Putin shopped his proposal to his friends in China, who have worked ever since to line up support for crippling the Internet. The deed is to be done at the World Conference on International Telecommunications to be held in Dubai in December 2012. Russia, China, Iran, and others of the world’s worst countries are planning to use the forum to push through a new treaty expanding the powers of the ITU and, through it, their ability to silence the Internet and make it conform to their political agenda and to bring the Internet under the regulatory thumb of the United Nations.
Touré, a native of Mali in Africa, is the ideal person to suit Putin’s objectives. If ever Putin found the right man for the job of controlling the Internet, Touré is it. He studied at the Technical Institute of Electronics and Telecommunication of—get this—Leningrad, receiving a master’s degree in electrical engineering, and a PhD from the Moscow Technical University of Communications and Informatics.5
Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, is, of course, Putin’s original stomping ground. Touré’s Russian educational background may help to explain his receptivity to Putin’s proposals.
And a rebuttable presumption would indicate that Hamadoun Touré was—and perhaps still is—a communist. Born in 1953, he would have been educated in the Soviet Union during the 1970s and early ’80s when the nation was under the rule of Party Secretary Leonid Brezhnev. No glasnost reformer he. Brezhnev kept the USSR under iron communist rule until Mikhail Gorbachev broke open the nation’s politics.
Why would a young man from Mali want to be schooled in Russia? And, more important, why would communist Russia want him? And why would Soviet Russia help him acquire expertise in telecommunications, electronics, and “informatics”? We can only speculate, but the thought is not comforting.
Putin found his man!
And Touré is the person the UN would pick to be its Internet commissar—er, coordinator!
Never mind that the open, deregulated Internet has been the font of global creativity and innovation. Its free speech is politically inconvenient for Russia, China, Iran, and other third world dictatorships. Josh Peterson of the Daily Caller writes that “while many US policymakers and industry analysts agree that… deregulation is the reason why growth and innovation has been so explosive on the Internet in the past several decades, an international movement wants to give international governing bodies more power to police the Internet.”6
NEGOTIATIONS ARE SECRET
The negotiators who are drawing up the plan for Internet regulation—including the delegates from the United States—have been keeping their plans top secret as they prepare their proposals for presentation to the Dubai Conference. There all 193 UN member countries will meet to discuss and possibly adopt their proposal. Each nation has one vote and none will have a veto. The Wall Street Journal warns that the authoritarian nations pushing for Internet regulation “could use the International Telecommunications Regulations to take control of the Internet.”7
Particularly chilling is the ease with which the UN could assume the power to regulate the Internet. All the would-be regulators need is a majority vote at the Dubai Conference. Journal reporter Gordon Crovitz warns: “It may be hard for the billions of Web users or the optimists of Silicon Valley to believe that an obscure agency of the UN can threaten their Internet, but authoritarian regimes are busy lobbying a majority of the UN members to vote their way.”8
The proposal for Internet regulation has been gaining supporters outside of just the group of authoritarian countries that are pushing for its adoption. Brazil and India, for example, have joined Russia and China in backing aspects of the proposal. Together these four nations comprise the BRIC group (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), which is often poised as a counterweight to the power of the US and the European Union. Vinton Cerf commented that “Brazil and India have surprised me with their interest in intervening and vying for control [over the Internet].”9
Otherwise, Cerf noted that support for ITU regulation of the Net came from countries like Syria and Saudi Arabia, “who are threatened by openness and freedom of expression.” He said these countries “are most interested in gaining control [over the Internet] through this treaty.”10 It has not escaped the notice of the dictators and monarchs who rule these countries that the Internet and social media played key roles in the Arab Spring revolutions of recent years.
Under the one-nation, one-vote rules of the ITU, technologically backward and tiny countries can literally force the rest of the world to submit to regulation of the Internet! And don’t discount the very real possibility that Russian and Chinese leaders are working overtime to buy the votes of African, Latin American, Asian, and Oceanian nations. These countries, often with only very small Internet user populations, may have no stake in preserving Internet freedom and may be willing to sell it out for some financial reward (either to their countries or to themselves personally).
And what a welcome move Internet regulation would be for the petty tyrants and strongmen who rule most of Africa! The pesky revolutions and civil wars could be nipped in the bud by Internet controls. How happy they would be to rein in free speech so they can rule—and plunder—their populations in peace.
(See Part Ten in this book on the status of global freedom to understand how tyrants and dictators constitute a majority of the membership of the UN.)
All this has led Cerf, one of the founders of the Web and currently a vice president of Google, to tell Congress recently that these proposals for regulation mean “the open Internet has never been at higher risk than it is now.”11
Cerf warned, “If all of us do not pay attention to what’s going on, users worldwide will be at risk of losing the open and free Internet that has brought so much to so many.”12
Cerf said the implications of the potential treaty regulating the Internet are “potentially disastrous.” He added that more international control over the Net could trigger a “race to the bottom” to restrict Internet freedom, “choking innovation and hurting American business abroad.”13
Richard Grenell, who served as spokesman and adviser to four US ambassadors to the UN between 2001 and 2009, said that “having the UN or any international community regulate the Internet only means you’re going to have the lowest common denominator of 193 countries.”14
We would not know of this plan to squelch Internet freedom but for a courageous—and still anonymous—leaker who unveiled a 212-page planning document that Crovitz, writing in the Wall Street Journal, reports is “being used by governments to prepare for the December conference.”
The leak materialized when Jerry Brito and Eli Dourado, George Mason University researchers, frustrated by the secrecy of the talks, created a website called WCITLeaks.org and invited anyone with access to documents outlining the UN proposals to post them online “to foster greater transparency.”15