 Let me start by introducing Andrew McLaughlin. He is the entrepreneur in residence at Beta Works in New York. From 2009 to 2011, he was a member of President Obama's senior White House staff serving as Deputy Chief Technology Officer of the United States, which is a great title. And he was also on the Obama-Biden transition team. So, Andrew. Thank you very much. So, what I've been asked to speak about this morning is can the UN save the Internet? And it will not shock you if I just go ahead and reveal that the answer to that question is no. What I want to do is go well beyond that though and try to put down a somewhat more provocative marker than we usually talk about, particularly for people that come from an administration background. And that marker is the following. I think that in the current debate about the governance of the Internet globally, the United States is being entirely too cautious and too timid and that we should set a significantly bolder and more audacious goal consistent with United States grand strategy and also with the economic interests of the world. And that position is the following. It is time to set as United States policy the objective of dismantling the communications union. The current debate that goes on around the ITU and the world is essentially a debate between the ITU is harmless. We should just basically ignore it because it can't really do that much. It doesn't actually have that much power versus a position that the ITU is an alarming threat to Internet freedom and the operation of free markets and free enterprise around the world. And so we should stop it in its tracks. Both of these positions should really leave the ITU as is. And what I'm going to make out today is a case for why we should say that as the PSTN blessedly dies a slow and painful death to be replaced by the decentralized packet-switched Internet that we've all come to know and love, it's time to replace the governance mechanisms that have gone along without old, outdated, centralized and no longer vital infrastructure that we're replacing. The simple point though is our communications networks have fundamentally changed so it's time to fundamentally change the governance mechanisms that catch up including, and I would say especially, the ITU. So I'm not saying kill the ITU exactly. I'm saying dismantle it. There are certain functions that the ITU performs that ought to live on. They're small functions, relatively insignificant in the grand scheme of things and I think in some ways indeed part of a package of problems that need to be solved. For example, the ITU R sector, so I'm sorry we're already getting into acronym now, LAN now, but anyway I've only got 15 minutes so I need to dive right in. So for example, the ITU has traditionally been engaged in the coordination of satellite segments and slots and radio frequencies across international borders and it's probably useful that we continue to do international coordination around those things. But let's be clear, even in this area where the, where you could argue that some international coordination function ought to continue, the historical track record of the ITU, its structures, its processes have propped up incredibly damaging and false spectrum scarcity claims and politics that we're working hard in this country as an administration in cooperation with the Congress to try to figure out how to get beyond. We're trying to figure out how to free up spectrum to be used for new models and new paradigms of wireless communications that aren't limited by this false notion of spectrum scarcity. So anyway, that's one example of what might remain. The ITU maintains a table of country codes for telephone dialing on the PSTN. Surely that function can continue, although I would note that even that, the ITU is historically screwed up if you look at the case of Taiwan and its experience having a country code polled and then later tolerated and then eventually assigned but in a highly politicized way it's clear that the ITU is problematic even in those configurations. But anyway, so my idea is that I'm putting in front of you is, dismantle the ITU continue a few bits spin out the things that don't need to be anchored in a treaty based organization like, for example, the standardization activities of the ITU and perhaps combine its development sector with the Internet Governance Forum to create some kind of a freestanding technical and policy advisory organization with sort of an annual conference for dialogue. Okay, so that's my prescription. What again is so bad about the ITU? Well, I'm going to assume most of you are familiar with these arguments so I won't dwell on them, but it's just simple things like the nature, structure, culture, values, processes of the ITU. They are all inimical to a free and open Internet and they are all inconsistent with the nature of the technical infrastructure that now characterizes our communications networks. The ITU is centralized. It is centered around states and governments. Parts of the ITU adhere to the one country, one vote principle, so Andorra and Liechtenstein have the same vote as the United States and China. Many depressive governments use that feature of the ITU's decision-making process to engage in horse trading that has nothing to do with the technical merits of the decisions under consideration. The values of the ITU are anchored in essentially this state-centric government-centric process which is extremely excruciatingly bureaucratic. It is literally a bureaucracy made up of bureaucrats. It's a meta-bureaucracy with all of the downsides that go along with that. It is non-transparent. It is not open. A great example of misbehavior by the ITU is the MPLS forking. So this is multi-protocol label switching and the way that the ITU simply appropriated an Internet engineering task force standard for no good reason other than to protect large incumbent monopolists and their desires to engage in non-network neutral business practices. So the past and future role of the ITU has traditionally been to foster corruption, monopoly to facilitate surveillance and censorship. These are not like sort of alarmist claims. This is the track record of the ITU over the last several decades. It's a nexus for what I would consider to be soft corruption. That's one of the worst forms of corruption that unholy nexus of power wherein the regulator goes to work for the incumbent monopoly, the monopolist places its people into the regulator, they all get to take nice trips to Geneva on a regular basis and people build their careers around the ITU is essentially a gravy train. And that form of soft corruption is one of the underpinnings that has kept the ITU alive and vital and is yet another reason why it should be killed off in its current form. In one sense you need look no further than the fact that the ITU is the chosen vehicle for regimes for whom the free and open internet is seen as an existential threat. Russia, China, Iran, Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Belarus, Cuba, these are the countries placing their hopes and their ambitions in the vessel of the International Telecommunications Union as the vehicle for governance and regulation of the internet. So into the specifics, we're now in a moment right now where the big annual conference on the International Telecommunications Regulations, the ITRs is coming up in Dubai. There are many horror shows to be observed in the details of the proposals for new ITRs. Among these are what I'll just reference as the article seven and eight proposals by the UAE, by Russia, by China. These would validate, legitimize and authorize horrific national practices with regard to surveillance, censorship, privacy anonymity, and identity. Russia, for example, has proposed an article that would affirm everybody's unlimited right to use international telecommunications networks, except when they're used to interfere in internal affairs, undermine sovereignty, national security, territory, integrity, public safety, or leak sensitive information, all of which they do anyway, but the ITU's mechanisms are being invoked here to try to validate, legitimize, and instantiate these principles in international law even more so than they are already. Under the guise of fighting cyber crime, protecting national security, guarding somehow against cyber war, protecting children, fighting fraud, protecting user identity and authentication on the internet, these kinds of repressive regimes seeking to terminate the potential of the internet to drive political change within their own borders without looking to the ITU for legitimacy and it should be denied. By the way, this is a horror show in the ITR process. The constitution of the ITU itself, though, already does a lot of this stuff. There's an explicit right, for example, in the ITU's constitution to block telecommunications that, quote, may appear, unquote, to be dangerous to state security, public order, or public decency. These are all inconsistent with the kind of world we want to live in, with the kind of communications networks that we want to have. So let me say a couple words about some of the geopolitical considerations around this. So first of all, is this anti-UN? And I often hear this from sort of Brazilian, South African, Indian, Mexican, Indonesian colleagues who say, you know, the U.S. always bashes on the U.N., the U.S. hates the U.N. We need some kind of forum in which countries can work together and cooperate and so is fighting against the ITU a way to fight just another example of a lazy, entitled American bashing on an international organization. And I think we have to recast the geopolitics around this and understand that the ITU is the enemy not of the governments of those places, it is the enemy of the internet users and individual people that live in those countries. This is a fight between individuals empowered by the internet and the monopolists, the incumbents and the governments whose interests are opposed to them. And so fighting against the ITU is fighting against those players, not fighting against people in those countries. So I hate to kind of say this in such a sort of stark way, but I will anyway, it strikes me that the Obama administration coming from the left in the United States, where I come from has an opportunity to kind of be the Nixon that goes to the China of really trying to kneecap a useless and inimical bloated bureaucratic corrupt international organization like the International Telecommunications Union. And I hope they will take that challenge. One of the beauties about this issue at the moment is that it brings together left and right. For example, on the left this argument is rooted in a belief in the importance of free speech opposing monopolies. It is a pro-poor argument because after all competition and the introduction of competitive wireless networks around the world and the explosion of wireless connectivity is going to be looked back on I think in 50 years is one of the greatest development programs in wealth creation vehicles ever. For the right, this is a way to advance a belief in free enterprise and free trade, to fight against regulation, to fight against the centralization of power against centralized planning. It brings together US and like-minded allies. Countries that believe in free speech can come together around the evils of the ITU and the desirability of breaking it apart, neutering it and replacing it with something better. It also brings together by the way in a business sense internet companies, access providers and carriers, public interest and advocacy organizations all have an interest in keeping the ITU from turning into some kind of a governance vehicle for the internet. You know, for example we've seen a really interesting reaction to the European carriers in this organization called Etno I'm sorry I'm just not going to spell that out trying to move from subscriber pays to sender pays in order to try to capture revenues from the services that are going, you know, basically like double tax internet services on their networks. This would be a huge threat to internet neutrality and yet even AT&T has opposed this set of principles because it's not in its economic interests to pursue them and to start shelling out money to its peers and transit partners. And finally I'll just say there's also a symbolic importance to winding down a centralized government-centric treaty organization in the context of a new communications network that doesn't need it, doesn't need it and in fact if anything is harmed by it. You know I last minute or two here if not the ITU what? Well in order to get your arms around that you have to understand what the internet actually needs to function. In other words if it doesn't need a centralized governmentally driven organization of function what it does need is a host of organizations tackling different pieces of the problem and the best way that I can sort of summarize this is if you watch the cyber security debates that are taking place in Congress what they typically get wrong is the idea that you need to have centralization of flows of information centralization of decision making around cyber security, centralization of of expertise and in fact the way that the internet stays secure is by a vast multiplicity of constant ongoing conversations. Security on the internet is conversations and governance of the internet globally is conversations. It's conversations about best practices conversations about how to use the internet conversations about what new services entrepreneurs should be developing how businesses relate to each other those kinds of conversations are what make the internet hum. It's how the internet standards were built it's how the internet network has been coordinated for decades now and it is what should as a model replace this notion of the ITU. So let me say a couple of things at the very end here. What could the US government do in the short term to try to make this a reality? Well first of all the US government should commit itself to dismantling the ITU and to do so publicly and to say it's going to be a long-term project it won't happen overnight but we need to wind it down. One small thing that should happen is the US government could shift from having the State Department represent the United States in the ITU and shift it to the FCC we might start to think about the ITU as more like a forum for regulators and regulatory agencies rather than a vehicle for diplomacy particularly when the State Department is proven to be so slow and clumsy they're very good people by the way I love and respect them they're former colleagues David Gross and Phil Revere and so forth do Yeoman's work but as an institution the State Department itself is too slow and clunky and non-technical to really be an effective avatar for the United States in this forum we should shift that and give primary agency responsibility to the Federal Communications Commission which is better suited to doing it second we should start to squeeze the budget of the ITU much more aggressively there should be ruthless budget scrutiny transparency and accountability the ITU spends vast amounts of money on Lord knows what its bureaucracy is as bloated and useless as they come why by the way should US taxpayers be funding an organization that directly subverts US national and global economic interests that's often a standard question with UN agencies but in this case I think it's quite a pointed one we should engage in a sustained push to spin out the ITU standardization activities the ITUT the ITUT should join the IETF Etsy, IEEE, 3GPP the broadband forum and other standards organizations that live or die according to whether the work that they do is useful if the work they do is useful industry will support it if it's not useful industry will not and won't be adopted and anchoring its standards activities in a treaty organizations where governments ultimately have decision making power makes no sense finally we should I think the United States Senate should be prepared to reject any new treaty language coming out of the ITRs that fails to shrink not just keep in place but fails to shrink the scope and role of the ITU even if the administration comes back with a not too terrible could have been worse set of ITRs the Senate should seriously consider rejecting them they should not accept any references to the internet in the ITRs any references to cyber anything any references to spam etc the things which are directly related to the internet as opposed to the telecommunications infrastructure that it rides on top of and my final contention is if the US and a number of countries reject new internet hostile ITRs it could dramatically accelerate the neutering and dismantling of the ITU that I think should be the formal objective of the United States to pursue over the coming decades thank you very much