The ITU isn’t the right venue for dealing with Internet issues,...
The ITU isn’t the right venue for dealing with Internet issues, Cynthia Wong, director of the Project on Global Freedom at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told reporters Monday. The ITU announcement Friday that it would publish the latest…
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version of the main conference preparatory document and create an online platform for public comment encompass “extremely modest first steps and don’t go nearly far enough,” she said. CDT and Public Knowledge are concerned about the ITU’s expertise in Internet issues, which makes various proposals “concerning,” said Sherwin Siy, the latter group’s vice president-legal affairs. The groups are also concerned about an ITU proposal by the European Telecommunications Network Operators’ Association to require sending networks to pay interconnection fees to deliver content to end users (CD June 28 p1). The proposal adds technical and administrative burdens to an Internet that has mostly been open and free, and imposes a “burdensome and heavyweight structure on carriers, and the way they hand off traffic to one another,” said David Sohn, CDT general counsel. Termination fees modeled on the phone system will make it “expensive and possibly exorbitant” to serve developing countries, which would otherwise have the most to gain from Internet development, he said. “You really go down the road to a balkanized, less global Internet."