The future of the Internet will decide in the coming days

The 193 members of the International Telecommunication Union will meet in Dubai since today to discuss a treaty governing telecommunications in the world and who has not been reviewed since 1988.

These are two visions of the world will oppose in the coming days. Center stage, 193 countries and more than 700 telecommunications companies and research organizations that struggle with technical standards and treated for the development of communications in the world. The organization has existed since 1865 and was founded with the telegraph. Already holding the conference has been the subject of intense negotiations, the United States is not Enthusiastic for what they consider an attempt to regulate the network of networks. The place chosen was also unsuitable, Google and others felt it was a bad place to make decisions about the future of the Internet. Other items are also subject to discussion, including the fact that the discussions and debates of the body are closed and it was virtually impossible to know precisely what it was, if it was a leak WCITleaks.org posted on the site, including denouncing the lack of transparency on an issue that affects billions of people. The site has published proposals for some countries that clearly show the need to control and regulate the Internet.

The West against the rest of the world

If the United States and the countries of the European Union defend the status quo, that is to say the lack of regulation by the states, others would like to renegotiate the treaty to achieve more control networks and impose a model akin to what happened to the phone. Internet governance is also in the eye of some countries such as China and Russia who would willingly put into touch ICANN, the organization responsible for managing domain names and - although officially independent - is in fact totally controlled by the Americans.

Operators against Internet actors

If there is consensus among Western countries in the defense of fundamental freedoms and therefore the lack of control of the Internet by governments, there are serious differences between countries and between actors. Thus, the European telecommunications operators grouped in an association called Etno want actors net consumers of bandwidth as YouTube pay a fee for the content being broadcast. U.S. operators defend the continuation of current operating believing that everything is fine and well that there is no reason to change anything.

In one of its blogs, Google calls users to sign a petition showing that they are mobilized for the defense of the current model. "Governments must not only decide the future of the Internet. The billions of people who use the Web and experts who design and maintain, must also participate in discussions. "

The end of the dinosaurs !

One of the fathers of the Internet, Vinton Cerf, who works at Google has some very harsh words to the European operators, "these attempts just show that these dinosaurs with brains the size of a pea have still not realized they were dead. The information is not reached until their head given the length of their neck, "he told Reuters. The European Parliament is it on the same wavelength as the actors in the Net and issued a resolution in which it considers that the reform was likely to seriously threaten the open nature of the Internet and competitive by driving up prices, hampering innovation and limiting access.