More than 80 nations – from Australia to Qatar and the United Kingdom – have rebuffed a controversial attempt to bring the internet under the control of a United Nations body.

The World Conference on International Telecommunications in Dubai concluded with a humiliating defeat for the UN plan when the 80 countries, led by the United States, announced they would not sign the proposed new regulations.

Collapse of negotiations followed an eleventh hour, global campaign led by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) and the labour movement which joined forces with human rights, environmental and civil society groups to lobby against the reforms.

The ITUC even made a direct appeal to the United Nations Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon, to reject changes to cyber governance that labour leaders warned could allow repressive regimes to monitor and censor internet traffic under the guise of tightening cyber security.

More than 100,000 signatures were collected by the trade union campaign alone.

Reform of the so-called ITRs was proposed by the International Telecommunication Union, a little known arm of the UN which has long governed areas such as telephone dialling codes, mobile charging regimes and the assignation of telco satellite orbits.

The ITU argued that the treaties were last updated at a conference in Melbourne, Australia in 1988 and a re-definition of regulatory frameworks was urgently needed to acknowledge the internet and the communications revolution sparked by the digital age.

However in the lead up to the conference, the ITU was increasingly accused of formulating its proposed new treaty in secret, refusing even to post country-by-country proposals for public perusal or debate.

The secrecy also sparked alarm bells among global internet companies such as Google that marshalled their own considerable resources to battle the plan.

“We are the web” said Google in its campaign.

“A free and open world depends on a free and open internet. Governments alone, working behind closed doors, should not direct its future.”

One American university even created a website specifically for the upload of leaked conference documents from signatory nations.

The leaks ultimately consolidated the view that far from being innocuous updates to keep pace with technological change, nations including China, Saudi Arabia and Russia were pushing for new rules which could provide UN sanction for widespread state and political intervention over the internet.

Speaking at the Dubai conference, the US ambassador, Terry Kramer, told delegates that it was with “a heavy heart and a sense of missed opportunities” that the US would communicate its refusal to sign the agreement.

“The internet has given the world unimaginable economic and social benefit during these past 24 years. All, without UN regulation. We candidly cannot support an ITU Treaty that is inconsistent with the multi-stakeholder model of internet governance.”

The US decision was followed by myriad other nations including the UK, Australia, Sweden, Canada, Poland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Kenya, New Zealand, Costa Rica, Qatar, Egypt and the Czech Republic.

The outcome of the conference has been widely interpreted worldwide to represent a major loss for the ITU, exposing the body as being out of touch with the most technologically advanced sectors of global society.

Its desire for consensus, while worthy, appeared wordy and mired in 1980s-style conference bureaucracy.

Critics reported that the ITU leadership lacked a true understanding and acceptance of the speed of online communications tools and the increasing societal demand for transparency.

According to the General Secretary of the ITUC, Sharan Burrow, the campaign to stymie the UN plan was successful but netizens the world over cannot afford to be complacent.

“A very worrying new ITU standard on Deep Packet Inspection – the most intrusive technology for monitoring, controlling and even changing the content of internet traffic - was sneaked through by the ITU in a technical meeting in the days before the WCIT conference took place” she said.

“Since there was virtually no chance for civil society to look at this standard before it was rammed through, assessment of its possible implications is still ongoing. However it is absolutely clear that privacy and freedom of speech concerns were not properly addressed in the discussions and the outcome of this standard despite the concerns of countries such as Germany.”

Burrow said the Dubai conference also highlighted the stark division between those who support an open and unfettered internet and those who want internet communications to be controlled by governments, even if it is against the interests of freedom of speech.

“The conference in fact probably worsened those divisions, especially because of the lack of transparency before and even during the event. Governments which want to bring the internet under their control will not stop at Dubai,” she warned.

“Nationally, many of those nations will continue to clamp down on citizen’s net activities, and will continue to try and get UN cover for that. The debate will, without doubt, continue and it risks becoming ever more polarized. Vigilance and engagement from civil society will be needed to keep the internet open, so that human rights, labour, environment and other activists can do their work freely and safely. The agendas of the big internet corporations, which see the net purely in profit terms, also need to be watched closely.”

Burrow’s comments follow a call for greater civil society participation in debate from Frank La Rue, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the right to freedom of opinion and expression.

La Rue, who works in the Geneva-based Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said this was imperative to ensure legitimacy of global discussions on the future of internet:

“The only consensus reached so far on this matter is that the future of the internet has to be determined in a multi-stakeholder dialogue, where no positions can be imposed unilaterally."

"Global attention is required to ensure that no international or national regulations on the Internet pave the way for hampering freedom of opinion and expression through the internet.”

“Unfortunately, legitimate expression on the internet is already criminalized in various countries today. International efforts must reverse this trend, not reinforce it”.