Policymaking Crucial to Preventing Internet Fragmentation, Experts Say
Internet governance stakeholders must continue to pay attention to global policy developments in the years ahead to ensure new standards and regulations remain flexible enough to allow a continuation of the multistakeholder model and prevent wholesale fragmentation of the internet, said government officials and private sector experts Thursday. Internet governance remains a flashpoint globally via the ITU and other international forums despite ICANN's recent completion of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority transition (see 1610030042 and 1611180046).
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The ITU remains an organization that's struggling to balance its traditional telecom role with a desire among some of its member governments to “figure out how to evolve” to also deal with internet policy issues, said State Department Senior Adviser-Internet Policy Micaela Klein during an Internet Society (ISOC)-Microsoft event. That desire is sometimes born out of “legitimate concerns” that governments are facing in dealing with internet policy issues, combined with difficulty in participating in venues like ICANN and the Internet Engineering Task Force in which governments “have the same clout” as individual users, Klein said.
Other countries are seeking a bigger ITU role in internet policymaking for political purposes, evidenced in many proposals arising from the ITU's recent World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly meeting in Yasmine Hammamet, Tunisia, Klein said. WTSA ultimately jettisoned controversial proposals to make the Digital Object Architecture (DOA) technology the universal standard for assigning unique identifiers for connected devices. Delegations affiliated with the Russian Communications Commonwealth, Arab States Administrations and the African Telecommunication Union pushed DOA over competing technologies as a way to address cybersecurity issues, including preventing distributed denial of service attacks and the emergence of counterfeit IoT devices (see 1610250054). There was a perception that some proposals offered at WTSA were born out of a misplaced perception that “something is wrong with the internet” as currently structured, Klein said.
Improving global trust in the internet is crucial to maintaining the stability of multistakeholder governance, said ISOC Vice President-Global Policy Development Sally Wentworth. ISOC released a policy framework in June aimed at improving global trust in the internet. Without trust among stakeholders who aren't already firm supporters of multistakeholder internet governance, “they're not going to make” the kinds of decisions needed to foster continued internet growth, Wentworth said. Considerations of human rights, communications confidentiality, privacy, policymaking transparency and accountability are crucial to improving that trust, she said.
Fragmentation “almost by definition” would hurt the internet's role as a powerful tool for advancing human rights globally, said AccessNow Senior Legislative Manager Nathan White. None of the countries that seek to fragment the internet through data localization laws and other policies are “trying to help human rights,” he said. Internet openness “results in innovation and entrepreneurship because it allows people to collaborate more easily,” said Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Senior Policy Analyst Jeremy West.