U.N. could tax U.S.-based Web sites, leaked docs show
Global Internet tax suggested by European network operators, who want Apple, Google, and other Web companies to pay to deliver content, is proposed for debate at a U.N. agency in December.
The United Nations is considering a new Internet tax targeting the largest Web content providers, including Google, Facebook, Apple, and Netflix, that could cripple their ability to reach users in developing nations.
The European proposal, offered for debate at a December meeting of a U.N. agency called the International Telecommunication Union, would amend an existing telecommunications treaty by imposing heavy costs on popular Web sites and their network providers for the privilege of serving non-U.S. users, according to newly leaked documents.
The documents (No. 1No. 2) punctuate warnings that the Obama administration and Republican members of Congress raised last week about how secret negotiations at the ITU over an international communications treaty could result in a radical re-engineering of the Internet ecosystem and allow governments to monitor or restrict their citizens' online activities.
"It's extremely worrisome," Sally Shipman Wentworth, senior manager for public policy at theInternet Society, says about the proposed Internet taxes. "It could create an enormous amount of legal uncertainty and commercial uncertainty."
The Internet Society's Sally Shipman Wentworth calls the proposal "extremely worrisome."
(Credit: Declan McCullagh/CNET)
While this is the first time this proposal been advanced, European network providers and phone companies have been bitterly complaining about U.S. content-providing companies for some time. France Telecom, Telecom Italia, and Vodafone Group, want to "require content providers like Apple and Google to pay fees linked to usage," Bloomberg reported last December.
ETNO refers to it as the "principle of sending party network pays" -- an idea borrowed from the system set up to handle payments for international phone calls, where the recipient's network set the per minute price. If its proposal is adopted, it would spell an end to the Internet's long-standing, successful design based on unmetered "peered" traffic, and effectively tax content providers to reach non-U.S. Internet users.
In a statement (PDF) sent to CNET on Friday morning, ETNO defended its proposal as "innovative" and said it had been adopted unanimously by its executive board. It would amend the treaties by saying, "to ensure an adequate return on investment in high bandwidth infrastructures, operating agencies shall negotiate commercial agreements to achieve a sustainable system of fair compensation for telecommunications services," ETNO said.
Such sender-pays frameworks, including the one from ETNO, could prompt U.S.-based Internet services to reject connections from users in developing countries, who would become unaffordably expensive to communicate with, predicts Robert Pepper, Cisco's vice president for global technology policy.
Developing countries "could effectively be cut off from the Internet," says Pepper, a former policy chief at the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. It "could have a host of very negative unintended consequences."
It's not clear how much the taxes levied by the ETNO's plan would total per year, but observers expect them to be in the billions of dollars. Government data show that in 1996, U.S. phone companies paid their overseas counterparts a total of $5.4 billion just for international long distance calls.
If the new taxes were levied, larger U.S. companies might be able to reduce the amount of money they pay by moving data closer to overseas customers, something that Netflix, for instance, already does through Akamai and other content delivery networks. But smaller U.S. companies unable to afford servers in other nations would still have to pay.
The leaked documents were posted by the Web site WCITLeaks, which was created by two policy analysts at the free-market Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Arlington, Va, who stress their Wikileaks-esque project is being done in their spare time. The name, WCITLeaks, is a reference to the ITU's December summit in Dubai, the World Conference on International Telecommunications, or WCIT.
Eli Dourado, a research fellow who founded WCITLeaks along with Jerry Brito, told CNET this afternoon that the documents show that Internet taxes represent "an attractive revenue stream for many governments, but it probably is not in the interest of their people, since it would increase global isolation."
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