WCIT an Opportunity for Transatlantic Cooperation, Delegates and Experts Say
The upcoming World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) will give the U.S. an opportunity to deepen its ties with Europe, officials and experts said Friday during an event at Johns Hopkins University’s School for Advanced International Studies. The European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations (CEPT) has largely been in agreement with the U.S. on important and controversial issues set to be discussed at WCIT, said Terry Kramer, head of the U.S. WCIT delegation. For example, in October CEPT rejected the European Telecommunications Network Operators’ Association’s (ETNO) controversial “sender-party-pays” proposal for Internet traffic compensation that could require the sender of any Internet content to pay for its transmission (WID Oct 24 p1).
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Delegates will meet at WCIT in Dubai beginning Dec. 3 to consider which proposed revisions they want to add to the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs). “There’s overall very good agreement about liberalized models, about cybersecurity, about letting the environment develop,” Kramer said. The U.S. said Wednesday in a second set of proposed revisions to the ITRs that it wants the ITU treaty updated to focus on the virtues of market liberalization (WID Nov 1 p2). Liberalization helped telecom and the Internet grow, Kramer said Friday.
The WCIT preparation process has been a good test bed for U.S.-EU cooperation, said Beatrice Covassi, digital agenda and information and communications technology (ICT) counselor for the EU’s delegation to the U.S. The EU has worked with Kramer and the U.S. delegation as preparations have continued leading up to the conference, she said. “We really think this is important, not just in the run-up to Dubai but also crucially during the two weeks of negotiations to keep this really important cooperation.” The EU holds largely similar views to the U.S. on the direction they want revisions to the ITRs to take, she said. The EU is asking the European Council to consider a proposal that would make clear the EU wants to “keep the ITRs at a very high level principle,” she said. The council is still considering the proposal, but Covassi said she was confident they would agree to make that their position.
Efforts to expand the scope of the ITRs beyond their traditional focus on international telecommunications have also been a concern for the U.S. and EU. David Gross, chair of the Ad Hoc WCIT Working Group and a member of the U.S. WCIT delegation, said one such effort from a group of Middle Eastern nations would seek to redefine “telecommunications” as including ICT and by extension, the Internet. “That is a very interesting and potentially important statement made by an important region that I think will need to be part of the discussions about how we go forward and what we are dealing with here,” he said.
Success at WCIT will depend on how well delegations interact “in the hallways,” said Michael Nelson, a Bloomberg Government analyst and former technology policy director at the FCC. “It’s not all going to be about negotiations at the table.” ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun Touré has made clear he wants decisions at WCIT to be based on consensus, rather than up-or-down votes, Kramer said. He plans to hold bilateral meetings with multiple nations in the coming days in conjunction with the Internet Governance Forum in Baku, Azerbaijan. The U.S. will also escalate its outreach efforts with “swing states” that can influence the consensus in the next few weeks, including South Korea, Singapore, Indonesia and many of the English-speaking southern African nations. “It’s important that we get to a lot of these other nations that I think are still contemplating positions,” he said. “We see a lot of common interests, and a lot of them are very pragmatic.”