Jimm Phillips

The results of the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) show the West must find ways to enable developing-world participation in the current multistakeholder Internet governance model, said Philip Verveer, U.S. coordinator for international communications and information policy and a member of the U.S. WCIT delegation, at an Internet Governance Forum event Friday.

The revised International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs) that emerged last week from the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) may have contained “poison pills” on the Internet and other controversial issues, but that does not mean the U.S. should stop advocating for its vision on such issues, said Terry Kramer, head of the U.S. WCIT delegation, Wednesday during an Internet Society event. “There’s a bigger discussion here about the benefits of the Internet that will carry the day I believe fundamentally,” he said in his first public comments since WCIT concluded Friday. “It is a long game that has to be played. We need to see the commercial benefits, the human benefits, et cetera."

Sprint Nextel’s successful bid to buy full ownership of Clearwire is unlikely to face a tough time winning regulatory approval, industry legal experts told us. Sprint, which already owned 51 percent of Clearwire, said Monday that Clearwire’s other shareholders had unanimously agreed to sell Sprint their 49 percent stake for $2.2 billion. That deal represented an improvement from the $2.1 billion Sprint offered last week (CD Dec 14 p15).

Most of the eligible delegations at the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) signed on to the revised International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs) Friday in Dubai during a ceremony to close out the conference, but a significant number of nations outright refused to endorse the controversial treaty or were still consulting with their national governments. Of the 144 nations with signing rights in the ITU, 89 signed onto the ITRs Friday. An additional 55 “may sign later,” the ITU said, but that figure includes the U.S., Australia, Canada, the U.K. and others that have outright committed to not sign the document (http://xrl.us/bn6iov). The figure also includes the nations consulting with their governments, including the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy and Poland. The EU condemned the attachment of a non-binding Internet governance resolution to the ITRs (see separate item in this issue). That resolution was one of several provisions included in the revised ITRs that prompted the U.S. decision not to sign (CD Dec 14 p1).

The U.S. will not sign on to the revised International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs) adopted at Thursday’s session of the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), said U.S. delegation head Terry Kramer Thursday. Delegations from Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark and the United Kingdom also immediately said their nations would not sign the treaty-level document. Delegations from Costa Rica, Kenya, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Qatar, Sweden and Poland also expressed concerns about the revised ITRs, but wanted to consult with their national governments before deciding whether to sign. Egypt’s delegation also said it was concerned about the revised ITRs, but its position on signing the document was not immediately clear from its statement following the document’s adoption. Nations that already support the amended ITRs are expected to sign the treaty Friday in Dubai. The amended treaty will take effect Jan. 1, 2015.

It’s time for government agencies to “think very seriously” about patent assertion entities’ (PAEs) activities and how they impact society, FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said Monday during a joint FTC/Department of Justice workshop. The agencies held the workshop as part of an ongoing effort to determine the effect of PAEs and determine whether the government needs to employ new methods to minimize what they see as harm caused by PAEs. High-quality intellectual property rights are crucial to U.S. innovation, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO) chief economist said. PAE-generated lawsuits are eating up a growing chunk of some technology companies’ legal budgets, several high-tech executives said, as a PAE executive said the model helps some patent developers get paid.

A United Arab Emirates-led proposal for a “new” version of the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs) threw a further wrench into talks Friday at the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai, even as debate over existing proposals had led to little progress. The UAE said during a plenary meeting that its proposal was borne out of its own frustrations over the lack of progress at the conference toward revising the existing ITRs, which have not been revised since 1988. WCIT began Dec. 3 and runs through this Friday. Discussions during the conference have thus far remained stuck on whether to change the scope of the treaty-level document from applying only to “recognized” operating agencies to applying to all operating agencies. The U.S. opposes any change in scope because it would make the ITRs apply to Internet providers, which would in turn allow the ITRs to stray into Internet governance issues (CD Dec 7 p18).

T-Mobile USA will begin offering Apple products on its network in 2013, Deutsche Telekom CEO René Obermann said Thursday at a webcast conference in Germany. T-Mobile CEO John Legere implied in a separate presentation during the conference that the products T-Mobile offers will include the iPhone, but did not say what other devices it might make available. “When we do announce what we're going to deploy, it will clearly be better and more effective” than recent media reports have suggested, he said. A T-Mobile spokesman said additional information on T-Mobile’s Apple offerings would be available later. An Apple spokesman confirmed that T-Mobile would begin carrying the company’s products next year, but declined to discuss specific models.

AT&T is raising its expectations for full-year smartphone sales after what AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph de la Vega said has been a record-setting first two months of Q4. The carrier sold 6.4 million smartphones during October and November, already making Q4 AT&T’s second best quarter for smartphone sales; quarterly figures typically improve even more during December, de la Vega said Wednesday during an investor conference. The carrier now forecasts it will sell 26 million smartphones for the year, 1 million more than previously expected, de la Vega said. “Excitement is at an all-time high,” he said. “I feel very good about momentum going into December.” The growth in smartphone sales came as a result of an improved supply of Apple’s iPhones, as well as Android-powered models like the LG Optimus G and HTC One X, de la Vega said. The carrier is also “really excited” about the prospects for Windows Phone models like the HTC 8X and the Nokia Lumia 920, he said.

The U.S. should formally seek to “dismantle” the ITU, said former U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer Andrew McLaughlin Thursday. “Sometimes you need some destruction; you need to burn the forest in order to grow the new pine trees,” he said during a Future Tense forum on Internet governance. Future Tense is a program of the New America Foundation. “In the case of the ITU, I think it’s very much the case that its day is gone. The U.S. should formally commit itself to hastening” its demise. The ITU was set up to coordinate regulation of international telecommunications, but it has become outdated in the Internet age, McLaughlin said. “For an Internet way of doing policy coordination, you have to accept that there will be lots of conversations happening in lots of different places, and no one body is the place where this is all going to happen efficiently."