Battle for control of the Internet:
Are Europeans trying to plug gains by countries such as ours?
Kalinga Seneviratne
A looming battle for the control of the Internet is underway as the
World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT-12) was held
in Dubai from December 3-14, the battle ground between Europe on
one-side and basically the rest of the world on the other.
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WCIT-12 is a United Nations mega-talkfest was held under the auspices
of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the
inter-governmental UN agency entrusted with telecommunication issues.
In a recently released paper titled ‘A Giant Step Backward or the Way
Forward An Analysis of some Proposals before WCIT’, internationally
renowned Sri Lankan telecommunication expert and the CEO of LIRNSasia,
Dr Rohan Samarajiva, warns that this proposal “seek to reverse twenty
years of liberalized, pro-market policies in international telecom
regulation”, policies that have delivered “affordable connectivity to
some of the world’s most remote peoples and places”.
ETNO, which is a Brussels based lobby group representing large
telecommunication companies in 35 European countries, wants the ITU to
designate Internet content providers as “call originators” and subject
them to a “sending party network pays” rule that would allow
telecommunications operators to charge them rates they believe are
commensurate with the bandwidth their content consumes.
“Such a change would have enormous implications for the expansion of
the digital economy in the developing world” argues Dr Samarajiva.
“Access to content would become more expensive (and) the Internet would
be ‘balkanized’ by cutting off some countries from large swaths of
content”.
“Loss of this access to content and applications, given the role
played by the Internet in supporting these countries’ transitions from
low-income to middle-income economies, could cost them billions of
dollars in lost growth” he argues.
Wider broadband access
Though the stated purpose by ETNO is to raise enough revenue to
provide wider broadband access to developing countries, the battles
lines are something different. European telecom giants have been
fighting the likes of Google and Facebook to get a slice of the enormous
revenue they make by providing contents to worldwide users that use
European telecom networks. However, the European telecom companies and
the American contents producers have been making billions of dollars in
revenue due to rapid expansion of the Internet around the world.
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According to ETNO’s 2011 annual report, telecom sector in Europe has
been growing slowly in 2010 with the bulk of revenue coming from mobile
services. Yet, the overall telecom revenue in Europe for date and
Internet services has increased from EUR 61.5 billion in 2009 to EUR
62.9 billion (USD 79.9 billion) in 2010. The broadband and ultra-fast
broadband segments are the major growth drivers in Europe’s telecom
services market, fuelled by a growing subscriber base.
In comparison the United States based Internet content provider
giants Google’s 2011 revenue was USD 37.9 billion with about USD 2
billion of it believed to be revenue streams generated by the
user-generated video site YouTube’s 161 million users last year, while
Facebook is believed to have made about USD 4 billion last year.
Internet service providers
Since early 2010 European telecommunication giants and Google have
been battling an increasingly heated commercial war, where the telecom
companies are trying to get Google to pay for the bandwidth YouTube and
its other websites are using.
This war is now invading the UN system with the forthcoming ITU
conference the battleground. “Many dangerous ideas are floating around
the ITU” argues Khaled Koubaa, policy manager for Google in North
Africa. “The proposal put forth by ETNO would harm internet users in
less developed countries”.
Writing in Eygpt’s English language Daily News, Koubaa pointed out
that what ETNO is trying to do is to change the way Internet traffic
flows around the world though “unregulated commercial agreements” with
an interconnection agreement that will require the user to pay.
“This development would be detrimental, in particularly to the
developing world” he noted. “Many Internet service providers would
attempt to limit connections with destinations deemed not worth the cost
of termination.”
“Since many applications and services, especially video, consume
large amounts of bandwidth, these interconnection fees can quickly
become extraordinarily high. YouTube, its parent company Google,
Facebook, Amazon and iTunes, on down to non-profits like Khan Academy,
would have to pay national network operators significantly more for the
bandwidth their services use” warns Dr Samarajiva. He gives as example
to illustrate its impact on the developing world’s poor.
While working on her algebra homework at the kitchen table of her
small home in Accra, Ghana, a schoolgirl finds herself challenged by a
difficult quadratic equation.
The girl is lucky enough to be part of a family that was able to
purchase an Internet-enabled smartphone just a few months before. Using
the phone’s Web browser, the girl navigates to Khan Academy
(www.khanacademy.org), a non-profit site that offers free access to some
3,300 video lessons on topics ranging from computer science to history
to maths. Under the “Math” menu, the girl selects “algebra.” Under the
submenu, “Quadratic Functions,” she finds 38 videos that can provide
review and assistance. After selecting and playing “Applying the
Quadratic Formula,” which is delivered from a YouTube server in the
U.S., her classroom lessons are reinforced and she is able to solve the
problem.
“This girl’s story is a classic example of how international Internet
connectivity improves the quality of life for anyone, anywhere in the
world, who has access” points out Dr Samarajiva.
But, ETNO’s chairman Gambardella argues otherwise. In a recent
interview with CNET, he assured: “We don’t want to touch the services
that are offered today”.
He argues that the current situation is putting at risk European
telecom companies’ ability to invest in building capacities and “we need
to rethink together to establish a new balance”. He described what they
are proposing is to improve the quality of service to a certain kind of
speed, especially when films or videos are streamed.
“We make an agreement and we allow them to offer this service. From
the point of view of the service provider, he can have an additional
revenue that he cannot have today because of the limitation of the
network. Sometimes quality is not guaranteed” he explained, adding, “the
customer has something that is today not yet offered. And we can add
revenue”. He did not explain nor expressed any concerns about how a
non-profit organisation like Khan Academy (or the school girl in Ghana)
could benefit from his proposal.
The ETNO’s proposal which if signed by most of the 193 governments
who are members of the ITU will require sending parties to pay for
contents they post and it will effectively tax the high-volume Internet
content providers, most of whom are non-European companies, mainly
American. The Europeans are however dressing this up as a revenue raiser
to help developing countries to build broadband infrastructure.
The Americans are expected to fight this move to the bitter end in
Dubai and this is perhaps the only issue where the Democrats and the
Republicans agree on a common platform after the bitter election battle.
In June the US House of Representatives unanimously passed a resolution
reiterating its “unequivocal policy” to promote global Internet free
from government control.
“We’re facing off against those who want the world’s approval” argued
Senator John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
“to balkanize the Internet into countries where governments can censure
speech or impose new taxes on the transmission of information across
national boundaries”.
Initially, some developing and emerging countries such as Russia,
China, Brazil, India, Iran and a host of others worried about the
Internet’s role in destabilizing their political systems were known to
be sympathetic to the ETNO proposal seeing it as a way to regulate the
flow of damaging contents on the Internet by controlling the flow at the
input stage.
But, lately many of them are believed to be suspicious of the
European’s self-serving claim that the new settlements regimes can offer
additional sources of revenue to fund their (emerging countries’)
infrastructure development.
Changing world order
What perhaps is appealing to the emerging countries in the ETNO move
is the chance to dismantle the United States’ control of the Internet
technology. The ITU’s secretary-general Hamadoun Toure is a Mali born
African who was educated in the former Soviet Union and now lives in
Geneva. His recent comment to Vanity Fair magazine has alarmed the
Americans and their free-speech supporters.
“When an invention becomes used by billions across the world, it no
longer remains the sole property of one nation, however powerful that
nation might be. There should be a mechanism where many countries have
an opportunity to have a say. I think that’s democratic” Toure told the
Vanity Fair.
A large number of ITU member countries have openly called for a “new
global body” to oversee online policy and the Dubai ITU meeting is
expected to come up with such a regime – at least in a form of a
statement. But there are many issues to be hammered out such as
sovereignty issues with respect to cross-border content flow, piracy and
intellectual property rights (free flow vs rights holders’ payments),
online anonymity (that allows creativity and dissent as well as
disruptive and criminal behavior) and national security and personal
surveillance issues.
The battle at ITU is building up like the acrimonious New World
Information and Communication Order (NWICO) debates of the 1970s at
another UN agency UNESCO, where the West was united in their opposition
to developing countries’ and communist bloc’s moves to regulate the
international flow of news and information. This time both camps are
split, perhaps a reflection of the changing world order.
When it comes to economic issues with the center of gravity of the
world economic moving towards the East, as well as Africa, the old
North-South battlegrounds of the past becomes a bit murky.
“The enormous momentum that the developing countries have achieved in
telecommunications is endangered by the ill thought out proposals before
the WCIT,” warns Dr Samarajiva. “If the revised ITRs (International
Telecommunication Regulations) artificially raise the cost of network
interconnection, content delivery, or quality of service, all these
costs will be passed along to those least able to afford them, or will
result in their exclusion from the Internet economy”.
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