Toure Votes Seen Focusing ITU on Development, Not Governance
GENEVA -- Hamadoun Toure’s election as ITU’s secy. gen. was a surprise to some, but others saw it as an endorsement by developing countries of the idea that getting connected to telecom and the Internet, rather than concerns about Internet governance, is their overriding concern, officials said.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
“I was very surprised,” said a European govt. official who works on international telecom policy and attended the Plenipot in Turkey. Since it appeared the Africans voted as a block, he asked if they were sending “a message that they're fed up with talking about Internet Governance and want to get down and do real stuff… I think ITU’s been wasting 8 years focusing on Internet governance because that’s what the secretary general thought was the future for ITU… but clearly that doesn’t deliver much difference on a day-to-day basis for telecommunications, especially in places like Africa.” A lot of people in the corridors of the Plenipot said the Africans “just want to move on from talking politics to real delivery, getting the networks in place,” he said. Toure was one of the candidates least vocal about Internet governance, he added.
“I think [current Secy. Gen.] Utsumi thought by doing WSIS [World Summit on the Information Society] he was going to bring Internet clearly within the domain of the ITU accepted lines of work,” an official in Geneva said. He said the Internet community didn’t want it, govts. didn’t want it, but it happened anyway, to the extent you see some of the ITU study groups working on Internet issues. Officials said that a vote for Brazilian Roberto Blois for the secy. gen. spot may have been seen by some as a pro-Utsumi vote, whereas a vote for Toure may have been seen as a vote against the handling of both Internet governance and of ITU’s development work.
In a “non-paper” floated at the Plenipot, Utsumi said it was his “moral obligation to present a solution” to revitalizing the development sector by: (1) Putting the functions of the development sector directly under the secy. gen. (2) Upgrading the World Telecom Development Conference to a Plenipotentiary Conference. (3) Establishing a separate budget funded by voluntary contributions for development work. (4) Establishing a UN liaison office in New York. (5) Renaming the union.
Toure gained considerable support and he won with a very comfortable majority, said Bertrand de la Chapelle, special envoy for the information society of the French Foreign Ministry and deputy head of delegation: “I think this is a win for developing countries who wanted to see the digital divide be the main focus of the ITU. It is likely to mean the orientation of the ITU will be a combination of the technical activities and probably a little bit more of the development agenda.”
Once the political elections are out of the way, the tougher debates start, said a telecom executive. They're already appearing in the working groups. The Plenipot continues another 3 weeks, a compressed time frame to deal with highly controversial discussions regarding the role of the ITU in the Internet and the topic of revisions to the International Telecom Regulations.
The message of the election is clear, the telecom executive said, and recurred in developing country ministers’ and delegates’ statements during the Plenipot’s first week: “The real challenge is connectivity within national borders, including connecting metro areas with the most rural and under-connected and underserved areas… Arguing over who governs an infrastructure they are urgently seeking to bring to their citizens seems not to be the highest priority.”
One concern is that with a Japanese out front after the first round of elections for ITU-T director, Europe and the Americas could end up not having an elected official at the ITU, if Yuji Inoue wins in balloting Tues. Valery Timofeev of Russia was reelected ITU-R dir.; he was unopposed. Inoue received 59 votes for director of ITU-T, a preliminary report said; Malcolm Johnson of the U.K. 46; Kishik Park of Korea 39; Fabio Bigi of Italy 15. Eighty votes were needed for a majority. The election is still up for grabs. If Bigi withdraws, and those countries coalesce around the idea of getting a European into the post, then Johnson could win. But a similar deal could be made between the Asians, or perhaps something else will happen, an official said.
81 votes were needed for a majority in the post of ITU-D dir. Patrick Masambu of Uganda received 49; Sami Al Basheer of Saudi Arabia 47; Najat Rochdi of Morocco 39; Abdelkrim Karim Boussaid of Algeria 25.