By L. Gordon Crovitz, Information Age, The Wall Street Journal, December 17, 2012
The open Internet, available to people around the world without the permission of any government, was a great liberation. It was also too good to last. Authoritarian governments this month won the first battle to close off parts of the Internet.
At the just-concluded conference of the International Telecommunications Union in Dubai, the U.S. and its allies got outmaneuvered. The ITU conference was highly technical, which may be why the media outside of tech blogs paid little attention, but the result is noteworthy: A majority of the 193 United Nations member countries approved a treaty giving governments new powers to close off access to the Internet in their countries.
U.S. diplomats were shocked by the result, but they shouldn't have been surprised. Authoritarian regimes, led by Russia and China, have long schemed to use the U.N. to claim control over today's borderless Internet, whose open, decentralized architecture makes it hard for these countries to close their people off entirely. In the run-up to the conference, dozens of secret proposals by authoritarian governments were leaked online.
A vote was called late one night last week in Dubai—at first described as a nonbinding "feel of the room on who will accept"—on a draft giving countries new power over the Internet.
The result was 89 countries in favor, with 55 against. The authoritarian majority included Russia, China, Arab countries, Iran and much of Africa. Under the rules of the ITU, the treaty takes effect in 2015 for these countries. Countries that opposed it are not bound by it, but Internet users in free countries will also suffer as global networks split into two camps—one open, one closed.
One lesson is that the best defense of the Internet is a good offense against an overreaching U.N. The majority of authoritarian governments in a one-country, one-vote system will keep chipping away at the open Internet. The best way to stop them is to abolish the ITU.
A Narrow Internet Escape (The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 18, 2012)
The U.S. walks out of a U.N. conference just in time.
The Administration's mistake was in playing along with the ITU in the first place. This White House and State Department have an undying faith in multilateral diplomacy, even when the rest of the world wants to use it to harm U.S. interests. Autocrats rightly see the open Web as a threat to their political control, which is precisely why it is in the U.S. interest to keep the U.N.'s hands off.
Given the ITU's Dubai double-cross, the U.S. has good cause to quit the agency. If that's too much, then perhaps the next Secretary of State will make it a theme of his tenure to preach the virtues of an unregulated Internet.
