WCIT Wrapup

Well, WCIT is over, and as anyone could have probably guessed, it didn’t end well.  Here’s a quick sampling of news stories regarding the rather acrimonious end to the much criticized conference:

• Paul Rosenzweig had a great post for Lawfare breaking down the WCIT treaty breakdown.

• Megan Garber, via the Atlantic, on how the UN’s ‘Game-Changing’ Internet Treaty Failed.  From Garber’s article:

Late last night, a faction led by the United States walked out of negotiations, refusing to sign the treaty. “It’s with a heavy heart and a sense of missed opportunities that the US must communicate that it’s not able to sign the agreement in the current form,” Terry Kramer, the U.S. ambassador to the summit, put it. “The internet has given the world unimaginable economic and social benefit during these past 24 years.”

• ZDNet’s Josh Taylor explains that Australia will join “the US and the UK in refusing to sign the proposed international telecommunications treaty . . .”

• Ellen Nakashima, of The Washington Post, writes that “[t]he Obama administration announced Thursday that it will refuse to sign a U.N. treaty under consideration at a major global telecommunications conference because of provisions that it says would give a U.N. stamp of approval to state censorship and regulation of the Internet and private networks.”

• The Economist feels that the failure at WCIT hints at a digital cold war, with the world split into two camps: one camp wants to keep the internet as it is, and one camp would like to turn the clock back and regain sovereignty.  Also, even though the U.S. genuinely wants to protect freedom of expression on the internet, remember that we have a vested interest in the status quo because “much of the internet’s infrastructure is based in America and most of its traffic zips through it . . . America is in a unique position to eavesdrop . . .”  Finally, the article notes that the remaining nations will sign the treaty today (Friday).