December 4th, 2006
As UN's ITU meets, concern about its limits and potential
The International Telecommunications Union, not a union at all but the UN agency that is concerned with the Internet (and note the capital I in "Internet") and represents 191 countries and 650 companies, is meeting this week in Hong Kong but, The New York Times observes, part of the discussion will be on the ITU's role and whether it is expanding to Internet governance, a role that has so far been handled by ICANN and the US Commerce Department.
So sensitive are matters of governance that the State Department's hair raised a bit on end when officials heard the ITU was looking at whether the word Internet should have an upper or lower case "i."
“We immediately thought, ‘Gee, what’s up with that?’ ” Mr. Gross, the coordinator for international communications and information policy at the State Department, said. “Who made the decision and on what basis? We didn’t have a clue if this was something insignificant or significant.”
Such small matters may herald big conflicts.
Should the ITU concern itself with Internet governance — a role that its Western members find particularly objectionable — or should it focus on ground-level issues, like access to telecommunications in developing countries?
Hamadoun Touré of Mali, who was recently elected secretary general of the agency, its highest-ranking official, favors the latter approach. “I wouldn’t want to see the I.T.U. trying to take over Internet governance,” he said at his first news conference.
These meeting have a habit of pitting the developing world against the West and generating all kinds of other schisms.
“We are not talking about the I.T.U. taking over governance here,” he said. “We’re talking about the I.T.U. continuing the mandate that it has been doing in contributing to the growth of the Internet over all of these years.”
But the ITU will have a major role in Digital Divide and cybersecurity decisions and the conference will take up those issues at the meeting.
“Security in cyberspace can only be brokered worldwide by I.T.U.,” Mr. Touré asserted, “because it is the only nonpolitical place in the whole U.N. system where all the parties are still talking to one another.” As an example, he cited a security report issued in his name last year that was signed by both Syria and the United States. “We’re the only one who can talk to everyone,” he said.
