U.S. Working With Global Coalition to Frustrate ITU Proposals on Internet Regulation, Says Weitzner
The U.S. is working with a coalition of countries and private sector organizations to ensure that proposals at the ITU to extend traditional telecom regulations to the Internet are defeated, said Daniel Weitzner, White House deputy chief technology officer. Some of those proposals are aimed at dealing with cybersecurity issues, while others would have the ITU get more involved in setting technical standards or in “administrative arrangements,” he said at an event at the Hudson Institute Tuesday.
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There are also proposals for the ITU to get involved with the type of work being done very well by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the World Wide Web Consortium and to regulate content that countries consider harmful, Weitzner said. The U.S. is “concerned by these proposals,” Weitzner said, because they raise “substantial free expression” issues. “We have a very firm position [that] we do not want to see the ITU extend its reach.” Any move to extend traditional telecom regulations to the Internet will be “very disruptive” to innovation, he said. The proposals have caused concern at “higher levels” of many governments, industry and advocacy groups, he said.
Weitzner rejected the argument that U.S. wiretapping law does not provide sufficient protections for privacy of Internet data stored in the country. The U.S. has proposed at the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) treaty negotiations that parties to the treaty avoid local storage requirements. Countries arguing against the proposal by raising data privacy concerns are wrong, he said. U.S. civil liberties protections are “absolutely the gold standard for individual civil liberties,” he said. Some of the countries seeking local data storage appear to be working at the insistence of domestic vendors and there could be “trade issues” involved, he said. Privacy and cybersecurity regulations in individual countries could end up being non-tariff barriers in the Internet “environment,” he said. So the U.S. also has proposed that TPP partners put regulatory frameworks in place that recognize companies complying with “globally accepted standards” in areas like privacy and cybersecurity, Weitzner said.
Congress should enact a consumer privacy protection statute based on the principles in the White House Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights released in February (CD Feb 24 p6), Weitzner said. The NTIA is hosting a multi-stakeholder workshop Thursday to develop a voluntary privacy code of conduct for mobile applications, he said. “We expect robust discussions” at the workshop and “we will learn where the center of gravity is on how to move forward on a mobile privacy code of conduct.” Because the White House’s bill of rights is consistent with U.S. “international commitments,” Weitzner said he believes it could be a basis for global privacy practices. It was “highly unlikely” that there would be global treaties on issues like privacy, he said, so countries need to evolve “global standards that can be flexibly applied.”