EU Common Negotiating Position Rejects Sending-Party-Pays Revision to ITRs
The International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs) shouldn’t try to “micro-manage” international telecom services but should deal with “high level strategic and policy issues,” EU governments said Thursday. The European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations (CEPT) published European common proposals for December’s ITU World Conference on International Telecommunications in Dubai. The statement is “very diplomatic” but makes clear that a proposal by the European Telecommunications Network Operators’ Association for a sending-party-pays provision in the ITRs has been rejected, said European Internet Services Providers Association board member Innocenzo Genna.
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Europe “wishes to facilitate a worldwide consensus in many controversial topics,” CEPT said (http://xrl.us/bn33df). EU countries believe regulation is only justified where it won’t burden governments and private companies, it said. One-size-fits-all and prescriptive solutions aren’t advisable, and the revised ITRs should be “applicable, helpful and meaningful in every region and country of the world during a large number of years.” That won’t happen if there’s a temptation to micro-manage international telecom services, as a provision that helps one nation could be meaningless or even harmful to its neighbor, it said.
Europe has agreed on a set of criteria to guide ITR revision, CEPT said. They are objective and balanced and have a legal underpinning, so should be taken in “utmost consideration” by EU governments, it said. The first is that ITRs should address high-level strategic and policy issues; and safeguard the rights of telecom operators and service providers to exercise commercial choice and have operational and technology freedom in providing international services and facilities. Revisions must also be consistent with the ITU constitution, it said. Governments should try to comply with ITU recommendations as much as possible but efforts to enforce them or enact national laws to enforce them run counter to the constitution, it said. By their nature, ITU recommendations are non-binding, it said. “Europe considers that the ITRs revision shall not be used to change the nature of Recommendations of the ITU."
The third criterion is consistency with international agreements and laws adopted by CEPT members. Proposals that are incompatible with principles underlying WTO treaties or ITU commitments can’t be supported, the body said. Revisions should, in addition, exclude areas related to CEPT members’ laws or policy that are within their sovereign rights, the document said. Europe “will consider proposals related to national defence, national security, content, and cybercrime issues” insofar as technical and development issues are concerned, but not those which interfere with national jurisdiction, it said.
CEPT will also consider revisions in light of whether they intrude into areas unrelated to the purpose and scope of the ITRs, it said. “Proposals concerning national/regional telecommunications services or transport means should not be included in the ITRs,” it said. In the text of its revision proposals, CEPT said: “It is inappropriate for Member States in an international treaty to make commitments which dictate the detail of how private operators conduct their commercial activities with operators in other countries in the current liberalised and competitive international telecommunications market."
CEPT has taken a “conservative position” in the sense that it doesn’t want to modify the actual boundaries of the ITRs, Genna told us. Its approach is that ITRs shouldn’t cover Internet services, nor should the ITU be granted additional powers in that area, he said. The statement is “very diplomatic” in order to maintain a flexible approach in Dubai, he said. But while it doesn’t say “we are with X” or “we are against Y,” it makes clear that “ETNO’s proposal is definitively rejected,” he said.