The idea of tearing down the International Telecommunications Union is a bad idea.  It is not the position of the US government or international civil society or the global businesses community.  And it isn’t going to happen.

At a recent New America Foundation forum on Internet governance and the upcoming World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), Andrew McLaughlin, the former U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer, said that the U.S. should aim to “dismantle” the International Telecommunications Union. “In the case of the ITU,” he said, “I think it’s very much the case that its day is gone.”

This is not the view of the global software and information companies in SIIA.  These companies emphatically do not have an agenda of dismantling the ITU. The ITU has been in the telecommunications standard setting business for 150 years and has well-developed and well understood policymaking processes in which all countries have an equal voice. It continues to play an important standard setting, spectrum allocation, and telecommunications coordination role.  Without it, the task of making telecommunications and satellite systems interoperate throughout the world would be vastly more complicated than it is today.  So much so, that if the ITU were dismantled, it would be necessary to recreate it.

Moreover, the ITU has a crucial development role. If we are to take seriously the task of making the Internet affordable to the billions of people who do not have access to it today, the ITU is an indispensable organization.

Fortunately, civil society immediately rejected the idea of dismantling the ITU. At the same New America Foundation forum, Ellery Biddle, a policy analyst with the Center for Democracy and Technology said, “I’m not sold,” she said. “I worry that governments will be even more angry at the U.S. than they already are if something like that happened, and that ultimately leads to worse results for the people.”

Terry Kramer, the head of the US delegation to WCIT, and articulating US policy in the area, also rejected the idea.  “I don’t think, per se, the ITU is the problem,” he said. “The ITU does some very important work on best practice sharing, on some development activities in developing markets.”

The US government is pretty adept at influencing outcomes in the ITU, but the US does not control the ITU, and so cannot control whether or not it is dismantled.  In effect, this idea is really advocating isolation from the rest of the world, a sure recipe for futility and an abandonment of our responsibility for leadership in the global technology and telecommunications policymaking space.  A US pull-back from the ITU would only hurt the global companies that SIIA represents.

SIIA has been critical of some of the ideas set for consideration at the upcoming WCIT meeting in Dubai.  In particular, proposals for bringing cybersecurity mandates and information technology generally within its regulatory jurisdiction seem to us to be mistaken and harmful.

But these disagreements do not suggest that we seek to undermine the institution. The software and information industries that bring their products and services to billions of people around the world support the good work of the ITU and look forward to it continuing this work into the indefinite future.  We urge the US government, civil society and all members of the Internet policymaking community to do the same.

Mark MacCarthy, Vice President, Public Policy at SIIA, directs SIIA’s public policy initiatives in the areas of intellectual property enforcement, information privacy, cybersecurity, cloud computing and the promotion of educational technology. Follow the SIIA Public Policy team on Twitter at @SIIAPolicy