Summary

  • RCC states propose inserting safe ICT-use skills and user awareness against fraud into Resolution 174’s operative invitation to Member States and ICT stakeholders.
  • Australia and the United States have filed a no-change proposal for the same resolution, giving Doha a precise choice about what the cyber rule asks its members to do.

A warning in the introduction of a rule is easy to admire. The practical question is who gets homework. The RCC’s Russian-language amendment to the ITU’s Resolution 174 would put safe ICT-use skills and user awareness in the section that invites governments and industry to act against fraud and other illicit uses of technology.

The ITU register for contribution 94 lists the amendment as addendum 16, posted on 23 October. Its new sentence sits after an existing invitation to Member States and relevant ICT stakeholders to keep talking at regional and national levels. The RCC asks those actors to promote safer-use skills and user awareness as part of building trust and security while countering fraud and other illegal ICT use, with national conditions and technological development in view. The invitation names the people expected to act; it does not supply a curriculum or a funded course.

Education was already in the 2014 text of Resolution 174. A paragraph recalling the World Summit on the Information Society’s Action Line C5 includes encouragement of education and awareness. The operative invitation, though, asks for dialogue toward mutually acceptable solutions. The RCC would lift user-facing learning from the policy backdrop into the resolution’s instructions. That is a small editorial move with a real governance consequence: a later report can ask what was taught, by whom, and to which users.

There is a competing filing. The ITU register for contribution 96 names Australia and the United States as sponsors of a proposal to leave Resolution 174 unchanged, posted on 22 October. The two filings put different wording before Doha. The RCC document carries a 16 October date and appeared in the public register on 23 October.

Doha’s November meeting will decide which wording survives. If the teaching clause enters the final text, its first test will be ordinary: whether members and ICT stakeholders can point to a safe-use skill or fraud-awareness activity instead of one more well-attended conversation.

Official sources