captioning performed by vitac >> before i begin, i would like to acknowledge commissioner mcdowell. commissioner mcdowell has been a leading voice in reminding us of the importance of internet freedom and how vital the internet is to innovation and economic growth and once again his excellent opening remarks he has done that again. and for that we are very much appreciative and it has had a

very positive impact we believe as we go forward in our preparations for the world conference on international telecommunication. at the outset let me make one point perfectly clear. the administration and of course the department of state firmly supports the position that the united nations is not the place for the day-to-day technical operations of the internet. we have made this point repeatedly and we will continue to make it. the united nations and the itu can do many things, and they can do those things effectively and importantly. and the areas of development, the areas of training as a forum for discussion of international policy matters and the case of the itu preeminently in the area of spectrum allocation and and

imagi management on an international basis. but managing the internet is certainly not one of the u.n.'s roles. the internet -- and this seems to have increasingly gained public support at meeting that i attend and that you have attended -- the internet is best left to a multi-stake holder structure, where decisions are made on a bottom-up basis and in which of course all stake holders can participate in their respective roles. this is the environment that has prove i don't know the test of time and has left the internet to innovate and for that we have gained extraordinary benefit socially and economically. let me focus my remarks on the itrs themselves. i have noted to friends that the

itrs seem to be a subject that has gained a tremendous amount of comment and interest but those who have actually read the itrs are still a decided minority. but let me try to put them into some context. what are they? first of all, they are high-level principles. they are not detailed. the radio regulations of the itu go to four volumes and weep just recently had a world radio communication conference where those regulations were revised and we appreciate commissioner mcdowell's presence at that conference. this is not the case of the itrs. they are nine pages long. they are nine pages of treaty text. in those nine pages they refer to three appendices.

those three appendices, which are an integral part of the treaty are about four and a half pages long. this treaty text then is followed by resolutions, decisions and opinions which run about eight pages long. those resolutions, decisions and opinions are not treaty text. the united states has always been very firm on that position that they do not go to the senate for advice and consent. second, they have had a long history. their origin is found in the 1875 paris convention, which was one of the first international conventions that brought about member states for the purpose for agreement on how to manage and indeed regulate, if you will, a communications medium

and that was the telegraph. from that point from 1988 they have had periodic review and revision. they were typically, however, integrated into radio treaties as a supplement, not as stand alone document. and it was not until 1973 that the united states signed the international telecommunication. you ask, well, why was that the case? that was the case because they were only focused on europe and they were integrated into the radio regulations and the opening preamtory language said that these -- these documents or this treaty is focused on europe and those of you who wish to participate in that, that is countries participate in this treaty may do so by your own

volition. so it was not until 1973 they were they were globalized and at that point they agreed to sign them. they've had one revision in this modern era and that is in 1988. they have been, as i indicated reviewed periodically and in most instances at long interviews between their review and their revision. thirdly, they have been remarkably stable. from 1875 to the present they have essentially done four or five things. first, they have affirmed that the transmission in the case of telegraph or telecommunications should be open to the public, that there should be a privacy attached to those

communications, that governments should agree to provide sufficient infrastructure globally to maintain global connectivity, a pledge to do that, a commitment to do that. and they were designed and by agreement of the member states to agree upon a basis for sharing revenue, as communications was between parties, how was revenue to be shared? and lastly, and i think significantly, notwithstanding everything i have just said or that they have found in the treaty there was always a provision that said notwithstanding what we agree to, member states may agree to enter into special arrangements unique to those particular circumstances. from 1875 to the present, those essentially have been the

elements of the -- now known at international telecommunications regulations. i mentioned member states. it is terribly important to understand that the itrs are agreements among member states. sovereign countries come together for purposes of agreement on international communications. as a result, i think, going back then to the point, nine pages of text is practically all member states could ever agree to in any case. why? because no member state is going to sacrifice their sovereignty. no member state goes to a conference with the intention of agreeing to compromise its sovereign right to regulator otherwise manage its communications as it deems appropriate. i think this is a very important point to keep in mind so that

member states agree among themselves. as a result, as i emphasize, the subjects that can be agreed to are rather minimal and of a high level principle. now having said that and understanding of course that the itrs have this tradition and that they last revised in 1988, it is inevitable that the situation we face today in 2012 is not the world of 1988, which was essentially a narrow band world, a world emerging into privatization of telecommunications infrastructure, a world with a distinctively different net work architecture and a world in which there could be an agreement among member states on how revenues would be shared. that was a different world in

1988 than the world that we enjoy today. so if we say that as a firm position that the united nations and the itu should not be engaged in the day-to-day operations of the internet, we also say that the world of broad band, of internet, of the world today, it would be counterproductive to try to impose upon this situation the context of the past, the practices of the past. nothing should be done at the conference in dubai to slow innovation or to attempt to bring about a top down and centralized control over the internet. those are fundamental principles that the u.s. delegation will take with it to dubai and will seek of course at all of our

energy to support. in terms of what we've seen so far, propose as coming into the international telecommunications regulations, let me put into context those proposals and then explain a little bit about the process. there has been an itu counselor, 48 countries that manage and govern the itu. a council working group has been preparing for this conference over about two years and about eight meetings. that council working group will send to the conference a report. the report will contain all of the possible options that have been discussed during this period as to how they could -- there could be revisions of the

itrs. so nine pages of actual text has grown to 70 pages if you include all the options that will go forward to the conference. then as a first date, august 3rd, governments are expected to send in their first proposals for the conference itself. we will begin to see, i think in very real terms what will be the parameters of the conference once these proposals come in from member states after august 3rd and will continue to approximately two weeks before the conference. but we already have i think an indication of what we will see by the council working group's report itself. and at this stage i can say that we have not seen a proposal to bring the day-to-day technical

operations of the internet under u.n. control. these proposals seem to reflect -- i need to be cautious because it's still an unfolding story -- but they seem to reflect regulatory issues arising from the different world regions. so that, for example, fraud, it seems to be a preoccupation in the middle east. in our hemisphere, roaming is a preoccupation. and in also i should say europe. network security seems to be a preoccupation coming out of eastern europe. various forms of revenue sharing seems to be a preoccupation coming out of africa, but these are some of the outlines of proposals coming in but none of

them to date propose moving from icahn to the unction the day-to-day operations of the internet. so i have indicated that we've had this council working group, this council working group will come forward with proposals, a compilation of the professional pose als that those groups have developed and then the member states will themselves come forward with national contributions. from the united states's point of view, we're very much on that track. we have been participating activity in the council working group and we will now begin to prepare for the council itself. we have formed a core delegation of the leading agencies of the government who are most interested in this subject and have equities, and secondly we await the white house announcement of of the head of delegation and that person will come forward shortly, i

understand, and the cordel awaits that person's leadership. once that person is on board, we will start an organization to sell the u.s. positions and the first tranche will come august 3rd and continue through the fall. we will form a delegation in september and that delegation of course is, as traditional, would be composed of private sector and government representatives and i would encourage you to take that on board as something that may be of interest to you. my last point is, and i see friends and colleagues in the room with who i have had the great pleasure of working over many conferences and i know because of their either having been in government, ambassador

mickey gardner of course, ambassador david gross, and i'm sure there are others in the room and i hope i haven't missed another ambassador. if i have, i may not be able to go back to my department, but all of you who have been in the private sector and transitioned to the governmental sector knows this relies heavily on the partnership between the government and the private sector. that partnership will continue as we have an active consultation through our advise riff committee structure and we'll look forward to forming the delegation compost of the government and private sector. i look forward to your questions. again, randy, thank you very much. >> thank you, dick, very much.

it's great having two of the senior officials of the government here that are involved in this issue. now, as i said, what we're going to do is we're going to move down the line with our commentors and i'm going to ask them to speak or only four minutes or so. i couldn't cut off these distinguished gentlemen but i may feel more comfortable with the commenters. i want to make sure we have time for interaction with the audience especially and among ourselves. so i'm going to turn to jackie ruff first. you got four minutes. >> grease. thanks to everybody for being here today because i think that this is an illustration of the fact that this topic is very important in many different ways here. and i want to comment of course

our first two speakers for their leadership, commissioner mcdowellon dirk but critical ways. soap three points, which i'll try to do quickly. why is verizon engaged, what's at dick set the stage with the notion of the public-private collaboration. verizon is a part of that. clearly the itu is one of those but as far as the ent net governance formium and other multi-take holder organizations, why do we do that? three main reasons -- our customers everywhere, u.s. and elsewhere, are all communicates v

via -- secondly we carry a lot of this traffic on our networks and of course satellite capacity and we often speak of those as the digital trade routes of the 21st century. and of course they're also the channels for freedom of expression as was commented on earlier today. and, third, we provide global enterprise services to enterprise solutions to largent prize and government customers around the world, 150 countries at a minimum, probably more. these are a combination of what you would think of as it, information technology, telecom and media services. as it was mentioned they are drivers for economic growth and they will only succeed in accomplishing that if the internet remains global live seamless, data can get across

borders and kbss can flow unimpeded. so what's at stake and in this regard i would agree wholeheartedly, i thought it was very interesting the way that commissioner mcdowell started his remarks talking about wireless here, talking about wireless as the key trend globally over the next weird. and cisco put out one of its great study on what's happening this morning and they previous district that 2016 there will be two and a half mobile connections per person, okay? so with the transformation of mobile services to broad band, this clearly means that this is the path, particularly for the developing world to participate in the benefit of the internet, to leap frog if the right investments are made. it's clear from the mckinzy

study and other world bank study that the effect on gdp growth is the greatest for the developing countries. for each 10% increase in broad band, you get a 1.4% increase in gdp and developing countries. so all this is happening, we've got this enormous potential to move to the internet. in the meantime, they're trying to figure out it's not that surprising that the itu is -- and i'll drill a little more deeply, wok of the proposals. sop those in will if legacy t--

in legacy -- if there are disruption business throwing up borders, the information exchange simply won't happen and if there's government control over routing of traffic and network design and management, many of the tools for innovation just won't be there. in those proposals now on the table, there are elements of those three things put out there. so it may not be about icahn's functions but it's about many of the functions of the internet per se. so my engineer colleagues would say but those won't work over the long time. you know they'll be bad policy, they won't accomplish the stated purpose. but for that to play out in the meantime it will deprive economies of the benefits of things like cloud services, which interesting enough are most being taken up in latin america and asia, access to the digital trade routes, the

benefits of direct ip-to-ip interconnection, not forced to go through gate ways at the border and it will eliminate the current handshake the network of networks that is the internet. it will eliminate that as a way that it functions. they'll keep them at high principals, training, standards development in some areas and i hope this will be part of the rest of the conversation, i think it will be with gigi, to preseverity multi-stake holder models for different organizations and ways of doing things that are out there. we believe that this is possible. we think it's challenging and

it's a multi- -- developing other allies across what multi stake holder grouping and that that is very possible we need to do a lot of actual addressing of real concerns, talking about how the economic and technical issues really work and by applying ourselves, and that's one of the reasons i'm so pleased to see a full room, ourselves here, ourselves globally that it will be possible to get a positive outcome. so i'm always an optimist. you have to think optimistically when you have challenges ahead. thank you. >> thank you, jackie. i know a lot of the people in the room have heard me say before that i'm always an optimist, too, so there are at least two of us here in the room as well. next we're going to hear from gigi. i want to say about gigi, a lot

of you in the room probably also know that -- i don't always agree with gigi on everything, we have different perspectives on a lot of of issues, she's been my friend a long time and i'm always happy to invite her to events. i think this is one, though, where i think probably our perspectives of a free thinking think tank and people in public knowledge and herself probably share some of the concern. one this evening i'm hoping that gigi and rick together will do it we referred -- i started out doing this referring to the mult

mult multi-stake holder process. the c-span audience may be wondering what this multi-stake holder process is. in the contest of your remarks maybe one of you will cover this a little bit in covering the points you want to make. >> good afternoon, everybody. it's great to be here and see soum friends out here in the audience and so much interest in a top that i can i agree with the others is is really, really critical. i have to say some great things about economicer mcdowell, who i consider a commend. his leadership has been enormous. it took a few months or maybe a year or more for people to start to listen and now people are really listening and you really have a lot to do about that. to also say about dick bard, his knowledge of the itu is enpsych clo pediatric. it just so happens my spouse

wo works with him and said to me this morning, dick bard, he knows where the bodies are buried. this is one of those rare moments where all agree. some of the propose as, although they're not fully baked, as mr. bard said as we heard about if they were to come to the fruition that is a great engine for economic growth and education and health care and all the great things that we love about it. now, among the many reasons why this jurisdiction shouldn't expand is that the itu is both

highly politicized and growthly undemocratic. one of the things i'm not sure was mentioned today is in the itu, as in the u.n., it's one country, one vote. so tuvalu and benin have the same votes the united states, china and india. that is not very democratic when you think about it. and the other thing is there's to role at all for simple society, unless you want to pony up $34,000. most of the organizations that we with certainly doesn't have that kind of resources to participate. you get to participate but ult mi mathly you don't have a vote. given there's agreement, that the ipo should not expand to

include two i think we have to be really, really careful not to simply dismiss et efforts to give the itu a greater role in regulation as some plot by china and russia and other edge eewig lawson-wade -- regimes to control the internet. this is one of the things that public knowledge would like to do as we get more ramped up here is work with our allies, particularly in the global south, brazil, latin america to try to convince those civil society groups that, no, this is really important, this is about freedom extension, this is not a