ITU was founded previously as the International Telegraph Union before AG
Bell's phone was patented, no doubt the evolution of telecommunications and
the Internet puts ITU with its current behavior in the path of becoming
obsolete and extinct, but you can't discount many positive contributions
particularly from the standards section.
As the multistakeholder model and its associated processes, which is far
from perfect, continues to evolve, ITU must be part of the evolution. The
issue is that as an organization they must accommodate and realize that now
they are "part of it" and not "it" anymore.
There is also a big confusion and still lack of a clear consensus on what
"Internet governance" means or entitles, and many take it as "governing the
Internet," hence governments want a piece of the action, and the constant
and many times intended perception that the Internet is controlled by the
USG and its development and evolution is US centric, which I believe at
IETF we know since long time ago is not true. But many countries, and as
you well say those where there was or still is a single telecom operator
and controlled by government, see it that way.
About the countries that signed, not many but most did it with
reservations, and those that didn't sign probably represent 2/3 or more of
the telecom market/industry. An interesting observation after spending
countless hours following the meeting, some of the countries that were
pushing the discussion for a reference to the universal declaration of
human rights are the ones who don't care much about them, particularly in
respect to women, and on the other hand others complaining about
discrimination and restricted access to the Internet are the ones currently
filtering on the big pipes and have the Internet as the first thing on
their list to shutdown during internal turmoil.
The same forces that pushed at WCIT will keep doing the same thing on other
international fora to insist with their Internet governance agenda, the
ITRs will become effective in Jan 2015, two years, which on Internet time
is an eternity, and it will be only valid if those countries that signed
ratify the treaty. Meanwhile packets keep flowing, faster, bigger and with
more destinations, not bad for a packet switching network that was not
supposed to work. (During WCIT I was wondering, could you imagine doing the
webcast via X.25? )
I agree that it is not clear what the outcome of WCIT12 was, but something
that is clear is that ITU needs to evolve, or as Vint characterized them,
the "dinosaurs" will become extinct.
Cheers, Happy Holidays and great start for 2013
Jorge
http://about.me/jamodio
On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 12:26 AM, Phillip Hallam-Baker
<hallam(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com>wrote:
We seem to have missed a discussion on the outcome of the Dubai WCIT
conference, or rather the lack of one.
The end result was a treaty that 54 countries refused to sign. The
non-signatories being the major developed economies including UK, US,
Japan, Germany, Canada. Many of the signatories have signed with
reservations.
Back at the dawn of the computer industry, IBM was a very late entrant but
it quickly came to dominate the industry by building on the commercial base
it had established in punchcard tabulator machines. There was a real risk
that ITU might have managed to pull off something similar by convincing
governments that there needed to be a global regulatory body for
communications and that the ITU should be that body.
Instead they seem to have pulled off the equivalent of OS/@ and
microchannel architecture which were the marketing moves that were intended
to allow IBM to consolidate its hold on the PC industry but instead lead to
the rise of the Windows and the EISA bus clones.
It now seems reasonably clear that the ITU was an accident of history that
resulted from a particular set of economic and technical limitations. The
ITU was founded when each country had exactly one telephone company and
almost all were government controlled. One country one vote was an
acceptable approach in those days because there was only one telephone
company per country. The telephone companies were the only stakeholders
needed to implement a proposal.
The old telephone system is fading away. It is becoming an Internet
application just as the pocket calculator has become a desktop application.
And as it passes, the institutions it founded are looking for new roles.
There is no particular reason that this must happen.
The stakeholders in the Internet don't even align to countries. My own
employer is relatively small but was founded in the UK, moved its
headquarters to the US and has operations in a dozen more countries and
many times that number of affiliates. The same is even more true of the
likes of Google, Cisco, Apple, IBM, Microsoft etc.
A standards process is a two way negotiation. There are things that I want
other people to implement in their products and there are things that they
want me to implement in mine. The second one is actually rather more
important than the first. Having the process mediated by government
employees does not appear to add any value to the process to me and seems
to be a complete waste of time for them.
What is not a waste of time for governments is to look at the control
points in the technology infrastructures the emerging economy depends on.
Radio spectrum and geostationary orbit slots are finite resources and no
country can afford to be locked out of the new economy because of the lack
of access to them.
There are some control points in the Internet but they are rather less
critical than many imagine. IPv6 address space allocations, DNS zone
management and AIS numbers are arguably control points.
If we can eliminate the control point nature of those resources then the
essential government needs in Internet regulation will have been met and
the need for the ITU to be involved will disappear entirely. There are
still concerns that an ITU-like body could usefully address. A treaty
baring cyber-sabotage would be an important and useful effort that demands
a diplomatic approach.
--
Website: http://hallambaker.com/