By JULIUS GENACHOWSKI
Last week in Dubai, a U.N. conference on global telecommunications put a stark spotlight on a vital issue: protecting Internet freedom and openness. And it showed that in the months and years ahead, the U.S. must continue to confront powerful forces around the world that seek to suppress the free flow of information online and change the Internet as we know it.
At the Dubai meeting, the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), the United States fought attempts by a number of countries — including Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia — to give a United Nations organization new regulatory authority over the Internet.
Some countries pushed to lay the foundation for new censorship. For instance, some provisions would have strengthened the power of governments to block and/or favor online content. Others pushed misguided economic changes — for example, to use international regulations to enable foreign network operators to charge Internet companies, including start-ups in tech incubators and garages around the world, every time someone clicks on a website or uses an app.
These two global agendas – political and economic – combined in a new and alarming way at last week’s conference and pose a real threat to Internet freedom. The global Internet is at a crossroads, and as the discussion in Dubai made clear, too many abroad would take us down the wrong path.
What’s at stake in this battle over the future of the Internet?
First, freedom of expression: The growth of an open Internet, largely without gatekeepers, has connected billions around the world, catalyzing the spread of freedom and democracy.
For many years, countries throughout the world pushed deployment of wired and wireless communications infrastructure in order to promote economic growth. They were right to do so. But few fully appreciated the capability of this infrastructure to empower people with information and the ability to organize. Particularly since the Arab Spring, more regimes are now focused on – and looking for ways to constrict – what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has powerfully named “the freedom to connect.”
The second reason Internet openness matters is economic opportunity: as the world’s greatest platform for innovation, the Internet has unleashed an enormous wave of entrepreneurship, job creation, and economic growth in both developed and developing economies. The World Bank estimates that a 10 percent increase in broadband penetration corresponds to a 1.4 percent increase in GDP in developing countries, and the Internet is projected to generate more than $4 trillion in annual global economic value by 2016. From the tremendous opportunities opening up around cloud computing, to apps and content that enable people everywhere to access health care and education, the Internet is improving lives for the better.
In contrast to this story of economic growth, some are pushing ideas like creating unprecedented regulations to establish a “sender pays” system for Internet traffic, which would fundamentally alter the Internet as we know it. It would risk Balkanizing the Internet, for example by creating incentives for carriers and businesses to cut off access to countries that charged the new fees. This would constrict access to innovation and new investment in precisely the areas where it’s most needed, stifling economic opportunity.
So the choice ahead is stark. Down one path is a free and open Internet, where users worldwide can speak, innovate, and do business online without having to ask the permission of central authorities or gatekeepers. It is the path most of the world has been on for the past three decades, and on this path the Internet has grown from an experiment to a transformative global force in less than a generation.
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Down the other path is a closing Internet that stunts opportunity for billions of people, impeding growth through censorship or counterproductive regulation. This is a world in which global connectedness is endangered, and the virtuous cycle of innovation and investment that has driven the Internet’s success slows or even stops.
In the U.S., we’ve taken strong steps to preserve Internet freedom — for free expression and economic growth — while helping unleash innovation and investment throughout the Internet ecosystem. Three years ago the FCC proposed and then adopted an Open Internet framework. That framework protects the right to send and receive information online — ensuring that no central authority, private or public, can serve as a gatekeeper to the Internet — while taking steps to encourage robust private investment in Internet infrastructure.
The results are clear — this isn’t hypothetical. Since announcement of the Open Internet framework, investment and innovation in the United States has increased across the Internet ecosystem. There has been nearly $200 billion in private investment in broadband networks since 2009; very high-speed broadband networks now pass more than 80 percent of U.S. homes, up from less than 20 percent in 2009; and annual investment in wireless networks increased approximately 25 percent from 2009 to 2011. Venture capital investing has reached its highest level in a decade, and the apps economy, a market that didn’t even exist five years ago, is booming.
There are challenges in the U.S., of course, including the need to increase broadband speeds and promote competition, but trendlines are moving in the right direction.
In Dubai, the U.S. delegation and our allies succeeded in preventing many of the worst proposals that would have undermined Internet freedom and openness from making it into the final treaty. But the new treaty still included deeply problematic provisions, and the U.S. was one of fifty-five countries that did not sign.
Dubai represents a clear sign of a troubling global dynamic. We should be fully prepared for this debate to come up again at events like the 2013 World Telecommunication Policy Forum in Geneva and the 2014 ITU Plenipotentiary Conference in South Korea. The U.S. must and will continue to fight to preserve global Internet freedom. It won’t be easy, but it’s not optional. The stakes couldn’t be higher.
Julius Genachowski is the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.
