Internet Stakeholders Eye WTSA Meeting for Clues on Future of ITU Policymaking
The World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly, which began Tuesday, is drawing interest from U.S.-based internet governance stakeholders. Some told us they will be watching for potential clues about the future trajectory of ITU internet policymaking. WTSA is set to run through Nov. 3 in Yasmine Hammamet, Tunisia. The standards conference is the ITU’s first major meeting since implementation earlier this month of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority transition, which most U.S. stakeholders had identified as crucial to the credibility of the multistakeholder internet governance model (see 1610030042).
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WTSA will be important for setting the tone of much of ITU policy debate over the next four years, said Internet Governance Coalition (IGC) Chairman David Gross. The meeting will in part decide who chairs the ITU’s various policy study groups, with each study group’s chair having a significant influence in the direction the group takes, said Gross, a Wiley Rein telecom and internet governance lawyer. “We’ll be carefully watching the outcome of those discussions, as they will be important” heading into the higher-profile 2017 World Telecommunication Development Conference (WTDC) and the 2018 ITU Plenipotentiary Conference, he said.
Gross and other U.S. stakeholders said they also will be watching standards policy-centric discussions at WTSA, which are to examine how the ITU should get involved in over-the-top services, cybersecurity and other issues. George Mason University Mercatus Center Technology Policy Program Director Eli Dourado said he's following how WTSA delegates will address Digital Object Architecture (DOA) technology, which assigns unique identifiers to every connected device, including those using IoT. “Imagine if we made the internet more like cellphone networks,” in which each device is identifiable through international mobile equipment identity and SIM card identifiers, Dourado said.
Delegations affiliated with the Russian Communications Commonwealth, Arab States Administrations and the African Telecommunication Union are pushing for DOA to become the universal standard for IoT over other competing standards as a way of addressing cybersecurity issues, including preventing distributed denial of service attacks and the emergence of counterfeit IoT devices, Dourado said. “The question here is whether the ITU’s study groups will decide to continue working on this towards making it a more widely used standard,” he said. "For those of us who have concerns about freedom of expression and freedom online in general, this is very concerning.”
The DOA standard debate is a concern partly because expansion of the standard's reach would benefit the internet policy goals of Russia, which has strongly pushed for its proliferation, said Tony Rutkowski, executive vice president-industry standards and regulatory affairs at Yaana Technologies, a provider of cloud and other communications and big data services. Russia favored DOA via the Switzerland-based DONA Foundation, Rutkowski said. The Internet Society also identified the debate over DOA as being “a more contentious issue” than others set for debate at WTSA. “A critical message to amplify in these discussions is that any technologies that are deployed continue to support the open Internet model for it to function and remain secure,” said ISoc Policy Adviser Elizabeth Oluoch-Do Canto in a blog post.
Debate over DOA will feed into a larger discussion within the ITU on “not only how to govern the current internet but how to evolve the internet,” Dourado told us. “You have this vision where everything is locked down and managed, with information management baked into the core protocols of the network so that states can make sure that certain bad activities aren’t happening online,” he said. “On the other hand, you have a vision of the next generation of networks that’s very hard to control, with ideas surrounding blockchain and other ways of distributing content online that are harder to censor.”
Discussions at WTSA and the outcomes from the conference will “give us an insight into how governments see the role of the ITU on issues like cybersecurity” ahead of WTDC and the ITU Plenipotentiary, Gross said. The IGC will be “watching closely” what Russia, China and Middle East nations advocate during WTSA and how those views influence the outcome, he said. “We are in very good hands” with State Department Senior Deputy Coordinator-International Communication and Information Policy Julie Zoller leading the U.S.’ WTSA delegation, Gross said. Signals ahead of WTSA’s conclusion won’t be totally conclusive, so “what ultimately matters” are the outcome and how stakeholders believe Russia and other advocates of more government-centric internet governance fared, an industry executive told us: “We’ll know a lot more after this conference” about the relative strength of advocates of multistakeholderism and multilateralism.