The U.S., Canada, and European allies are squaring off against Russia and China at a U.N. Internet summit. At stake: the future of how the Internet will be run.
The inner workings of United Nations telecommunications agencies aren't usually headline news. But then again, most U.N. confabs don't grapple with topics as slippery as Internet censorship, taxation, and privacy.
A U.N. agency called the International Telecommunication Union has kicked off what has become a highly controversial summit this week in Dubai, capping over a year of closed-door negotiations over an international communications treaty that could have a direct impact on the Internet. The summit continues through the end of next week.
It's true, of course, that U.N. meetings often yield more rhetoric than substance. During a summit in Tunisia in 2005, for instance, Iran and African governments proclaimed that the Internet permits too much free speech, with Cuba's delegate announcing that Fidel Castro believed the time had come to create a new organization "which administers this network of networks."
The difference here is that this meeting actually matters: the ITU event is aimed at rewriting a multilateral treaty that governs international communications traffic. It was last updated back in 1988, when home computers used dial-up modems, the Internet was primarily a university network, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was a mere 4 years old.
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