For those reading through the recently released DT/55, which contains all the text of the ITRs, its appendices and associated WCIT-12 resolutions, I’ve highlighted the changes made to the Internet-related resolution text in the screenshot below. As you will see, the changes made to the text since the draft was discussed as part of DT/51 rev. 1 in the final plenary of 12 December are very minor:
Just over a thousand delegates from Member States are entering the final negotiation phase of WCIT-12, and with the reappearance of the controversial proposal document by Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, China, United Arab Emirates, Russian Federation, Iraq, Sudan, things could get quite ugly.
So let’s breathe, step back a minute, and look at something good that has come out of WCIT: ITU’s positive response to calls from civil society and others to open up its deliberations. Let’s see how well this new era of multi-stakeholder ITU is progressing.
One of the 25% of WCIT-12 attendees who is female. Credit: ITU
WCIT preparations were undertaken by a special Council Working Group to Prepare for the 2012 WCIT (CWG-WCIT12), which held meetings beginning in early 2010 and ending in June this year. Like all ITU CWGs, its documents are restricted to Member States only. Not even Sector Members can view CWG documents.
At the 2011 and 2012 ITU Council meetings, Member States supporting the open Internet model had tried to encourage the Council to open access to the documents of another CWG of interest, the Council Working Group on international Internet-related public policy issues (CWG-Internet), and its Dedicated Group predecessor. Those attempts failed. Which is a little odd, you might think, given the last Council meeting had agreed to solicit public comments on issues the CWG-Internet deemed could benefit from expert input from non-government sectors.
It seems that CWG documents are, as a rule, Not for Public Consumption.
While CWG-WCIT12 was meeting behind closed doors, non-government stakeholders—in particular civil society—having heard that some of the WCIT proposals mentioned Internet-related issues, began a campaign to have the WCIT proposals made public. On 17 May 2012, over 40 civil society organizations and individuals sent ITU Secretary-General Touré a letter requesting that the CWG-WCIT12 documents be made open, as well as requesting that WCIT and its preparatory process be opened to “meaning participation from civil society”. During the 15th Session of the Commission on Science and Technology for Development (CSTD) the following week, a civil society representative, Marília Maciel, repeated the request while speaking as a panelist. In response, Touré lost his temper a little, and, reinterpreting Maciel’s words, retorted that since civil society kept asking for Internet governance to be discussed as part of the ITRs at WCIT-12, he’d pass the request on to ITU members. Such a response didn’t endear him to the non-government representatives in the room. However, since then, things have improved markedly:
These were all very positive steps from ITU to make its WCIT activities more transparent to non-government stakeholders. This is an organization that is not, by its nature, very open. As an intergovernmental organization, it is used to closed-door negotiations. The fact that it has begun to changed course and let non-government folk see some of its inner workings is very impressive and should be applauded.
The change is also a testament to the power of campaigns conducted by non-government stakeholders to raise awareness of the importance of ITR negotiations and the possible ramifications for Internet and telecommunications users.
What is less impressive is the poor response by non-government stakeholders to the open consultation period. The ITU only received 29 responses during the open consultation phase. Partially, this could be due to ITU not publicizing the open consultation as widely as they could have. However, given the public version of the ITR proposals was downloaded 4831 times, it also looks like a lot of those interested in reading the ITRs weren’t interested in actively participating in commenting on those ITRs.
If this were a report card, I’d also have to mark some players down for inciting hysterical news articles, opinions and blogs on the evilness of the ITU. Some stakeholders were using trial by media to gain public support for their positions. This was not a great way to encourage open and productive interactions between newly engaged non-government stakeholders and existing government participants in the WCIT world.
Spearheaded by Touré, the ITU Secretariat responded to the various negative press reports with a PR campaign denying that ITU wanted to “control the Internet” and pointing out how open and multi-stakeholder WCIT would be.
Another two of the 25% of WCIT-12 attendees who are female. Credit: ITU
According to statements Touré has made, the ITU and its current WCIT-12 discussions are multi-stakeholder because it’s possible for non-government stakeholders to participate by attending under the umbrella of their government’s delegation.
Looking at the WCIT attendee list, a number of governments have committed to multi-stakeholder delegations. One of the biggest delegations, from the USA, consists of roughly 50% government representatives and 50% non-government representatives. Yes, this is impressive. However, how many of those non-government representatives are truly “participating”? How many of non-government representatives on government delegations are we hearing speak from the floor in Dubai? There is Veni Markovski under the Bulgarian flag and Philip Rushton under the UK flag. I’m not aware of many others allowed to speak, though.
An additional issue is saying that WCIT is multi-stakeholder because Member States can add non-government representatives to their delegations ignores the obvious problem that many countries do not have any interest in including the divergent views of non-government stakeholders.
As seen at the recent 2012 IGF in Baku, the Azerbaijan government worked hard to keep the oppositional views of the country’s civil society out of sight. Many IGF participants watched in stunned silence during the closing plenary as a “civil society” representative from Azerbaijan spoke nothing but positive words about life in the country, despite the fact that most people in the room were aware of Azerbaijan’s less-than-stellar human rights record. We can see, therefore, that some countries are never going to have multi-stakeholder delegations at events like WCIT-12.
So what is the solution? The ITU Secretariat is obviously working hard to improve public opinions about ITU and its work. However, the Secretariat’s hands are tied in many ways. While it can tinker at the edges and provide civil society briefings and public webcasts of main sessions, for substantive changes, it relies on decisions by Member States. As we have seen from WCIT-12 webcasts, not all ITU Member States are open to being open. All is not lost, however.
This past week or so of WCIT-12 has not only been webcast and transcribed. It has also been tweeted and blogged and talked about by people and organizations who in the past would never have considered an ITU event worth following. As we’ve learned from the Arab Spring, once the door is opened a crack, it’s very hard to close the door again. People are watching WCIT-12 and they are watching how their governments are behaving at WCIT-12. As a result, we may find that future ITU meetings, particularly those that concern Internet-related matters, are conducted more openly.
I doubt, though, that such meetings will lose the drama of States strongly divided on issues related to the Internet. If they did, I don’t they’d be half as much fun to follow!
I’ve been working on some substantial posts about WCIT-12, but have been sidetracked by statistics. They’re shorter, display nicely in graphs, and don’t require as many words to be written about them. So until I finish my other articles, enjoy these numbers:
As of 2 pm Dubai time:
| Document type | Number of documents |
| Administrative (ADM) | 25 + 12 Revisions |
| Contribution (C) | 51 + 14 Revisions + 9 Addendum + 2 Corrigendum |
| Limited Distribution (DL) | 22 + 4 Revisions |
| Temporary Documents (TD/DT) | 48 + 18 Revisions + 1 Corrigendum |
| Informational (INF) | 3 |
| Total | 149 + 48 Revisions + 9 Addedum + 3 Corrigendum |
Notes on the above:
What can we learn from the large numbers of documents in each category above? When combined with the punishing schedule of Ad Hoc Group, Working Group, Delegation, Committee and Plenary sessions, it’s easy to see why delegates are getting confused about what document is under discussion at any given point in time.
Using the ITU document ADM4, which in its current incarnation lists all WCIT-12 delegates who had arrived onsite as of 6 December, we have:
| Title | Number of Member State delegates |
| Mr | 827 |
| Mrs | 49 |
| Ms | 182 |
| Dr (gender unspecified) | 39 |
| Total | 1097 |
Let’s look at that in pie chart form, shall we?
Member State delegates at WCIT-12 are disproportionately male.
Given three-quarters of the government delegations are male, I now understand why “Chairman” and “Vice-chairman” are the standard currency at the meeting. I do wonder why 49 of the women felt it necessary to inform the world that they are married given there is no way to differentiate between the married and unmarried men at WCIT-12. I prefer how the Internet Governance Forum registration list works: you’re either a “Mr” or a “Ms”.
Despite the opening ceremony declaration of peace and harmony, the first plenary session of the World Conference on International Telecommunications gave us a hint of what is to come over the next two weeks:
In an environment where nations all vie to have their ideas adopted as the international norm, getting your proposals discussed before anyone else’s can influence the discussion to your benefit. Equally, the earlier you can knock out your opposition’s ideas, the more chance you have of getting your proposal through. Alternatively, if you are patient, you could sit back, wait for all the other competitors to knock each other out of the running, and come in at the end with your proposal intact. Formal protocol and procedures help prevent a meeting descending into a Lord of the Flies scenario by introducing apparently neutral ways to proceed with discussion. How are we seeing this play out at WCIT-12?
Photo credit: ITU
There were repeated references to the fact that most of the world’s population still doesn’t have a connection to the Internet. To illustrate the exorbitant costs of connecting to the Internet, the jet-setting ITU Secretary-General, Hamadoun Touré, complained that he had to pay 76 USD for three days’ hotel Internet connection while in New York recently. The Twitter crowd wasn’t sympathetic, by the way, with @stickywcit suggesting Touré pick a hotel with free wifi in future.
The opening ceremony may have been full of positive words about ICANN, but the subtle inference in the first plenary was that the Internet community was somehow failing in getting the Internet out to the world’s majority who are located in developing countries. ITU has long positioned itself as the champion of developing country telecommunication needs, so you don’t need to be a mind-reader to see where this may go over the next fortnight.
Touré has made it clear that WCIT-12 is not about taking over the Internet, nor about Internet governance. However, what the WCIT-12 is about—connecting the unconnected via broadband, mobile, standards for modems, etc—does stray a little into Internet administrative territory. Newly connected Internet users need IP addresses, for example. And modems need software that can handle IPv6. Last week, Member States at WTSA-12 agreed to continue study into IPv6 in Study Group 2 or 3. At WCIT-12, it may be difficult for ITU Member States to agree on what is relevant territory for ITU to handle under the banner of “connecting the unconnected” without, perhaps, straying into areas already handled by parts of the Internet governance ecosystem, but that are seen as failing the disconnected two-thirds of the world.
The first informal discussion group was formed, and met at 8 am on Day 2 of WCIT-12 to discuss whether references to “Recognized Operating Agency” in the ITRs should be changed to the far broader term, “Operating Agency”. Soon, the 8 am informal discussion group slots will be filled and earlier slots will be needed, as well as slots after the official WCIT-12 days end at 5:30 pm. Weekend sessions will be invoked, too. Participants will become exhausted and grumpy. You may not think you should care how little sleep high-level government representatives are getting, but tired officials are less likely to pick up problems in newly proposed text for the ITRs. Tired and cranky officials are also less inclined to feel generous towards their ideological opponents during the more intense debates at the meeting.
Touré made a number of comments on the first day of WCIT-12 about his recent travels around the world. I wondered whether these were perhaps a little ill-judged. A lot of developing Member States can’t attend ITU meetings without special funding from ITU. Even then, some of the smallest and least developing states don’t have the human resources to devote to regular ITU participation. Knowing that the ITU Secretary-General is travelling the world and able to pay 76 USD for three days’ Internet access in New York might, to such states, seem as offensive as the large bonuses bank executives received in the wake of government bailouts of banks in the US and UK. On the other hand, developing countries may appreciate knowing that the Secretary-General is travelling to them, rather than expecting them to travel to ITU’s home in Geneva.
I am amazed at the lack of gender neutral language being used in the plenary. “Chairman” and “Vice-chairman” were the norm, even when referring to female occupants of those positions. ITU has been very active in promoting the role of women in ICTs (for example, Girls in ICT Day), so the use of phallocentric terminology at WCIT-12 was a bit confusing. Just because most of the positions are filled by men doesn’t mean that gender-neutral terms are unnecessary. Language helps define norms, and if ITU continues to use “Chairman” and “Vice-chairmen”, even for women in chairing positions, it fails to challenge the outdated norm that men are the natural choice for leadership roles in ICT.