U.S. to Push Back Against Internet Regulation at U.N.
The U.S. “very much wants to push back” against efforts by some nations and some organizations such as the ITU to bring the Internet under “top-down government control through treaty organizations and such,” said NTIA Administrator Lawrence Strickling. “We find that quite threatening to the success of the Internet,” he said in an interview for C-SPAN’s Communicators (See related story). This is an issue that has been “emerging for some period of time but is coming to a head here over the next year or two due to some activities of other nations as well as some international conferences,” such as those by the ITU, he said. Strickling was asked about his talks with House Commerce Manufacturing Subcommittee Chairman Mary Bono Mack, R-Calif., about the “U.N. and control of the Internet."
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
If your job depends on informed compliance, you need International Trade Today. Delivered every business day and available any time online, only International Trade Today helps you stay current on the increasingly complex international trade regulatory environment.
Referring to the “multistakeholder process” that the NTIA is engaging in to develop a privacy code of conduct that seeks to avoid top-down regulation, Strickling said “if you expand the idea to the international community, it is the same situation.” The U.S. has relied on multistakeholder organizations such as the World Wide Web Consortium and Internet Engineering Forum that “have allowed the Internet to develop the way it has developed and we want to preserve that.” So the U.S. is “quite concerned … when we see individual nations suggesting that maybe this ought to be handed over to a group of governments to run,” he said. “All of a sudden we lose the flexibility, the innovation, the creativity that has so characterized the development of the Internet."
The NTIA intends to start “as quickly as we can” a process of convening stakeholders to work on privacy codes of conduct because “we can move forward with these codes before any legislation is enacted by Congress,” Strickling said. There’s a “lot of interest” from industry and consumer groups to participate in the development of the codes, he said. Strickling said in a Wednesday speech he favored a “U.N. model” for deciding what constitutes consensus on such codes (CD April 12 p3).
Once a company adopts the codes, the FTC can take enforcement action if it doesn’t follow the codes, Strickling said. “One of the reasons we like basic principles enshrined in legislation … is for those companies that choose not to participate in that process,” Strickling said. “We want to ensure a basic level of protection for our citizens that would be done through enactment of the bill of rights into legislation which would then be directly enforced by the Federal Trade Commission.”