Behind closed doors at the UN's attempted “takeover of the Internet”
Eli Dourado is a research fellow with the Technology Policy Program at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, a co-founder of WCITLeaks, and a member of the US delegation to the WCIT. The views expressed here are his own.
Context & Ripple Effects
The WCIT fight had been building all year: a February Wall Street Journal warning about a UN threat to internet freedom framed the stakes, an August BBC report detailed US resistance to control passing to a UN agency, and by late November the Associated Press was cataloguing the web access battles brewing before the Dubai conference. What this piece adds is the insider view: Eli Dourado writes from inside the room, as both a member of the US delegation and co-founder of WCITLeaks, the site that published the draft texts negotiators wanted kept quiet.
That dual role is the story's leverage. The syndication footprint — picked up by The Verge twice around publication — shows how much appetite there was for a firsthand account of the closed-door process at a moment when the treaty talks' legitimacy hinged on whether outsiders could see what was being proposed.
First-order effects
- WCITLeaks' publication of draft proposals converts a closed diplomatic process into a public one, forcing delegations backing an expanded ITU remit to defend specific text rather than negotiate unobserved.
- The US delegation's stated red line — keeping internet governance out of the UN agency's hands — is now being argued under continuous outside scrutiny of the very drafts it is negotiating against.
Second-order effects
- Widespread pickup by outlets like The Verge raises the political cost for any state proposing language that reads as a governance grab, since each draft revision can be diffed and reported within hours.
- Civil society and industry opponents gain a coordination point: leaked texts let them lobby capitals against specific clauses instead of reacting to a finished treaty presented as fait accompli.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, treaty-level bodies like the ITU lose their information monopoly on internet governance negotiations, and the contest shifts from the conference floor to whoever controls disclosure — a structural advantage for the multistakeholder camp over the multilateral one.
- A durable bloc structure is likely to harden either way: states seeking state authority over the network versus a US-led coalition defending the existing multi-stakeholder arrangement, with future conferences inheriting the same fault line.
The trend: Internet governance is settling into a standing contest between multilateral treaty bodies like the ITU and the multistakeholder status quo, with leaks and forced transparency becoming the decisive weapon.