Pete sez:
I agree. The purpose of the liaison should be to keep the IETF
informed about the goings-on of the ITU. Insofar as the actions of
any other standards or commercial organization might have a
significant impact on the decisions of the working group (e.g.,
knowledge that a particular company has IPR, or that another
standards organization is deploying something that would conflict
with a WG proposal), having an official representative of the ITU
bring that information is fine.
this is just what was intended here
the reason behind this at all is that we have had cases of people
representing to IETF WGs that they know what is going on in an ITU-T
SG but it turned out that in some cases they did not know and thus
mislead the listeners about what was going on in the ITU-T - this
was meant as a way for the ITU-T management to say, in effect "he
knows what is going on" - this was not intended to mean that any
such designated person carries any more weight in IETF WG deliberations
than does any other individual - but as Pete points out, it can
be useful to actually know what another group is or is not doing.
Scott