From: ZDNet

Summary: U.S. State Department and global civil society groups prep as U.N. telecommunication arm ITU tackles Internet control at WPTF-13 this week.

By Violet Blue

he Fifth World Telecommunication/ICT Policy Forum (“WTPF-13”) will be held in Geneva, Switzerland, this week for three days, May 14-16.

As with the bellicose WCIT-12 (the U.N.’s 2012 World Conference on International Telecommunications) last December in Dubai and its accompanying protests and dramatic walkout by the U.S. delegation, this Forum will be run by the United Nations notoriously dubious telecommunications arm, the ITU.

WTPF-13 — with its Twitter hashtag #WTPF13 and counter-tag #OpWTF — is ITU’s final preparation for The 2014 ITU Plenipotentiary Conference (“PP-14”), ITU’s Fall 2014 plenipotentiary meeting.

In February, outgoing U.S. Federal Communications Commissioner Robert McDowell testified to Congress in a joint U.S. House subcommittee hearing on international Internet governance that U.N.’s ITU Internet plans “must be stopped.”

McDowell warned ominously that after the WCIT-12 debacle in Dubai, combined with this week’s WTPF, the groundwork is laid for 2014 and, “Internet freedom’s foes around the globe are working hard to exploit a treaty negotiation that dwarfs the importance of the WCIT by orders of magnitude.”

On January 11, 2013, ITU’s Secretary-General Hamadoun Toure released the fourth and final ITU/WTPF-13 report outlining groundwork for Internet governance and internet regulatory topics at the May 14-16 meetings.

The ITU/WTPF-13 document explicitly includes the creation of “Global Principles for the governance and use of the Internet.” It spells out intent to resolve issues pertaining to “use of Internet resources for purposes that are inconsistent with international peace, stability and security” in the form of subjecting cybersecurity/cybercrime and data privacy to international control.

Crucially, it also redefines the multi-stakeholder definition of Internet governance as currently insufficient because it does not grant governments — now defined by ITU as underrepresented multi-stakeholders — “sufficient” Internet governance power.

PP-14 will be held in Busan, South Korea on October 20-November 7, 2014.

In the FCC Commissioner’s testimony, McDowell bluntly told the joint House subcommittee that the results of plans being made by the ITU to secure Internet governance at this very moment for the 2014 plenipot, “will be devastating even if the United States does not ratify these toxic new treaties [this week at WTPF-13].”

McDowell told Congress bluntly that since 2003, his office directly observed that countries such as China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia — and their allies — have never given up their regulatory quest. “They continued to push the ITU, and the U.N. itself, to regulate both the operations, economics and content of the Net,” he said.

McDowell strongly outlined that Congress and “many defenders of Internet freedom” must understand that serious damage was done when they did not take [ITU’s Internet governance] intentions and machinations seriously — and that the ITU is determined and able to see its intent manifest.

The U.S. State Department’s official blog said the U.S. will be attending ITU’s summit as a WTPF-13 stakeholder and expressed optimism for an agreement on multistakeholder governance.