[WSIS CS-Plenary] Regime change on the internet - meeting notes.

[Milton Mueller]

Dear Robert Guerra:
Thanks for transmitting your notes of the July 28 symposium. The Internet Governance Project (IGP) will be posting a complete transcript of US State Department Richard Beaird's comments and announcing it Monday or Tuesday. 

In the meantime, I have extracted his comments about conventions and treaties as they pertain to the Internet. As you may know IGP has been promoting the idea of a framework convention. We were interested to see how strongly Mr. Beaird came out against that idea at the July 28 Symposium. We also think the reasoning was quite... interesting. Attached below, are his comments on that issue; as noted the complete transcript will be made available on our website in a day or two.

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[Partial] Summary of comments of Richard Beaird, US State Department 
July 28 Symposium of the Internet Governance Project"Regime Change on the Internet? Internet Governance after WGIG."

Let me comment on the issue of conventions and treaties. A question was asked about what happens if WSIS fails to agree on anything. We're not uncomfortable at all with where we are. Let me make that clear. We are very comfortable with our statement of where things are because it clarified for us what was important, and it clarified for the world what is essential. 

What's interesting to me is the extent to which the world, in terms of the key players, basically indicate to the USG that they also*I have to be careful with words here ......at least they understand the issues and from this point understand what the playing field is. From that point of view, we can have a discussion that is clearer today than it was two months ago. So we in the US government are very comfortable, the discussions we had prior to publication of the principles makes us feel that we did the right thing to clarify our principles. 

Now with respect to conventions and treaties, our government does not support a convention or a treaty in this area, for a variety of reasons. 

One is that it's difficult for us to indicate that we would engage in a negotiation on a subject which we feel very strongly has a private sector element to it. And that private sector element, we continuously underscore, is essential for the Internet. 

Secondly, when you begin to engage in discussions of the Internet as subject to a treaty one must discuss what form that treaty would take. Well, trade is not a very good model, particularly in telecommunications because the Basic Telecommunications Services agreement is one in which we could not get agreement on one text. It is a series of offers. What was agreed to is a reference paper, a series of general principles about what constitutes a competitive environment. But what was not agreed to is one single text that the world said is THE text that would govern Basic Telecommunications Services under the WTO. So that should caution us. 

The third point is that other models of treaties equally we find inappropriate to this area. Once you start talking about governments agreeing not to do something, it runs up against some national obligations of governments. One should not underestimate that as a powerful influence on government actions. We all come from contexts in which the domestic situation is key and what we forbear as our public interest responsibilities, that's a very difficult decision to make and we would not want to go to Geneva for that purpose. 

But the other point is this: as we know from UN exchanges on these subjects, you get very close to issues of models that may come from the arms control world. And that is a position we do not wish to encourage * we do not believe that information should be "weaponized" in the sense that we do not enter into an international treaty that obligates us to matters of information in the security area. That is not a road we wish to go down. 

Thus for a variety of reasons treaties and conventions do not offer a very constructive direction.



Dr. Milton Mueller
Syracuse University School of Information Studies
http://www.digital-convergence.org
http://www.internetgovernance.org