Topic: Net Neutrality
Country: Russia
Delegate Name: Samuel Mendoza
School: Forest Hills Eastern High School
Topic page: background guide and all position papers All Russia position papers GLIMUN 2016 committees
Until the 1990’s, the Internet was not a prevalent civilian telecommunications network. When the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) passed the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITR’s), these regulations were broad in their terminology in order to cover a wide spectrum of telecommunications technology. However, these regulations are not law. They were agreed upon at an international conference and states have no penalties for noncompliance. Now that the Internet has progressed to its current level of infrastructure and penetration, these regulations must be updated to specifically regulate the Internet and include penalties for states that do not comply with these regulations. The Russian Federation believes that regulations should be put into to place that both standardize international internet regulation and allow governments to block content that threatens their citizens or country.
The Russian Federation has a regulatory body responsible for the internet and other mass communications technologies called Roskomnadzor. This body prevents harmful web content from appearing to our citizens, such as extremist support, child pornography, and illegal copyrighted materials. We do this to prevent harm to children who stumble across this dangerous content and, in the case of extremist support, we mean to prevent any such support in the Russian Federation. Roskomnadzor has been incredibly effective in preventing this content from being accessed by our citizens and the Russian Federation hopes that this organization can serve as a model to other countries who are crafting their own similar regulatory bodies. While some countries, such as the United States of America, see these actions as repression of free speech, the Russian Federation is protecting its citizens. We firmly believe that the internet can and should be regulated by governments in order to prevent terror, access to pirated content, and child pornography.
With this in mind, the Russian Federation recommends that the ITR’s be swiftly updated to include regulations that govern individual methods of telecommunication so that each method can be properly controlled. In the case of the regulation of the internet, we recommend that the ITR’s include protections for governments who choose to protect their citizens from dangerous web content. Finally, the Russian Federation recommends that the ITR’s become not just a set of regulations agreed upon at a conference with no penalties for noncompliance, but a set of regulations enforced by the United Nations in order to better serve the international community.
