[Infowarrior] - UN Agency's Leaked Playbook: Panic, Chaos over Anti-Internet Treaty

[Richard Forno]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrydownes/2012/11/26/un-agencys-leaked-playbook-panic-chaos-over-internet-treaty/print/

UN Agency's Leaked Playbook: Panic, Chaos over Anti-Internet Treaty
Larry Downes, Contributor

11/26/2012 @ 6:00AM

The International Telecommunications Union, the UN agency at the center of a firestorm over new efforts to regulate the Internet, is preparing a social media campaign to target what it expects will be fierce opposition to a revised telephone treaty being decided next month at a secret conference in Dubai.

That’s according to a key ITU internal planning document that appeared Saturday on the website WCITLeaks, which has been posting a steady stream of documents leading up to the conference.  Even as ITU officials accelerate increasingly clumsy efforts to deflect the wrath of Internet users over next month’s World Conference on International Telecommunications, more documents leaking out ahead of the meeting continue to expose the agency’s misstatements.

The WCIT conference will consider revisions to a 1988 treaty known as the International Telecommunications Regulations.  At the meeting, 193 member nations consider dozens of proposed amendments, including several that would bring the Internet under ITU jurisdiction and substantially change the architecture and governance of the Internet.  Other proposals would, if adopted, give countries including Russia, China, and Iran UN sanctioned-authority to monitor and censor incoming and outgoing Internet traffic under the guise of improving “security.”

The newly-leaked document is the agenda for an “ITU Senior Management Retreat” held in Geneva in September.  It includes a detailed report on resistance to WCIT and the agency’s plans to counter criticism of its secretive processes. It also includes links and passwords for presentations given by outside public relations and advertising executives from leading global agencies.  (The passwords were still active as of Nov. 24th.)

The document, marked “confidential,” suggests senior ITU officials have become both paranoid and panicked over growing outrage over both the form and substance of the upcoming negotiations.  Material included with the agenda paints a pathetic picture of the150 year-old UN agency struggling to defend itself from attacks by what the agency believes is a “well-financed and well-organized campaign originating in the USA” whose goal is to “discredit the ITU and WCIT.”

The two-day meeting also featured leading media consultants invited to help the agency formulate a strategy to avoid the kind of global outrage that mortally wounded a secret Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement treaty earlier this year, and which did in copyright legislation known as SOPA and PIPA in the U.S. in January.

Both ACTA and the US copyright bills were widely expected to pass with little opposition until Internet users organized physical and virtual protests that caught lawmakers by surprise.

According to the internal ITU document, the agency had already launched what it calls a “counter-campaign”–a media blitz the agency plans to expand in light of what the ITU sees as the likely event of significant hostility to the revised treaty after the conference.

Following the WCIT meeting, the ITU says, the counter-campaign will focus on ways to “mitigate the risk” of an “intensive anti-ratification campaign in [the US and Western Europe], based on the so-called lack of openness of the WCIT process, resulting in a significant number of countries refusing to ratify the new ITRs.”

 

A Crisis of the ITU’s Own Making

The “so-called lack of openness” has little to do with growing outrage over WCIT.  The real objections to the conference have more to do with substance than the secrecy of the negotiations.  First and foremost, there is strong opposition within the US and EU delegations to expanding the UN’s jurisdiction over IP networks in any form.  (The current ITRs do not extend to the Internet.)

Globally, concern is also growing over increasingly direct efforts by some national governments to hijack the conference into mandating changes to the engineering-driven, multi-stakeholder model of Internet governance that relies on non-governmental international organizations such as the Internet Society, ICANN, and the W3C.  These changes are seen as preludes to future restrictions on content and users implemented through the reengineering of key resources.

In response to early proposals along these lines, Congress unanimously passed a joint resolution over the summer urging the US delegation, led by Ambassador Terry Kramer, to reject any extension of the ITU’s authority to Internet matters, or to allow ITU member states to use the conference to advance longstanding anti-Internet agendas.  Last week, the EU debated a sternly-worded proposal urging its members likewise to resist Internet-related proposals.

Also last week, Google launched its own campaign, urging users to take direct action against the WCIT.  “Some governments want to use a closed-door meeting in December to increase censorship and regulate the Internet,” the company said.  “Some proposals could permit governments to censor legitimate speech — or even allow them to cut off Internet access.”

Recent Cyber Attacks

The ITU has refused to take such criticism seriously, and continues instead to stonewall.  In a Nov. 23 blog post, the agency attacked the Google campaign by name, insisting absurdly that the agency’s secret proceedings are “completely transparent” because all 193 voting nations have access to the proceedings.  (Non-voting private entities, which also have access to conference documents, can join the ITU at a cost that starts at around $20,000 a year.)

On Saturday, likewise, an ITU spokesperson once again rejected claims that any proposals so far submitted for consideration could have any effect on censorship or reducing free speech in some member nations.

The spokesperson also flatly denied that any proposals do or could deal with regulation of the Internet or its underlying engineering.  “There’s nothing that’s coming up in this conference that touches on Internet governance or proposes changing the current mandate of the organizations that run the Internet,” the ITU spokesperson told The Hill.

ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun Touré, likewise, has said repeatedly that the WCIT has nothing to do with Internet governance, and that it specifically will not address multi-stakeholder management of protocols, domain names, addresses, or other engineering resources.

In a recent op-ed published by Wired, for example, Touré wrote, “To be clear, the conference will not examine management of critical Internet resources such as domain names and IP addresses. These functions are already performed by ICANN and regional Internet registries.”  In a Nov. 15th blog post, the agency again assured critics that “there have not been any proposals calling for a change from the bottom-up  multi-stakeholder model of Internet governance to an ITU-controlled model.“  (emphasis original)

Yet as I reported last week, a leaked November 13th proposal from the Russian Federation to the ITU specifically adds a new section to the treaty dealing with Internet governance, and would if adopted transfer some it not all of ICANN’s authority over domain names, Internet addresses and other key resources to national governments under the auspices of the ITU.

A direct contradiction of ITU assurances, the Russian proposal was only the most direct and aggressive of several leaked amendments from countries and non-voting private ITU members that would explicitly change the architecture and governance of the Internet.

(Many though by no means all of these have been posted to the WCITLeaks site, maintained by Jerry Brito and Eli Dourado, researchers at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.)

Preparing for the Worst—and Causing it at the Same Time

The ITU is well aware of these proposals, yet continues to deny their existence.

Now we know why.  The agency’s clumsy efforts at misdirection and outright misstatements follow precisely the media playbook discussed at the September senior management retreat.

At the meeting, the ITU considered responses to six possible outcomes for the upcoming WCIT conference, including “Consensus on a treaty that is substantively different from the existing ITRs, perhaps with reservations from some OECD countries regarding specific articles.”  (The OECD is an economic development organization that includes the US and much of Western Europe.)

But the agency’s senior management acknowledges in the document that a consensus scenario “seems unlikely given the positions taken by the USA.”

Those “positions,” according to the document, were expressed through a “well-financed and well-organized campaign” that was determined to “discredit the ITU and WCIT, so at to minimize the chances that new ITRs could affect the existing flow of funds for Internet traffic.”

The ITU is referring specifically to proposals I first reported on in May from a trade group of European telephone companies known as ETNO.  ETNO proposed radical changes to the ITRs that would mandate new Internet traffic transit arrangements in which content providers would pay tolls and taxes to local ISPs (many still run by national governments) to reach local users who requested their content.

The ETNO plan was widely seen as a desperation move by over-regulated European ISPs to subsidize their networks on the backs of high-volume content providers including YouTube, Netflix, and other video sites, most of which are headquartered outside the EU.  But by requiring content providers to pay locally-set tolls to satisfy information requests by their own users, the plan would have signaled the end of Internet growth in much of the developing world.

In Europe earlier this month, sources told me that the ETNO proposal had yet to find a sponsor among the European member nations.  But versions of similar Internet tax plans have since appeared in amendments offered by some African and Arab countries.  These governments hope content taxes can somehow replace lost revenue from declining international long distance traffic, where rates were set artificially high, leading to rampant corruption.

According to the leaked document, the ITU believes that the anti-ETNO campaign got out of hand, unintentionally leading public advocacy groups on the left and the right to begin “attacking the ITU and WCIT  for being insufficiently open and transparent.”

Without identifying the  U.S.-based “lobbying group” behind what it acknowledges to be growing negative media coverage, the agency goes on to say that “the sponsors” of the campaign “did not realize that the attacks directed against WCIT would turn into general attacks on the ITU as a whole.” The internal document says that “[t]he lobbying group that initiated the campaign has probably lost control of it and regrets the intensity of the attacks against the ITU.”

In response to the anti-WCIT “campaign,” according to the September retreat’s preparatory materials, the ITU reluctantly launched a “counter-campaign,” which the agency believes “has been fairly successful outside the US and somewhat successful even in the US,” where “some of the statements made to denigrate ITU and WCIT are so extreme that they were easy to challenge and rebut.”

Going forward, the ITU focused at its meeting on the possibility of an “intensive anti-ratification campaign in OECD countries, based on the so-called lack of openness of the WCIT process, resulting in a significant number of countries refusing to ratify the new ITRs.”  The ITU calls this possibility “the so-called ACTA scenario,” referring to sometimes violent protests against the secret ACTA treaty that took place this year.

To develop the next phase of its “counter-campaign,” the ITU hosted speakers from leading PR and advertising agencies to advise them on the use of social media.  For example, Matthias Lufkens, Head of Digital Strategy for global public relations firm Burson-Marsteller, gave a presentation on how his agency helped the World Economic Forum leverage tools such as Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr to fend off “occupy”-style protests that occurred both physically in Davos and on the Internet.

“There is a risk that [the ACTA scenario] will happen, but our communication campaign can mitigate this,” the internal document says.

Fighting Fire with Tweets

But the ITU is deluding itself if its senior management actually believes the current “counter-campaign” has in any way been “successful.”  Opposition to WCIT has ramped up since the September retreat, and it is by no means limited to the US and other OECD countries.

Indeed, many countries in the developing world now recognize the ETNO proposal as one that would leave them cut off from most Internet traffic, and resent the ITU’s implicit endorsement of the plan. (Even as late as September, the internal document characterized the sending party tax innocuously as “who pays how much to whom to move traffic” and sniffed that any objection to ETNO’s proposals implied that “developing countries are unable to understand what is in their interests.”)

The hostile response by Internet users to leaked anti-Internet proposals at WCIT is no mystery.  Nor is it the result of a vast conspiracy against the ITU.  The launch of Google’s campaign, which comes nearly three months after the ITU retreat confidently predicted it had stemmed the tide of negative “press,” is further evidence that the ITU and its media consultants have completely misread the response to WCIT from users not just in the U.S. but around the world.

Instead, as its media playbook advises, the ITU continues to repeat that only the agency’s remarkable foresight in prior efforts at international telephone regulation “paved the way for today’s  information and communications technologies.”  The document encourages ITU spokespeople to deflect media questions from secrecy, taxes and censorship and say instead that “[t]he revised ITRs have the exciting potential to pave the way for a broadband revolution in the 21st century.”

In a particularly ham-fisted example, the title of Dr. Touré’s recent op-ed in Wired was changed a few days after it appeared from “UN Must Regulate the Internet” to “UN: We Seek to Bring Internet to All,” presumably at the ITU’s request.  (Contrary to journalistic convention, Wired’s editors made the change without noting or explaining it.)

Of course no one but the ITU believes such inanities.  Indeed, the leaked agenda and supporting materials for its recent senior management retreat suggests even the agency’s senior staff is having trouble keeping a straight face.

In fact, the ITU has been caught utterly flat-footed by the response to its Internet power grab.  The agency is now straining to paint itself as an innocent victim of negative press intended for other targets.

But whether caused by its own greed or incompetence, the agency deserves the backlash that continues to grow against its efforts to expand its authority and reassert its relevance in the digital age–even if doing so comes at the cost of Internet freedom for some or all users.

Indeed, the leaked internal document makes crystal clear that the agency fundamentally misunderstands the resistance of Internet users to an enhanced UN role in Internet governance, and to proposals that would give repressive governments increased political cover to slow or silence the free flow of information under the guise of implementing a UN treaty.

It isn’t the lack of transparency, in other words, that has outraged users.  It’s the terrible ideas the agency is at pains to keep secret within its sometimes-complicit national membership.

Here’s the unvarnished truth, which no PR agency can help the agency talk, tweet, or prevaricate their way around:  The commercial Internet emerged and matured entirely since the treaty was last reviewed.  It developed in spite of the ITRs, not because of them.

There is a familiar pattern here of ambitious regulators who have no expertise and little experience with the Internet proclaiming themselves its benevolent dictators, only to find the peasants revolting before the coup has even started.

The ITU is no different than the sponsors of ACTA, SOPA, PIPA, and other attempts at regulating the Internet, its content, or its users by governments large and small.  Like the media lobbyists who continue to see the successful fight to kill SOPA and PIPA as a proxy war waged solely by Google and other Internet companies, the ITU simply can’t accept the reality that Internet users have become their own best advocates.

Without prodding, they readily work together to defend a common-sense faith in self-governance for engineering resources and an unshakable belief in a free marketplace of ideas, the cornerstones of the Internet’s success.

The UN is just the latest would-be savior that believes itself the only solution to governance problems that are largely non-existent.  And they are being aided and abetted in this delusion by national governments and others who are determined to turn off the free flow of information however they can, whether through legal or technological means, or both.

The only things broken on the Web have been broken by governments.  As the ITU’s continued fumbling makes ever-clearer, the UN is ill-suited to play any role in the continued development of the digital economy.   And the ITRs are no place to deal with real or imagined Internet issues.   No one but the ITU’s management and their client governments could ever think otherwise.

Fortunately for Internet users, setting up a Twitter feed and loading a Facebook page with lectures on the agency’s patronizing sense of noblesse oblige isn’t going to change that reality one bit.

Internet users already know that.  The ITU and its media consultants will learn it soon enough.

That is, assuming its senior bureaucrats stop telling themselves consoling fairy tales at retreats in the Swiss countryside long enough for reality to set in.