apple’s iPhones, as well as Android-powered models like the LG Optimus G and HTC One X, de la Vega said. The carrier is also “really excited” about the prospects for Windows Phone models like the HTC 8X and the Nokia Lumia 920, he said.

Voluntary incentive auctions for spectrum held by federal agencies will likely be discussed during the 113th Congress, said David Redl, majority counsel for the House Commerce Committee. But he and others at an FCBA continuing education panel said the incentives involved on the federal side would be very different than the ones involved in the voluntary incentive auction of TV stations’ frequencies. “At the end of the day, when we look at ways to incentivize folks in the government to relinquish spectrum authorizations, simply paying them from the federal coffers isn’t going to cut it,” Radl said. “It’s the left hand paying the right hand.”

The U.S. should formally seek to “dismantle” the ITU, said former U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer Andrew McLaughlin Thursday. “Sometimes you need some destruction; you need to burn the forest in order to grow the new pine trees,” he said during a Future Tense forum on Internet governance. Future Tense is a program of the New America Foundation. “In the case of the ITU, I think it’s very much the case that its day is gone. The U.S. should formally commit itself to hastening” its demise. The ITU was set up to coordinate regulation of international telecommunications, but it has become outdated in the Internet age, McLaughlin said. “For an Internet way of doing policy coordination, you have to accept that there will be lots of conversations happening in lots of different places, and no one body is the place where this is all going to happen efficiently."

The World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) should consider a set of “threshold” issues at the start of its upcoming conference -- any changes to the preamble and Article 1 of the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs), including the definitions used in the ITRs and the agencies the treaty-level document will apply to -- before delegates tackle any other proposed revisions, the U.S. and Canada said in a proposal filed Tuesday with the ITU. “Streamlined and rapid” consideration of changes to the Preamble and Article 1 “will ensure there is consensus from the beginning of the conference on how to proceed with revisions to the ITRs,” the two nations said in the proposal. Addressing those issues at the beginning of the conference would also allow delegates to consider the impact of other ITU meetings, including the outcomes of the World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly, the proposal said.

A promised full release of documents related to the World Conference on International Telecommunications began online Thursday through .Nxt, an Internet policy information service. It cited growing public interest in the WCIT in its decision to release the files. Delegations from ITU member states will meet at WCIT, which begins Dec. 3 in Dubai, to revise the treaty-level International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs). “As interest has grown over the outcomes of this conference (thanks largely to concerns raised about what they may be) the issue of availability of related documents has itself become a major bone of contention,” .Nxt said in a blog post announcing the documents’ release (http://xrl.us/bn27p9). Files relating to WCIT, including proposed revisions submitted by national delegations, are available to parties within the telecom industry and members of the ITU that pay for membership to the organization. CEO Kieren McCarthy of .Nxt told us that while he’s had access to WCIT documents through the ITU portal for some time, “it got to the point where there was a massive public interest in the conference.” That rise in public interest is due in part to PR campaigns by Internet advocacy group Fight for the Future, Google, Greenpeace and the International Trade Union Confederation, all of which have centered on proposed revisions to the ITRs that the U.S. and other nations fear could alter the current Internet governance structure, McCarthy said. Google’s effort, which went live Tuesday, centers on getting its users to sign a petition that says “A free and open world depends on a free and open Internet. Governments alone, working behind closed doors, should not direct its future. The billions of people around the globe who use the Internet should have a voice” (http://bit.ly/TdH9iK). Some national proposals have also received heightened public scrutiny, such as a set of proposals from the Russian Federation that critics claim could alter the current model of Internet addressing and other Internet governance issues (CD Nov 21 p7).

The U.S. is concerned that the Russian Federation’s newest set of proposed revisions for the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs) would increase governments’ ability to control the Internet, officials and Internet governance experts told us. Russia originally submitted the proposals Nov. 13 before sending a revised version to the ITU on Saturday. Delegates will consider proposed revisions at the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), which begins Dec. 3 in Dubai.