Summary

  • RCC Member States propose adding other telecom and ICT facilities, services and applications—including applied research, technology transfer and electronic meetings—to Resolution 64’s appeal against technical barriers to Internet access.
  • The sponsors invoke sanctions and an undefined concept of discrimination. Their submitted amendment widens the list of protected activities while leaving the definition and the resolution’s invitational verb in place.

The title on the door already says “telecommunications.” The instruction inside still points at the Internet. That is the small but consequential mismatch a group of RCC Member States wants the ITU to fix at November’s Plenipotentiary Conference.

Their addendum 31 to contribution 94, posted on 23 October, targets Resolution 64. The Bucharest 2022 text invites Member States to refrain from unilateral or discriminatory measures that could technically block another Member State’s full access to the Internet. Its title and other clauses already speak about equipment, services, applications, applied research and technology transfer. The operative invitation gives the Internet the starring role.

The RCC draft extends that one sentence to “other” telecom and ICT facilities, services and applications, and explicitly names applied research, technology transfer and electronic meetings. A dispute over access to a technology platform or an ITU online meeting would therefore have a more obvious place in the resolution’s vocabulary. The wording still speaks to states and technical impediments; the document does not install a complaints desk or a remedy schedule.

The sponsors’ introduction supplies the politics. It says the resolution lacks a clear definition of discrimination and argues that unilateral restrictive measures, including sanctions, can reach services and technology beyond Internet connectivity. The tracked edit then adds the wider list. It supplies no definition of discrimination. That gap matters because a wider noun does not settle which restriction counts, who decides or what follows from a finding.

Nor does the proposal erase the existing resolution’s references to mutually agreed terms, national regulations and international obligations in other organizations’ fields of competence. Those clauses will shape any reading of the expanded invitation. PP-26 is being asked to choose a broader diplomatic statement, not a new tribunal.

There is an honest piece of progress here: the operative sentence would finally match more of the resolution’s own title. The remaining argument is about the verb. “Invites” can put an objection on the record. Enforcement has to come from somewhere else.

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