U.S., Canada Seek Early Look at ITRs’ Definitions and Scope at WCIT
The World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) should consider a set of “threshold” issues at the start of its upcoming conference -- any changes to the preamble and Article 1 of the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs), including the definitions used in the ITRs and the agencies the treaty-level document will apply to -- before delegates tackle any other proposed revisions, the U.S. and Canada said in a proposal filed Tuesday with the ITU. “Streamlined and rapid” consideration of changes to the Preamble and Article 1 “will ensure there is consensus from the beginning of the conference on how to proceed with revisions to the ITRs,” the two nations said in the proposal. Addressing those issues at the beginning of the conference would also allow delegates to consider the impact of other ITU meetings, including the outcomes of the World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly, the proposal said.
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The U.S. has supported minimal changes to the Preamble and Article 1 of the ITRs throughout the lead-up to WCIT, which begins Monday in Dubai. In its initial set of proposals, filed Aug. 3, the U.S. called for the definitions of “telecommunications” and “international telecommunications service” to remain the same as in the original 1988 treaty, while all other definitions in the ITRs should align with the definitions listed in the ITU Constitution and Convention. In the same set of proposals, the U.S. called for the ITRs to continue to only apply to recognized operating agencies, rather than expanding the treaty’s scope to include more operating agencies. An expansion to operating agencies would allow the ITRs to apply to agencies that do not provide “authorized or licensed” international telecommunications services (CD Aug 6 p2).
WCIT delegates would have needed to deal with the scope of the ITRs at some point during the conference, Tony Rutkowski, a senior research fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, told us Wednesday. The U.S.-Canada proposal would address those issues sooner, which “helps focus the dialogue and makes the ‘red line’ clear,” he said.
The scope of the ITRs is the fundamental issue, since the current document only applies to legacy telecoms and deals with legacy infrastructure and services like international telephony, fax, telegrams and international circuits, Rutkowski said. “Getting everyone on the same page here to that compartmentalization seems critical, as the West and its allies clearly are not willing to go beyond this scoping,” he said. “It is inconceivable that they will sign anything that exceeds those boundaries.” When WCIT delegates met in 1988 to draft the ITRs, they tried to constrain them to only the uses based on standards set by ITU-T, the U.N. agency’s technical standards branch, said Rutkowski, who worked in the ITU Secretariat during the 1988 conference. “The reality was that the relevant ITU-T standards were largely nonsense specifications that were unusable, so everyone just ignored the ITRs,” he said. “In theory, the same scenario could arise at this WCIT."
Maintaining the current scope of the ITRs “would by definition exclude the Internet,” thereby eliminating controversial proposals the U.S. sees as threats to the current multistakeholder Internet governance model, Rutkowski said. The U.S. has repeatedly opposed proposed revisions to the ITRs that attempt to address issues related to cybersecurity and access fees. For example, the U.S. recently condemned a set of Russian proposals that would affect Internet governance, including altering the current structure of Internet addressing (CD Nov 21 p7).