Civil Society Participation for ITU Forums Seen in Early Stages

The 2014 forums -- particularly the Plenipotentiary Conference -- will need even more civil society engagement than the levels seen during the controversial 2012 World Conference on International Telecommunications, said former FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell, who was a member of the U.S. WCIT delegation. WCIT resulted in a revision of the International Telecommunication Regulations that 89 nations -- including the U.S. -- chose not to sign onto (CD Dec 17/12 p1). Since WCIT, “a lot of advocacy efforts on Internet governance have become dormant or have waned,” McDowell said. “It’s almost as if pro-Internet freedom forces thought the struggle was over with, when in reality the struggle has just extended into the Plenipotentiary Conference."

Eli Dourado, a research fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center and a member of the U.S.’s WCIT and World Telecommunication/ICT Policy Forum delegations, said he would like to join the U.S. delegations to the Plenipotentiary Conference and other 2014 ITU forums. Dourado has already been participating in the U.S.’s planning process through the International Telecommunication Advisory Committee’s ad hoc meetings. Dourado said he has noticed slightly more civil society and industry participation in the planning for the 2014 forums than he saw in the initial lead-up to WCIT. The 2012 conference generated a great deal of industry interest, and “that attention has probably brought out more participation this time, especially from civil society,” he said. “The private sector has always been involved."

Civil society will be interested in how the ITU addresses ongoing transparency issues, Dourado said. Public access to ITU documents and meetings became a marquee issue in the lead-up to WCIT, prompting Dourado and Mercatus Center senior research fellow Jerry Brito to found WCITLeaks, which posted WCIT-related documents in the run-up to the conference. “In the past, the ITU secretariat has said they weren’t authorized under the ITU Constitution and Convention to make decisions about document availability, that it was something that really needed to be addressed at the Plenipotentiary Conference,” Dourado said. “I'm very eager to see how that issue’s going to play out."

Pro-digital freedom group Access is still deciding which ITU forums it wants to participate in, said Deborah Brown, the group’s senior policy analyst, who attended WCIT as part of the U.S. delegation. “It’s really a matter of prioritizing and seeing where we think the most important debates will be, and where we will have the most ability to impact the discussion,” she said. The Plenipotentiary Conference has gotten a great deal of attention, but “it’s hard to see at this point where those discussions will be going because of ongoing transparency issues with the ITU,” Brown said. Once the World Telecommunication Development Conference concludes in mid-April, “that will give us a better sense of what direction those discussions will take and to what degree the issues we're concerned with -- including human rights and openness -- will be at issue at the Plenipotentiary Conference,” Brown said. “I think it’s fair to say that some groups see this as an important space, but it’s an issue of how to spend their limited resources."

The NSA surveillance scandal, already seen to be affecting international relations on Internet governance and other communications policy issues, has also “confused the forces of Internet freedom, and they're not quite sure how to deal with it,” McDowell said. “But I think it’s quite simple -- we can help reverse the trend of government intervention into the Internet sphere by strengthening and modernizing the multistakeholder Internet governance model.” The Internet governance debate and the NSA scandal are not intrinsically linked in terms of actual policy issues, but Brazil and other countries in favor of a more government-centric governance model are using the scandal “as a rationale for reasserting the Internet governance question,” Dourado said. ‘It certainly puts those issues back on the table."

Access, like other actors, is “still reacting” to the NSA scandal, including its implications for the international Internet governance debate, Brown said. Access is also actively engaged in preparations for an Internet governance summit planned for April in Sao Paulo, Brazil, she said. Known opponents of the multi-stakeholder model are using the NSA scandal to justify more government intervention and a balkanization of the Internet, “making it all the important to be skeptical of what they're pushing at the ITU,” Brown said. NSA has also come up in the context of the 10-year review of the outcomes of the World Summit on the Information Society, and NSA issues will also likely continue to come up within the U.N., she said.