What is really at stake, some analysts say, is money.
Robert M. McDowell, a member of the Federal Communications Commission, told a U.S. House committee last month that he was aware of treaty proposals that could enable foreign telecommunications companies to levy fees on Google, Facebook, Netflix and other U.S. Internet companies that are heavy users of bandwidth. This would be “devastating to global economic activity,” he said.
The European Telecommunications Network Operators’ Association, a lobbying group based in Brussels, has called for the treaty to permit the management of telecommunications traffic.
The treaty “should acknowledge the challenges of the new Internet economy and the principles that fair compensation is received for carried traffic and operators’ revenues should not be disconnected from the investment needs caused by rapid Internet traffic growth,” the operators’ association said in a submission to the I.T.U.
Thus the real conflict is not over governance of the Internet, some analysts say, but over the division of the spoils, with international telecommunications operators trying to use the I.T.U. to extract revenue from American Internet companies.
