Next month the World Telecommunication/ICT Policy Forum will be held in Geneva, Switzerland. The meeting is billed as “a high-level international event to exchange views on the key policy issues arising from today's fast changing information and communication technology (ICT) environment.” The day before this meeting will feature a “Strategic Dialogue Session” which “builds on the positive vision of the importance of broadband as a basic platform for progress and explores issues of the benefits of broadband, the rationale for regulation and our network future.”
Cutting through the jargon and government speak, these meetings are the next push to “harmonize” national laws that apply to the Internet—to have intergovernmental organizations like the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a small United Nation’s agency, take control of Internet governance. The push began last December when some ITU members decided, over U.S. objections and insistence that it would not sign such an agreement, to broaden the scope of the agency’s rules to include the content and operations of the Internet.
The new meetings prove that FCC Commissioner Rob McDowell’s guidance and caution were correct: "Internet freedom’s allies everywhere should more than redouble their efforts to erase the damage that was wrought today. Freedom and prosperity are at stake. Let’s never be slow to respond again. Freedom’s foes are patient and persistent incrementalists. They will never give up. Nor should we.”
Congress, led in the House by Rep. Greg Walden, continues to pay attention to such developments, and even last week advanced legislation to oppose international efforts to regulate official U.S. Internet policy.
This opposition is helpful but largely ineffective because the U.S. itself, led by some in Congress and at the FCC, has embraced government control of Internet traffic, via initiatives like “net neutrality.”
Another example is the recent push to impose the so-called “Marketplace Fairness Act” on the U.S. A vote in favor of this trick is a vote for ending the long-held “physical nexus” standard for government authority by substituting expansive government power to enforce state tax laws on those beyond the state’s borders and with no connection to the state.
This sort of extra-territorial reach is exactly the dark heart of global government efforts to seize control of the Internet. Ultimately, U.S. citizens will pay the price for such wrong-headed decisions by myopic legislators, all but inviting international efforts in the same vein.
Such anti-freedom efforts should be seen as a threat, whether foreign or domestic.
April 19, 2013