House to hold hearing on international control of the Internet

The House Energy and Commerce's subcommittee on Communications and Technology scheduled a hearing for next Thursday to examine international proposals to regulate the Internet.

A witness list was not immediately available.

Some countries are pushing to give the United Nations' International Telecommunication Union more control over the governance of the Internet. U.S. officials, including Larry Strickling of the Commerce Department and Robert McDowell of the Federal Communications Commission, have warned the proposal would undermine freedom on the Internet.

"A top-down, centralized, international regulatory overlay is antithetical to the architecture of the Net, which is a global network of networks without borders," McDowell wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed earlier this year. "No government, let alone an intergovernmental body, can make engineering and economic decisions in lightning-fast Internet time. Productivity, rising living standards and the spread of freedom everywhere, but especially in the developing world, would grind to a halt as engineering and business decisions become politically paralyzed within a global regulatory body."

The proposal would give the international body more control over cybersecurity issues, rates for traffic across borders and the Web's address system.

The Internet is currently governed under a "multi-stakeholder" approach that gives power to a host of nonprofits, rather than governments.

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