WCIT meeting, Day 3. Photo by ITU.
So the US is threatening to walk out of the WCIT, the meeting of the ITU (International Telecommunications Union, which aspires to run the Internet more than it does already, mainly as the cover to grabs by Russia and other bad actors).
As the Register reports, the US delegate has complained that some of the proposals coming down the pike from the likes of Russia " “creates an open door for review of content and potential censorship”. No surprise there!
So, good! That's what you do at international meetings like this. You threaten to walk out. You reject bad text. You fight. You talk to people in capitals. And you leave with either no document or a very thin compromise document or whatever. The US walked out of the World Conference Against Racism in Durban -- that was the right thing to do. The US gets up and walks out of the room when the Iranian president rants about wanting to wipe Israel off the map -- that's what you do.
The ITU is a creaky, old-fashioned Soviet-style institution for which the UN is famous -- the entire place has the feel of 1970s Soviet culture -- right down to the bad art on the walls -- but it's still a multilateral body which politically represents the countries involved, for better or worse. It has its troubles, surely; the meeting has even had a network outage (was it hacked?) -- not exactly a good calling card for a group wanting to run the Internet.
But...When I said Google needs to be paper-trained for international meetings, I wasn't kidding. Here's Andrew McLaughlin, former Googler, and former deputy CTO for the US government (who got his wrist slapped while in office for contact with his former company), saying that the ITU should be "knee-capped" like an IRA thug. Techies are so nasty! I was shocked. Crovits' headline -- that the ITU "needs to be deleted" is little better.
Sure, the ITU is creaky and shouldn't be allowed to take over -- but neither should Google. Google just doesn't get it. Google doesn't have standing. And in fact, to the extent that this entire "multi-stakeholder" crap has gotten a hold in the whole Internet governance sphere, we have a problem, precisely because elite NGOs, funded by Soros or the EU or whatever, claim then an equal place at the table with governments and businesses even though they are no more democratically and transparently run than many of the countries. And they have neither the people behind them -- as elected governments do -- or the resources -- as businesses do -- to be making that claim. This is of course an entire topic, this grab at international governance as a whole by the lefty NGOs -- Ken Anderson has a great monograph on it. (Like me, Ken is a former HRW staffer.)
The entire Internet space -- the actual technology and then all the meta-ideologies that have sprung up around it -- offers a new playing field for the international jet-set aspiring to global governance, of course. And I'm not for handing it to them -- they don't deserve it. And they bring bad ideology to the table of a different sort.
Grumps Crovits:
Under the one country, one vote rule of the U.N., these 100,000 people trump the rest of the two billion. It only takes a majority of the 193 countries in the U.N. to hijack the Internet.
And so...we should have Human Rights Watch or the Open Society Foundation or Google -- trump the rest of the two billion? Why?
It pays to remember that the Internet Governance Forum -- their preferred playing field to the ITU -- is in fact also nothing more than a UN creature that ultimately tethers back up to the UN. It was formed originally as a working group of a working group of a conference -- the World Summit on the Information Society which met over the last decade in various capitals of the world spawned the Working Group on Internet Governance, which then in turn spawned the Internet Governance Forum. The "stakeholders" who are the "multis" in the IGF are all government bureaucrats. If anything, they actually have less accountablity than an ITU delegation, because they are less tethered to political leadership, and are off on their own writing papers and making policy and citing the "complexity" and "technical nature" of the issues to get their way. The IGF has some good and some bad in terms of governments and NGOs.
But it has no more right to be the global governor of us all than the ITU does, and has far less stature as a forum of a working group of a world summit of a secretariat -- it's about three times removed from home base in Geneva, for whatever third-world time serving staff actually runs it. It's supposed to be saved from bureaucratic torpour by having "dynamic coalitions" that can come together to "solve problems" and "make proposals". Yet the "dynamic coalitions" can't just appear as flash-mobs or even conscientious and sober task forces. They have to be approved by the secretariat and have to have three existing multistakeholders endorse them. That's still not enough, that endorsement -- their papers, plans, charter, etc. have to be cleared. Obviously, if you make a "dyanmic coalition" on a politically correct topic like "global warming and the Internet" you'll get fast-tracked, but trust me, I might spend the rest of my life trying to get registered a coalition on intellectual property protection for small business on the Internet.
In a rant at the New America Foundation (where else), McLaughlin says:
"What is so bad about the ITU?" Mr. McLaughlin asked in a speech to the New America Foundation in Washington on Nov. 29. "It's just simple things like the nature, structure, culture, values and processes of the ITU. They are all inimical to a free and open Internet, and they are all inconsistent with the nature of the technical infrastructure that now characterizes our communications networks." Voting rules let repressive governments "engage in horse trading that has nothing to do with the technical merits of the decisions under consideration."
But here's what's inimical about Google:
o non-transparency in its vaunted Transparency Report where it has set itself up as a global censor -- and reprimands to critics
o unfairness in dealing with user complaints in Ad Sense cases
o if we're going to play the development game -- doesn't bring its taxes home, and doesn't create very many jobs -- as part of the Internet-busting of paid content, it destroys more jobs than it creates
o opposes copyright by pretending that upholding livelihoods for creators somehow harms "innovation," which is really just Google's business interest
o lobbying for its business interests under the guise of care about freedom of expression (GNI)
o arbitrary and overbroad appication of draconian TOS on G+ -- where bans can lead to loss of property on all other Google services.
McLaughlin goes to town on all the countries I've spent my life doing human rights work for:
"You need look no further than the fact that the ITU is the chosen vehicle for regimes for whom the free and open Internet is seen as an existential threat—Russia, China, Iran, Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Belarus and Cuba. These are the countries placing their hopes and ambitions in the vessel of the ITU for governance and regulation of the Internet," Mr. McLaughlin said.
But Google was pretty late to the game opposing Chinese censorship and even today -- well, Silicon Valley uses China as its back end to manufacture its gadgets and is fairly beholden to China. What does Google do for any of these countries, really? The GNI, which was supposed to be the vessel where "the hopes and ambitions" for NGOs would reside has been a dismal failure, as Google and other Big IT firms never enabled it to make denunciations of Internet closures or censorship by states, but only tackled edge-cases which it felt might harm Google's direct business interests -- i.e. a case involving Youtube in Italy.
Did GNI muster a denunciation of Syria's shutdown of the Internet? Sure, it had to do that much! But it missed dozens of other cases where this happens and instead focuses again on its core business interests and defiance of any attempt at even a liberal government's regulations, with events like "The Communications Data Bill: ‘Snoopers’ charter’, or safeguarding our security?"
If you really want to hear GNI mumble -- and mumble loudly -- read this astounding page of non-answers and non-positions from this coalition, which nevertheless then amplifies the individual positions by some of its members -- like Center for Democracy and Technology, which basically cheerleads Google's decision not to wait for a court order, but to take down the anti-Muslim video from view in Egypt and Libya where violence had occurred. Astoundingly, none of these freedom fighters think to criticize the Egyptian government for putting the video on national TV and helping spark the violence. "And these targeted takedowns may also help Google's YouTube expand and preserve its market," says CDT -- and that, above all, is of course what matters, not universal human rights.
BTW, speaking of global warming and the Internet, I wanted to follow the Baku meeting and comment on it meaningfully but I couldn't; my power was shut off for weeks during Hurricane Sandy and I couldn't justify just sitting on the Internet following a conference during the brief hours that I was able to beat the lines for a seat at Fedex to use the computers uptown. I will have to study it another time. I'll skip the global warming stuff though -- it's likely to have the same kind of insanity we've seen from Susan Crawford.
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