China has pitched a plan to the ITU that would allow operators to bill for cross-border internet traffic.
An ITU official said the ITU-T - the UN agency’s telecom standards arm - was considering the proposal, but denied it would involve modifying the BGP, one of the net’s core protocols. The standard has been set by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), not the ITU, the official said..
The plan is reportedly aimed at allowing developing countries the chance to recover some of the cost of building out internet infrastructure – echoing debates a decade ago when countries complained about bearing the cost of building networks to deliver US content to their consumers.
Andrea Servida, a European Commission cybersecurity expert, told a House of Lords committee that China could have a “hidden agenda” in wanting to monitor data flows.
He said technical changes needed to support the billing backend could undermine the web's founding principle of openness as well as raising security and stability concerns.
He said it was not clear whether the Chinese proposal involved installing BGP routers or modifying the BGP protocol itself.
China's proposal was believed to have the backing of a number of developing countries, which currently have to bear the cost of international internet connections, the BBC said.