EU to Join U.S. in Opposing Controversial Sending-Party-Pays Revision to ITRs
EU governments have apparently rejected a proposal by the European Telecommunications Network Operators’ Association (ETNO) to add a “sending-party-network-pays” provision to ITU international telecom regulations (ITRs). The European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations (CEPT) met last week in Istanbul to firm up a common EU position before December’s ITU World Conference on International Telecommunications in Dubai. CEPT hasn’t made its position public yet, but European Internet Services Providers (EuroISPA) board member Innocenzo Genna wrote on his blog (http://xrl.us/bnu2vh) that informal sources have said the ETNO proposal is out. ETNO Communications and Public Policy Director Thierry Dieu, however, said he expects a final decision from CEPT next week. The U.S. has already rejected the proposal.
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One organization present at the Istanbul talks said CEPT nixed the inclusion of any of ETNO’s proposal in the common position on the ground that it’s contrary to CEPT high level criteria, and outside the scope of the ITRs because it deals with specific commercial and technical concerns. However, CEPT also agreed that the issues ETNO raised were relevant to the future of the telecom sector and should be addressed, the source said. CEPT didn’t confirm the decision. Mark Thomas, director of its European Communications Office, said he wasn’t at the meeting and had no information about it. The question of whether CEPT rejected ETNO’s approach “may be difficult to answer immediately,” he said, “as the conditions under which issues were discussed would require care with interpreting and reporting the discussion and outcome: both in order to respect any confidences which may have been shared at the meeting and to avoid unintentionally mis-reporting them from a distance."
ETNO has indicated it might withdraw the proposal (CD Oct 15 p3), but the amendments are still on the table, Genna said. They may be moved forward by the organization of African countries within the ITU, he said. That move hasn’t been formalized yet but has been confirmed by many sources, he told us. The entire process is “so untransparent,” he said. The African conference is said to endorse the sending-party-pays concept because African countries have been losing money due to the advent of Skype and other Internet phone services, he said. Those nations have traditionally generated revenue by charging termination fees, collected by the local incumbent (the government), for incoming international calls, he said. When Africans abroad started making Internet calls, revenue dropped, he said, but sending-party-pays would allow governments to recoup the losses. The idea is “insane,” because many ISPs will refuse to service Africa, to the detriment of people living there, Genna said.
ETNO’s amendments join a list of others that “could comprise significant UN-style intrusion into future commercial and technical flexibility,” EuroISPA said in a statement on ITR revisions (http://xrl.us/bnu2gs). Among those are: (1) Expanding the definition of telecom to include processing of information on the Internet. (2) Requiring service providers to disclose routing and other network management information to regulators and/or the ITU. (3) Regulating spam and international roaming. Those proposals also open the door to legitimate questions about the future of multi-stakeholder organizations that deal with the Internet, it said.