At the end of 2012, a series of international events brought years of private dissension over the nature and future of the Internet into very public view. At the Budapest Conference on Cyberspace in October, and the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai, a Euroatlantic consensus on an international space for free exchange of information and views clashed with an alternative model backed by Russia, China and other states, advocating national control of information space and an entirely different approach to managing content. Debates which until that point had been conducted bilaterally or through such fora as the United Nations Group of Government Experts were aired in public, leading to at times acerbic exchanges. In Budapest, on 3–5 October, European nations stressed the human rights aspects of cybersecurity, based on their understanding of internet freedom as a fundamental right (Budapest, 2012), leading an exasperated Chinese representative to ask whether he was at a conference on cybersecurity or on human rights (Samuel, 2012). And in Dubai, a proposed new set of International Telecommunication Regulations (ITR) struggled to gain the support of many of the 151 delegate nations, after strong opposition from Euroatlantic states led by a formidable US delegation (ITU, 2012).