It's been a “very important year” for Internet governance and the ITU Plenipotentiary in Busan, South Korea, was the “highlight,” NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling said on a panel Thursday hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations and sponsored by Google. All panelists, including Daniel Sepulveda, U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for economic and business affairs, called the ITU conference a success. Sepulveda said cybersecurity issues aren’t in the “remit” of the ITU. The conference emphasized that ITU wouldn’t be inserted into areas of content control, he said. Strickling said ICANN’s accountability proposal process has been “slower” than its corresponding Internet Assigned Numbers Authority transition proposal and called the latter process “almost metaphysical.” He said ICANN and NTIA are relying on the ICANN community to develop the proposal (see 1410140062), and they weren’t trying to “steer it in any particular direction.” The debates over Internet governance and cybersecurity issues are far from over, said Christopher Painter, State Department cyber issues coordinator. Countries that are considering “drawing sovereign boundaries around cyberspace” have become much more active in Internet governance debates, he said.
Level 3 asked the FCC in meetings with aides to commissioners Mignon Clyburn and Jessica Rosenworcel to take up the interconnection issue as part of any net neutrality order. Consumer demand for video “is driving significant growth in overall traffic volume on the Internet,” Level 3 General Counsel Michael Mooney, CEO Jeff Storey and other executives told Clyburn’s aide Monday, said a Level 3 ex parte filing. Content providers, such as streaming video services, have “multiple competitive options for delivering their content to the ISP,” but “the ISP itself offers the only path for that content to reach the end user,” Level 3 said. Several of the largest ISPs “are leveraging that bottleneck control over access to their users, demanding arbitrary tolls from providers like Level 3 who carry the Internet content requested by the ISPs’ end users from the global Internet to the ISPs’ last mile networks,” the company said. “If Level 3 will not pay these arbitrary and discriminatory tolls, these ISPs refuse to augment interconnection capacity that is congested to a degree that any network engineer would agree must be augmented for the Internet to function properly. … These ISPs are degrading the experience of their own customers as a means to leverage the collection of arbitrary access tolls from the rest of the Internet.” Other Level 3 officials at the meeting were John Blount, president-North America; John Ryan, chief legal officer; and Scott Seab, senior corporate counsel. Broadband Internet access providers have a "terminating access monopoly over end users that gives them the incentive and ability to demand new access tolls from some parties, leaving degraded local delivery for online content and services end users want," Joseph Cavender, Level 3 assistant general counsel, and others told Rosenworcel’s aide on Tuesday, according to a Computer & Communications Industry Association ex parte filing provided by CCIA. Also advocating for interconnection regulations at the meeting, according to the filing, were Catherine Sloan, CCIA vice president-government relations; Dave Schaeffer, Cogent Communications CEO; Brian Chase, Foursquare Labs general counsel; Melanie Wyne, National Association of Realtors senior policy representative; Angie Kronenberg, Comptel general counsel; Sarah Morris, senior policy counsel at the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute; and Phillip Berenbroick, policy director of the Internet Freedom Business Alliance. "Absent strong FCC rules against commercial discrimination by such access providers, we indicated that realtors, social media and other tech entrepreneurs, long haul transit providers, CDNs and others who depend on an open Internet for transmission of online video are all at risk in the near future," said the filling made in docket 14-28. Level 3 and other proponents of interconnection rules are encouraged the FCC will take it up (see 1411130042).
The Internet Society (ISOC) board of trustees refused to endorse the NETmundial Initiative’s Coordination Council, a Sunday ISOC news release said. The ISOC board reached its conclusion following its weekend meeting in Honolulu. ICANN and the World Economic Forum will occupy two of the five permanent seats on the initiative’s council (see 1411060028). The council's 25 total seats will be made up of representatives from academia, civil society, governments and the private sector. “We are concerned that the way in which the NETmundial Initiative is being formed does not appear to be consistent with the Internet Society’s longstanding principles,” which include the multistakeholder model and decentralization, it said. The board has asked ISOC CEO Kathryn Brown to “convene a dialogue” with ISOC, it said. “The dialogue should consider whether any new initiatives or groups are needed at the current time and, if so, to define the objectives for any such effort,” it said. ISOC Board Chairman Bob Hinden has been in talks with ICANN Board Chairman Steve Crocker about ICANN’s involvement in the initiative, it said. The ISOC board also expressed its support for the Internet Architecture Board’s statement last week that encryption should be the “norm for Internet traffic,” it said in a news release Saturday.
Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker welcomed the launch of the NETmundial Initiative, in a statement Thursday. The initiative is being led by ICANN, the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee (CGI.br), said the initiative’s website. The initiative is designed to be a “self-organizing framework” that lets Internet governance stakeholders build on the work earlier this year of the NETmundial conference in Sao Paulo, Brazil (see 1404240071), said Richard Samans, World Economic Forum managing director, on a conference call Thursday. Pritzker said she hoped the initiative would be “successful in advancing multistakeholder Internet governance that is open, transparent and allows for the participation of all interested parties.” Samans, ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade and Virgilio Almeida, Brazilian secretary for information and technology policy, are heading the initiative’s transitional committee, which will select its Coordination Council, said the website. That council will be made up of 25 members, including one member from the academic community; two civil society members; three government members; and four private sectors members. ICANN, WEF and ICG.br will occupy three of the five permanent seats on the council. Samans said the council’s first meeting is expected in late January, at which point the transitional committee will be disbanded. Internet governance officials announced their intent to launch the initiative at the WEF in August (see 1408290071). The Electronic Frontier Foundation criticized the initiative in September, calling it a “pre-cooked, big business initiative” (see 1409020079).
“Community concerns” within ICANN prompted its board to change the location of ICANN 52 to Singapore, said an ICANN news release Monday. The meeting was originally scheduled to be in Marrakech, Morocco, Feb. 8-12, it said. Some in the ICANN community felt the Marrakech location would "prevent maximum participation" in the meeting, it said. The date wasn't changed. The board said it expects to hold its first ICANN meeting of 2016 in Marrakech.
The ITU Plenipotentiary shouldn’t “initiate or authorize a treaty-making process or otherwise develop binding agreements on international security or cybersecurity,” said Danielle Kriz, Information Technology Industry Council global cybersecurity policy director, in a blog post Sunday. The ITU “lacks the expertise to deal with many technical and legal matters, including cybersecurity and cybercrime,” she said. The plenipotentiary should “oppose” any expansion of the ITU Standards Bureau into “new areas of cybersecurity standardization” and should avoid efforts to have the bureau partner with other standard development organizations, said Kriz. ITU member countries elected Houlin Zhao of China as the ITU’s new secretary-general last week (see 1410240047). Zhao will take over as secretary general Jan. 1.