UN internet conference begins in Dubai

A UN agency is trying to address fears of the internet being damaged by a conference it was hosting.

Government regulators across 193 countries are meeting in Dubai to revise a wide-ranging communications treaty, raising fears in some quarters that the event would be dmaging to the open nature of the internet.

According to Google, the event threatened the "open internet", even as the EU said the current system worked, adding if it was not broke, there was no reason to fix it.
 
But the agency said action was needed to ensure investment in infrastructure to help more people access the net.

Ahead of the meeting Dr Hamadoun Toure, secretary-general of the UN's International Telecom munications Union said the brutal truth was that the internet remained largely the rich people's privilege, which ITU wanted to change.

The ITU's roots go back to 1865, which then was focused on telegrams, but over ensuing decades governments had extended its remit to other communications technologies.

The ITU was instrumental in making standards that made sure different countries' telephone networks could talk to each other, and continued to allocate global radio spectrum and communication satellite orbits.