[kictanet] UN Agency's Leaked Playbook: Panic, Chaos over Anti-Internet Treaty

[Alice Munyua]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrydownes/2012/11/26/un-agencys-leaked-playbook-panic-chaos-over-internet-treaty/

The International Telecommunications Union, the UN agency at the center 
of a firestorm over new efforts to regulate the Internet, is preparing a 
social media campaign to target what it expects will be fierce 
opposition to a revised telephone treaty being decided next month at a 
secret conference in Dubai.

That’s according to a key ITU internal planning document that appeared 
Saturday on the website WCITLeaks, which has been posting a steady 
stream of documents leading up to the conference. Even as ITU officials 
accelerate increasingly clumsy efforts to deflect the wrath of Internet 
users over next month’s World Conference on International 
Telecommunications, more documents leaking out ahead of the meeting 
continue to expose the agency’s misstatements.

The WCIT conference will consider revisions to a 1988 treaty known as 
the International Telecommunications Regulations. At the meeting, 193 
member nations consider dozens of proposed amendments, including several 
that would bring the Internet under ITU jurisdiction and substantially 
change the architecture and governance of the Internet. Other proposals 
would, if adopted, give countries including Russia, China, and Iran UN 
sanctioned-authority to monitor and censor incoming and outgoing 
Internet traffic under the guise of improving “security.”

The newly-leaked document is the agenda for an “ITU Senior Management 
Retreat” held in Geneva in September. It includes a detailed report on 
resistance to WCIT and the agency’s plans to counter criticism of its 
secretive processes. It also includes links and passwords for 
presentations given by outside public relations and advertising 
executives from leading global agencies. (The passwords were still 
active as of Nov. 24th.)

The document, marked “confidential,” suggests senior ITU officials have 
become both paranoid and panicked over growing outrage over both the 
form and substance of the upcoming negotiations. Material included with 
the agenda paints a pathetic picture of the150 year-old UN agency 
struggling to defend itself from attacks by what the agency believes is 
a “well-financed and well-organized campaign originating in the USA” 
whose goal is to “discredit the ITU and WCIT.”

The two-day meeting also featured leading media consultants invited to 
help the agency formulate a strategy to avoid the kind of global outrage 
that mortally wounded a secret Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement 
treaty earlier this year, and which did in copyright legislation known 
as SOPA and PIPA in the U.S. in January.

Both ACTA and the US copyright bills were widely expected to pass with 
little opposition until Internet users organized physical and virtual 
protests that caught lawmakers by surprise.

According to the internal ITU document, the agency had already launched 
what it calls a “counter-campaign”–a media blitz the agency plans to 
expand in light of what the ITU sees as the likely event of significant 
hostility to the revised treaty after the conference.

Following the WCIT meeting, the ITU says, the counter-campaign will 
focus on ways to “mitigate the risk” of an “intensive anti-ratification 
campaign in [the US and Western Europe], based on the so-called lack of 
openness of the WCIT process, resulting in a significant number of 
countries refusing to ratify the new ITRs.”

A Crisis of the ITU’s Own Making
The “so-called lack of openness” has little to do with growing outrage 
over WCIT. The real objections to the conference have more to do with 
substance than the secrecy of the negotiations. First and foremost, 
there is strong opposition within the US and EU delegations to expanding 
the UN’s jurisdiction over IP networks in any form. (The current ITRs do 
not extend to the Internet.)

Globally, concern is also growing over increasingly direct efforts by 
some national governments to hijack the conference into mandating 
changes to the engineering-driven, multi-stakeholder model of Internet 
governance that relies on non-governmental international organizations 
such as the Internet Society, ICANN, and the W3C. These changes are seen 
as preludes to future restrictions on content and users implemented 
through the reengineering of key resources.

In response to early proposals along these lines, Congress unanimously 
passed a joint resolution over the summer urging the US delegation, led 
by Ambassador Terry Kramer, to reject any extension of the ITU’s 
authority to Internet matters, or to allow ITU member states to use the 
conference to advance longstanding anti-Internet agendas. Last week, the 
EU debated a sternly-worded proposal urging its members likewise to 
resist Internet-related proposals.

Also last week, Google launched its own campaign, urging users to take 
direct action against the WCIT. “Some governments want to use a 
closed-door meeting in December to increase censorship and regulate the 
Internet,” the company said. “Some proposals could permit governments to 
censor legitimate speech — or even allow them to cut off Internet access.”

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