Over the last six months, UN diplomats have negotiated over the text of a document set to define the policies and frameworks of how the Internet is governed in the future, and who has a role in the process. The final version presented on Wednesday at the General Assembly contains a word that civil society groups, businesses and many Western governments oppose: multilateral.
Multilateral is code for states making the rules. The inclusion of the word was largely spearheaded by China, which worked to enshrine state control over the Internet in the document, said negotiators who were involved in the process. During the discussions, representatives from China demanded repeatedly that the word be included, according to participants and draft versions of the document that laid out which countries made each submission.
“China has been very active in the negotiations at pushing for more state control over how people get online and who has access to data,” said Peter Micek, global policy and legal counsel for Access Now, a digital-rights organization based in New York that was involved in the negotiation efforts.
The outcome document, which was presented at a UN meeting known as the Ten-Year Review of the World Summit on the Information Society is an indication of how China is trying to assert its influence over how the Internet will be governed. Although the document is nonbinding for member states, it outlines policies and grants authority to UN bodies such as the International Telecommunication Union and others in which China exerts significant influence.
The document also provides an international precedent that governments can claim legitimizes their own agendas.
China failed to get many of its proposed insertions and deletions of language into the text. At points, Chinese officials tried to remove phrases such as “freedom of expression” and “democratic,” which other nations wanted to include to safeguard human rights and privacy online. The final version of the document still has those phrases.
The final document endorses the more inclusive “multistakeholder” approach to Internet governance proposed by the US, the EU and developing nations such as Brazil and India. This model promotes a management system based on the consensus of civil society, businesses, academic institutions, engineers and governments.
“To their credit, negotiators fought off the worst proposals, and recognized that our human rights to privacy and expression, and access to information and digital security tools, remain under threat,” Micek said.
Still, China appears satisfied that the document recognized “a leading role” for governments in cybersecurity matters relating to national security — one of its top objectives — and that it refers to the UN Charter, which enshrines principles of state sovereignty and nonintervention by the UN in domestic affairs.
“We think those principles apply to Internet communication technologies,” said one of the Chinese negotiators, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak publicly. “We found that the outcome document is in China’s interest.”
The document was formally adopted as China opened its World Internet Conference. The conference is part of a global lobbying effort by China aimed at promoting a concept called “Internet sovereignty,” which maintains that each nation should have the unfettered right to regulate cyberinfrastructure and activities in its territory, including the ability to censor and restrict information within and across its borders.
The three-day meeting, held in Zhejiang Province, was used last year by officials to urge participants to sign a pledge accepting China’s claims to Internet sovereignty. Concerns that a new document could be circulated have led to less Western corporate and diplomatic participation this year, according to several people familiar with the attendees, who asked not to be named to avoid retaliation by Chinese authorities.
China has long tried to gain a broader say in how the Internet and technology more generally are regulated worldwide. Beijing has prevailed on state-run telecom operators to spend heavily to gain more influence in cellular standards, while Chinese officials have worked their way up the hierarchies in global regulatory bodies, such as the International Telecommunication Union, whose secretary-general is Chinese.
The agency has increasingly taken on cybersecurity management, a prime Chinese objective, as a result of the first World Summit on the Information Society outcome document, adopted in 2005.
In China’s view, Internet sovereignty justifies the tangle of controls used to monitor its more than 640 million Internet users and restrict what they see and say online with a system known as the Great Firewall that blocks thousands of foreign Web sites.
China and its allies tried last month to add language that would have made authority for Internet-related public policy issues the “sovereign right of states,” a phrase that the US, Canada and other countries said would end negotiations if it were included. The Western bloc negotiated for two days before the other side withdrew the proposal, participants said.
While Internet sovereignty does not appear in the final document, many diplomats and civil society groups say they remain wary of China’s “multilateral” intentions.
“The Chinese are terrific negotiators,” said David Gross, a former US Department of State coordinator for international communications and information policy. “They set things up over time in order to advance their interests, and they don’t feel the need to win everything off the bat.”
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