A federal government memo making the rounds of Internet governance stakeholders downplays a planned December 2012 meeting of the International Telecommunications Union in Dubai as a battleground between those for and against a supranational Internet regulatory body.

The memo (.pdf), posted online Jan. 30 by Syracuse University Professor Milton Mueller, says widespread concern prevalent a year ago that the twelfth World Conference on International Telecommunications (aka, WCIT-12) would see the proposal of draft treaty texts empowering the ITU with Internet governance authority have been met with "significant progress."

"There are no pending proposals to invest the ITU with [Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers]-like Internet governance authority," the memo states.

"Instead, thus far, traditional telecom issues such as roaming and fraud have taken center stage," the memo adds.

The U.S. position has been to support a framework (.pdf) for Internet governance adopted in December by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development as a recommendation for member states that emphasizes the role of "consensus driven technical standards...[agreed to by] multi-stakeholder institutions that govern standards for different layers of Internet components."

Despite the memo's tone of nonchalance, however, Obama administration officials have sounded warnings against major changes to the International Telecommunications Regulations (.pdf), a 1988 treaty that governs international interoperability overseen by the ITU.

"In an effort to establish the ITU as an operational authority on international cybersecurity, some more authoritarian countries have proposed to include cybersecurity and cybercrime provisions into the ITRs" said Larry Strickling, head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, while speaking Jan. 11 at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.

The memo also does state that "many countries view WCIT-12 as an opportunity to add detailed regulatory provisions to the ITRs concerning...poorly defined 'network security' issues."

However, the memo also brings up the possibility that federal rhetoric linking WCIT-12 with Internet issues or policy could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Possibly the federal government "should avoid linking WCIT-12 with Internet issues or policy because doing so reintroduces a suggestion that the treaty conference is somehow about the Internet. It is not, and the USG doesn't want it to be," the memo states.