Re: Last Call: Modern Global Standards Paradigm

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE read what the proposal is. The proposal being put forth 
is not that the ITU-T wants to write Internet standards. The proposal being put 
forth is that ONLY ITU-T standards will be the *legal* standards accepted by 
signatory nations.

At best, this would be a repeat of GOSIP in the U.S., where the law was the 
U.S. government could only buy OSI products. The issue there was the private 
sector was still free to buy what it wanted and DoD did not really follow the 
rules and bought TCP/IP instead. TCP/IP in the market killed OSI.

The difference here is some countries may take their ITR obligations literally 
and ban products that use non-ITU protocols. Could one go to jail for using 
TCP/IP or HTTP? That has an admittedly small, but not insignificant possibility 
of happening. Worse yet, having treaties that obligates countries to ban 
non-ITU protocols does virtually guarantee a balkanization of the Internet into 
open and free networking and controlled and censored networking.

Just as it is not fair to say that if the ITU-T gets its way the world will 
end, it is also not fair to say there is no risk to allowing the ITU-T to get a 
privileged, NON-VOLUNTARY, position in the communications world.

On Aug 10, 2012, at 9:49 AM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:

I think the point needs to be made that standards organizations can
only advise and not dictate.

There is really no risk that ITU-T is going to end up in control of
the technical standards that are implemented by the likes of
Microsoft, Cisco or Google, let alone Apache, Mozilla and the folk on
SourceForge and Github.

The key defect in the ITU-T view of the world is that it is populated
by people who think that they are making decisions that matter. In
practice deciding telephone system standards right now is about as
important as the next revision of the FORTRAN standard, it is not
completely irrelevant but matters a lot more to the people in the
meetings than anyone else.

The strength of the IETF negotiating position comes from the fact that
we cannot dictate terms to anyone. The consensus that matters is not
just consensus among the people developing the specification document
but consensus among the people who are expected to act on it.

ITU-T can certainly set themselves up a Friendship Games if they like
[1]. But they can't force people to show up, let alone implement their
'requirements'.

From a censorship busting point of view, the best thing that can
happen for us is for the states attempting to gain control of the net
in their country to attempt to standardize their approach. Much easier
to circumvent fixed blocks than the current moving target.


[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendship_Games


On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 11:19 AM, IETF Chair <chair(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org> 
wrote:


The IETF Chair and the IAB Chair intend to sign the Affirmation
of the Modern Global Standards Paradigm, which can be found
here:

http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/84/slides/slides-84-iesg-opsplenary-15.pdf

An earlier version was discussed in plenary, and the IAB Chair called
for comments on the IETF mail list.  This version includes changes
that address those comments.

Th IETF 84 Administrative plenary minutes have been posted, so that
discussion can be reviewed if desired.  The minutes are here:

http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/84/minutes/minutes-84-iesg-opsplenary

On 8 August 2012, the IEEE Standards Association Board of Governors
approved this version of the document.  The approval process is
underway at the W3C as well.

The IETF Chair and the IAB Chair intend to sign the Affirmation in the
next few weeks. Please send strong objections to the iab(_at_)iab(_dot_)org
and the ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org mailing lists by 2012-08-24.

Thank you,
 Russ Housley
 IETF Chair




-- 
Website: http://hallambaker.com/

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