Eli Dourado is a research fellow with the Technology Policy Program at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, a co-founder of WCITLeaks, and a member of the US delegation to the WCIT. The views expressed here are his own.

DUBAI, UAE—In early December, I found myself in an odd position: touching down in Dubai with credentials to attend a 12-day closed-door meeting of the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT). It's a meeting I spent the last six months trying to expose.

Though the world had been assured that WCIT would not attempt to mount a “UN takeover of the Internet,” that was in many ways what happened. As the conference ended, I watched US Ambassador Terry Kramer abandon months of preparatory work and almost two weeks of intense negotiations to announce, as his words echoed through hundreds of headsets in six languages, that the US simply would not sign the resulting deal.

“Mr. Chairman, as head of the US Delegation, I wanted to start out and thank you for your tireless work and leadership,” Kramer said. “Your personal commitment to a successful outcome here is very impressive. However, I do need to say that 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.”

He went on to say the adopted treaty text was incompatible with the existing multistakeholder model of Internet governance. Internet policy, he said, “should not be determined by Member States, but by citizens, communities, and broader society, and such consultation from the private sector and civil society is paramount. This has not happened here.”

Fifty-four other countries took the same position, drawing sharp battle lines over the Internet and its future governance.

How did a “consensus-driven” UN process that would not, we were told, involve the Internet end up this way?

Sticky wicket

When I first heard about the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) early in 2012, I understood it vaguely as the event at which the United Nations would try to “take over the Internet.” But the experts I met with soon admitted they didn’t know what would happen at the WCIT (wicket, as they pronounced it).

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the UN agency convening the meeting, vigorously denied that the conference would have anything to do with the Internet at all. The purpose of the meeting, claimed ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun Touré, was simply to update the treaty that governs international phone calls; it had last been revised in 1988, when most phone companies were state-owned monopolies. Claims that the conference would implicate the Internet were part of a misinformation campaign pursued by unnamed opponents of the ITU, Touré said. In any case, the ITU was just a convener of the WCIT, and actual decisions would be made by member states on a non-voting, consensus-driven basis. The ITU, it was said, had no agenda of its own.

Because the proposals for the updated treaty stayed secret, however, the public had no way to judge the claims of the ITU and its critics. On a Tuesday morning in June, my colleague Jerry Brito stopped by my office and said, “We have to make a leaks site for WCIT proposals. We can call it WCITLeaks!” Armed with the perfect name, we spent the rest of the day putting together a site where insiders could anonymously upload documents related to the WCIT.

We launched on Wednesday and, within hours, we had our first leak—a draft of the new treaty containing several options for revisions to each provision, including some that addressed Internet issues. The next day, we received the infamous ETNO proposal drafted by European telecom giants, which would have applied the “sender-pays” rule from telephone service to Internet data transfers. A few days later, we posted a compilation of every single proposal that had been made so far.

The increased transparency did have an effect on the ITU. A mere two weeks after we launched our site, Touré announced that he would recommend making WCIT-related documents public—a recommendation largely rejected by the ITU Council, which released a single document that was already available on WCITLeaks. The additional transparency also had an effect on some ITU member states, which simply withheld their most heinous proposals until the conference neared. Not until mid-November, for instance, did Russia put forth its proposed revisions. These contained an entire new article called “Internet.”

Off to Dubai

In the meantime, I began to participate in State Department public consultations about the WCIT. By merely expressing enough interest, I was eventually allowed to join the US delegation and travel with them to Dubai. The US government never expressly condoned WCITLeaks’s activities, but it never expressly condemned them, either.

The first few days of the conference were mostly, for me, spent figuring out how everything worked. The highest-level meeting was the Plenary, which established several committees, of which Committee 5 (COM5) did the substantive work of revising treaty text. As a result of criticism over transparency, Plenary and COM5 meetings were webcast and open to those who only had observer status.

WCIT was not going to be about the Internet, but there we were, halfway through the conference, and the Internet was still on the table.

COM5 established two working groups that split up the treaty text between them; these meetings were not webcast or open to unaffiliated attendees. Fortunately, as an official member of a delegation, I was able to attend them.

At each official meeting, the name of the game was consensus. Where consensus could not be reached on a particular issue, an ad hoc group was created to deal with that issue. The ad hoc group would spend additional time trying to forge a consensus. If a particular meeting could not find language that every member state could agree to, it would report back to the next-highest level meeting with the contentious text in square brackets.

The first five days of the conference followed a pattern. Any issue not immediately agreed to on the first day was referred to COM5. Any issue not immediately agreed to in COM5 was referred to a working group, which referred them to ad hoc groups. Because there was little consensus, the ad hoc groups reported back to the working groups with proposals that were filled with brackets, and this bracketed text likewise worked its way back up through COM5 to the Plenary.

Everyone grew frustrated and tired. After working long hours each day, text was beginning to trickle back up to Plenary still laden with brackets, and it was clear that consensus would be difficult, if not impossible, to reach. The US pleaded for everything to be handled in Plenary, rather than cascading down and back up through the chain of groups with little progress.

Amid this frustration, host country United Arab Emirates (UAE) dropped a bombshell. It announced that it was putting forward a new “multi-regional common proposal,” a complete rewrite of the treaty to substitute for all the bracketed text we had worked on. It had support from numerous member states. Bahrain, Russia, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Oman all expressed support for the document, which was not yet available for inspection.

The US delegation went to bed on Friday evening still not having seen the new document. It was not available in the ITU’s document system, despite promises from the UAE to submit it immediately following the Friday Plenary. On Saturday morning, I heard from a few people that they had seen it in paper form. Finally, around noon on Saturday, WCITLeaks received and posted a version of the multi-regional proposals.

The document indicated that it was to be submitted jointly by Russia, UAE, China, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Sudan, and Egypt. It read like a compilation of the most objectionable proposals—it would have nationalized key aspects of Internet governance, including naming and numbering (currently handled by the nongovernmental ICANN), and it created new member state obligations with respect to Internet security. Despite the ITU’s claims that WCIT was not going to be about the Internet, there we were, halfway through the conference, and the Internet was still on the table.

The WCITLeaks version of the multi-regional proposal began to circulate widely among delegates from all countries. Within minutes of posting it, people sitting near me told me that they were receiving e-mails that linked to the document. With the document available for anyone to read, at least one delegation grew worried. By 4:30pm, WCITLeaks received a tweet from an Egyptian delegate saying, “On behalf of the Head of the Egyptian Delegation, we would like to announce that Egypt never supported that proposal.”

On Sunday afternoon, the ITU announced via Twitter that the multi-regional proposal had been withdrawn. At the next Plenary meeting, on Monday night, Egypt distanced itself further:

Egypt would like to clarify its position with regards to the unofficial multi-country draft proposal regarding the review of the ITRs. That was submitted—that was circulated back last Saturday. This document has spread unofficially, and we notice that it contains the name of Egypt among its proponents. Egypt would like to reiterate that we never supported this document... Egypt has always supported and will continue to support the concepts of free Internet and has exerted all efforts to develop the Internet and its wide spread among its citizens. Content Regulation and censorship are not within the scope of ITRs [International Telecommunications Regulations].

With that statement, which was met by applause, the multi-regional proposal looked dead—and the Internet seemed safer.

Listing image by ITU