Byron Holland, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) speculated what the results of WCIT-12 mean for the Internet in the article, “Observations on WCIT-12.” Mr. Holland says the results of WCIT-12 will lead to a two-tiered Internet.
One tier consisting of the countries that supported the new ITRs and ratified the resulting agreement. He believes that these governments will use the United Nations agreement to limit and watch, if not censor, Internet traffic transiting across its borders.
The CIRA CEO states that governments that did not support the new ITR’s and the resulting treaty will continue to have access to the free and open Internet and all of its benefits. The governments that rejected the WCIT power grab are primarily in the developed world. The rest of the world, primarily those that live in the developing world, will have access to some lesser version of the Internet.
There is a clear correlation between a state’s ranking in the Democracy Index and how their place on the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITR) at the International Telecommunication Union‘s (ITU) World Conference on Information Technology (WCIT-12) according to the article. The following chart compares those countries that supported the ITRs with those that did not or deferred their vote until after consulting with their home country.
The author concludes that some of the larger content producers are simply just not going to bother offering content or services to much of the world. This could very well mean that a content producer will be subject to the ITRs if it is available in those countries. Mr. Holland explains that Internet traffic doesn’t travel point-to-point. The traffic is broken into many packets of information which individually take the most efficient route possible. What if that route transits through a country that has signed on to the new ITRs?
The CIRA CEO urges everyone to think about how the Internet works against the backdrop of the above info-graphic. It is primarily countries in the developing world that supported the new ITRs. This means that it will be the developing world that will not have access to the same information, free and open democracies, like Canada, do.
The article concludes that the result of Dubai is that the free and open Internet – the Internet that has allowed free speech, democracy, and economic development to flourish – will only be available to the citizens of the developed world. The citizens of the developing world – the people who could most benefit from the free and open Internet, from the free flow of information, and from access to global markets for their products and services – will be deprived of these benefits.
Related articles
- Behind closed doors at the UN’s attempted “takeover of the Internet” (arstechnica.com)