NEW YORK — If they weren’t before, the members of the United Nations should now all be aware of the powerful real world implications of free speech on the Internet.
As President Obama said in his remarks to the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday, referencing the notorious anti-Muslim film “Innocence of Muslims”: “Americans have fought and died around the globe to protect the right of all people to express their views – even views that we disagree with.”
But across town on Monday and earlier over the weekend, another world leader was attempting to toe a fine line between Internet security, increased development and freedom of expression.
Hamadoun Touré, Secretary General of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the global telecom standard-setting agency that actually predates the U.N. (founded in 1865 to coordinate global interoperability of the telegraph), spoke on Monday at Columbia University about an upcoming conference in which representatives from the 193 nations that make up the U.N. will get together to revamp international communications regulations for the Internet era.
That conference, the World Conference on International Telecommunications 2012 (WCIT-12), is the first time that the nations are rewriting international rules for telecommunications since 1988, before the rise of the commercial Internet.
But the conference, which is to take place in Dubai from December 3 through 14, has also drawn suspicion and criticism from U.S. lawmakers and advocacy groups who believe that proposals for rewriting the regulations submitted by more centrally-governed nations including Russia, China, Iran and other Arabic countries, indicate that these nations want to use the opportunity to codify measures that would enable them to police Internet content, meter Internet traffic at international borders, and essentially attain U.N. blessing to crack down on dissenting voices.
Touré and the ITU have repeatedly rebuffed these notions, but apparently not enough: Touré’s speech Monday was titled “Myths and Reality,” and he used it to try and articulate what he thought were the benign, yet important, matters at stake at the WCIT-12 conference.
“The conference has attracted an enormous amount of interest and media coverage – especially here in the United States, but not always for the right reasons,” Touré said in his speech, later adding:
Let us focus on what WCIT is really about.
It is about accelerating the rapid deployment of broadband to ensure that many more of the unconnected are given a voice online and that the transformative power of broadband is accessible to all the world’s people.
This is very much in line with ITU’s day-to-day activities which are already fundamental to promoting Internet growth.
Touré also said that the conference was about, “the free flow of information” and “continuing to promote a harmonious and conducive international environment that drives innovation” and “accelerating the rapid deployment of broadband to ensure that many more of the unconnected are given a voice online.”
However, Touré also repeated his assertion that the WCIT-12 conference and the ITU’s daily activities also involved “security standards, including standards to combat spam.”
It’s precisely codifying regulations and international agreements to fight spam and other network disruptions in the context of cybersecurity that worry some U.S. lawmakers and freedom of information advocates, including Eli Dourado, a research fellow at the George Mason University Mercatus Center and co-founder of WCITLeaks.org, a website critical of the ITU that publishes leaked regulations proposals.
Dourado earlier this summer wrote on the blog Tech Liberation that an international agreement on fighting spam “would create an international legal excuse for governments to inspect our emails.”
“We need to remember that any security standards that are included in the ITRs [international telecommunications regulations], with whatever intentions, will be used by some member states for their own purposes,” Dourado tweeted to TPM on Tuesday. “This might include censorship or political repression.”
The ITU has also repeatedly pointed out that its role is only to facilitate international discussion about telecommunications standards and development, not to make any decisions, which the member nations must agree to by broad consensus.
At the same time, the ITU is openly working to spur the growth of broadband Internet connections around the globe, particularly in developing nations.
On Sunday at the Yale Club in New York, Touré attended and presided over a meeting of the ITU’s Broadband Commission, a collaboration with UNESCO established in May 2010 to help meet some of the telecommunications connectivity levels for developing nations set in the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals.
The meeting saw the release of the first-ever “State of Broadband” report, which collects and summarizes broadband installation rates on a country-by-country basis around the globe for the year of 2011. The report found that fixed internet subscriptions totalled 589 million in 2011 and that out of 5.97 billion mobile subscriptions, 18.3 percent were mobile broadband, but that mobile broadband subscriptions are growing by a rate of 60 percent year-over-year.
The report goes on to lay out specific “advocacy targets,” including “making broadband policy universal — by 2015 all countries should have a national broad plan or strategy,” and “making broadband affordable,” by having developing countries pass laws or policies to ensure entry-level access to broadband amounts to less than 5 percent of household’s monthly income.
Overall, the ITU’s Broadband Commission wants to see 60 percent of the world’s people online by 2015, with at least 50 percent access to developing nations and 15 percent to the least-developed.
The report didn’t touch on security, but when asked by TPM about the ITU’s role in ensuring networks are secure while simultaneously open to dissenting voices, Touré responded in part with the following statements:
“This is a fundamental issue,” Touré said, “We’re trying to address it globally, because its a global problem and you can only have global solutions…In security matters, you have also unfortunately some wide differences in terms of even definitions of security…you have differences in definitions of freedom across countries; cultural or religious differences that make those understandings different. To be frank with you, in order to avoid entering into a long debate on those issues where its clearly not working, my job was to try find one area where we agree. This is why we launched the Child’s Online Protection initiative. Children, everyone agrees on that.”
The Child’s Online Protection initiative (COP) was launched by the ITU in 2008, and aims to coordinate best industry and policy practices when it comes to keeping kids safe online, while still encouraging access.
