Re: The conference broke down for good reason
"The treaty allows governments to inspect the contents of Internet traffic"
Which treaty, the existing one or the proposed new one? The current treaty was conceived mostly in a phone-and-fax era. By the current treaty it must be OK for governments to examine content in their own jurisdictions as long as it complies with local laws (I would be flabbergasted to the contrary, otherwise international calls could not be wiretapped, and all western governments do this, hopefully under judicial review).
So clearly by the current treaty it's already OK for, for example, China to inspect content on any internet server that's physically located in China. So I still fail to see what the difference is and why the backlash.
My suspicion is that the authoritarian states want to get their intrusivenes enshrined in the treaty, not because they won't keep on snooping either way, but to give them some sort of moral high ground. The western states don't want to relenquish their own perceived moral high ground, and Google et al want to be able to feed massive volumes of data around without being forced to pay more for access, or see their traffic being bumped down in priority if real-time data like VOIP gets priority.
And no-one wants to admit their real agenda so they're all blustering about freedom