The head of the US delegation said that the United States will fight in any major revision to 24-year-old global telecommunications regulations at an International conference insisting the Internet must remain free and open.
Terry Kramer, a special envoy named for World Conference on International Telecommunications in Dubai said that they need to avoid suffocating, the internet space through well meaning but overly-proscriptive proposals that would seek to control content or seek to mandate routing and payment practices. He said in the report that Washington was eager to cooperate with other nations to reach a consensus on alterations to global regulations set up by the UN’s International Telecommunication Union in 1998, yet stressed that only minimal changes would be acceptable.
Kramer reiterated Washington’s opposition to proposals from a number of countries to expand the ITU’s authority to regulate the Internet that his country not want cyber security to fall under the UN agency’s mandate. The US ambasaddor insisted that the ITU regulations were not an appropriate or useful venue to address cyber security while acknowledging a sharp hike in hacking and cyber crimes with around 67,000 so-called malware attacks.
He explained that there are a lot of cyber threats, however the nature of cyber issues requires agility, it requires a technical expertise and it requires a distributed effort, so they are very sensitive about any one organization taking on the sole of solving cyber threats. He also stated that Washington strongly disagrred with a proposal from the European Telecommunications Network Operators calling for network operators to be able to charge for sending content on to Internet users.
He said that the US strongly opposed proposals from some non-democratic nations for the tracking and monitoring of data routing which he cautioned makes it very easy for nations to monitor traffic, including content and customer information. The ITU regulations in place for nearly a quarter of a decade have been a huge success. If few or no changes were made to them during the December meeting , he think it would not be terrible outcome at all.
REFERENCES:
http://gadgets.ndtv.com/telecom/news/us-will-oppose-major-revisions-of-global-telecom-rules-277259
