Censorship vs economics in battle for internet control

Former Australian Communications Authority deputy chairman, Dr Bob Horton – also one of the architects of the 1988 treaty – outlined a much less conspiratorial set of objectives at the ITU's Asia Pacific regulator's roundtable in March.

He advocated "light regulation" including:

• A human right to communication;
• Secure use of communication and protection of critical national resources;
• Charging and accounting;
• Interoperability and interconnection;
• Quality of service;
• Misuse and hijacking of international numbers; and
• Enforcement.

Despite consternation over ITU's role in internet governance, he said there were currently "no contributions on the broad issue".

Instead, leaked documents from 2011 and 2012 appear to reflect the hopes of telcos operating the major global and local networks.

Mueller said the new proposed regulations mostly reflected developing nations' dissatisfaction with the "internet model" of paying for your own connectivity.

"The only people who don't [support user-pays connectivity] are remote countries without a competitive market for international bandwidth," he explained, noting that Australia had advocated a model of shared payments and government-regulated interconnection fees in 1999.

But neither Mueller nor iiNet's Lindsay welcomed the ITU's ambition to expand its regulatory influence to the internet.

"The ITU was the old government-owned telco 'club'," Lindsay said.

"All that's left is the government and a bunch of third-world monopoly telcos whose voice termination fees are a large source of hard currency income for the government."

The Federal Government has voiced support for re-negotiating the treaty this December, but has yet to expand on its preference over specific provisions in the regulations.