Fears grow over efforts to govern the web
By Richard Waters in San Francisco, Daniel Thomas in London and James Fontanella-Khan in Brussels
A deeply technical, two-week conference on new rules for connecting the world’s communications networks hardly sounds like a setting for high-stakes international brinkmanship.
But according to the rhetoric it has stirred up from Silicon Valley to Brussels, the event that gets under way in Dubai on Monday will see nothing less than a fight over the future of the internet.
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The meeting is the first called since 1988 to redraft the treaty that governs the International Telecommunications Union, which operates under the auspices of the UN. For many governments represented at the conference that has amounted to an open invitation to try to extend regulations developed for an earlier era of telecommunications to the internet age.
Prodded by Google and other US internet companies, Washington has warned that there is far more at stake than simple technical rules.
“There is the spectre that some governments will seize on these proposals for all the wrong reasons because they want more control of the internet for anti-democratic ends,” says William Kennard, a former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and now the US ambassador to the EU .
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