Internet freedom versus Internet restriction ? or a beat-up ...

WCIT-12 will see a meeting of the International Telecommunications Union, a UN body which has the crucial task of reviewing the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs). These regulations, which govern the way different countries? telecommunications systems are interconnected, were adopted at the World Administrative Telegraph and Telephone Conference in Melbourne in 1988, but are now widely seen to be out of date.

?In 1988, there were just 4.3 million mobile cellular subscriptions worldwide,? said ITU Secretary-General Dr Hamadoun Tour? when he opened the conference. ?Today there are over six billion. In 1988, hardly anybody was online. Today we are approaching 2.5 billion users of the Internet. WCIT is about making sure that we connect the billion people without access to mobile telephony. And that we connect the 4.5 billion people who are still offline,? Dr Tour? said.

?Not only were the 1988 ITRs instrumental in enabling rapid growth in the ICT sector, but they also made possible the global deployment of the Internet ? and many other ITU activities continue to be essential components of Internet growth.?

He pointed out that ITU standards are used every day in the Internet. These include standards for end-user access equipment, such as modems ? including xDSL and cable modems; compression standards; security standards ? including standards to combat spam; standards for backbone networks ? including optical fibre; and the radio frequencies used to implement Wi-Fi.

Dr Tour? is a native of the impoverished West African country of Mail, and was educated in Soviet Russia. He became Secretary-General of the ITU in 2007, and was re-elected for a second four-year term in 2010. He is a respected technocrat who had a successful career with Intelsat. In his opening address he said WCIT-12 is an excellent demonstration of ITU as the original multi-stakeholder organisation.

?All stakeholders are well represented here in Dubai, with national delegations comprising representatives from government, industry and civil society, as well as technical and legal experts, making this a fully-inclusive conference,? Dr Tour? said.

He specifically welcomed one particular delegate to the conference, Australia?s Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy Senator Stephen Conroy, who he singled out ?not just because of Australia?s tremendous achievements in broadband, or because of his great work on the Broadband Commission for Digital Development, but also because the conference that originally discussed the ITRs took place in Melbourne, Australia, in 1988, and set the stage for the information society.?

Dr Tour? told delegates that the ITU has made every effort in the run-up to this conference to ensure that everyone can have a say and that everybody?s voice is heard. He said that one of the most persistent myths concerned freedom of expression, where there had been suggestions that WCIT-12 might in some way act to restrict the open and free flow of information. He reminded delegates that Article 33 of the ITU Constitution says that member states recognise the right of the public to correspond by means of the international service of public correspondence. ?The ITRs cannot contradict that provision.

This concept is paralleled in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which he quoted: ?Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.? We all know how well many member nations of the UN respect those ideals in practice. It remains to be seen how closely the new ITRS reflect Dr Tour??s fine words.

Source: http://www.i-policy.org/2012/12/internet-freedom-versus-internet-restriction-or-a-beat-up-.html

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