Phillip,
The reason that rule is useful is that just as it is ridiculous for
the US representative to the ITU to attempt to convey the positions
of Comcast and Google, it is no more practical for one person to
represent the position of Cisco or Microsoft.
Then I take it from this comment that you believe that all forms of
representative government (and reaching agreements) are ridiculous?
Surely you don't believe that pure democracy will work? That myth
had been dispelled 250 years ago.
The process of a representative form for creating agreements seems to
be (as flawed as it is) about the best we have come up with.
Wrt its application in standards outside the ITU it works the same
way. When a voluntary standards organization organizes by country,
it is to give voice to the small companies as well as the Ciscos and
Microsofts. The big guys can send 10s of people (which represents a
different problem) to meetings all over the world. The little
companies can't afford that but they have an interest. Providing the
means for them to agree on what their interest is and to make it
heard is equally important.
It sounds like you are arguing for the hegemony of the robber barons
moved to the 21stC.
Where the problem comes in is when you have a proposal that requires
the active support and participation of stakeholders like VeriSign.
When I told the IETF that DNSSEC would be deployed in
<http://dot.com>dot.com if and only if the opt-in proposal was
accepted, I was stating the official position of a stakeholder whose
participation was essential if DNSSEC was going to be deployed.
It was a really minor change but the reason it was blocked was one
individual had the crazy idea that blocking deployment of DNSSEC
would cause VeriSign to lose dotcom. He was not the only person with
that idea but he was the only person in a position to wreck all
progress in the IETF if he didn't get his way.
For projects like IPv6 the standards development process needs to be
better at identifying the necessary stakeholders and ensuring that
enough essential requirements of enough stakeholders are met.
Otherwise we end up with yet another Proposed Standard RFC that
everyone ignores.
I would disagree slightly. It is not task of the SDO to identify the
necessary stakeholders but to ensure all of the stakeholder are
represented at all levels. The problems you describe above result
from breaking that rule.
The main fault of IETF culture is the idea that the Internet is
waiting to receive everything that we toss over the wall. That is
not how I view the utility of the process. If I want to have fun
designing something I invite at most five people to the
brainstorming session then one person writes it up. The only reason
to have more then five people is to seek buy-in from other
stakeholders.
Wrt some of your previous comments, I would agree. When phone
companies were owned by governments (remember this was often both the
provider and manufacturer parts of the business) , there might have
been a reason for ITU to be a treaty organization. I can see that
for wireless government involvement is still necessary. However,
given that providers are now private (often international) businesses
it is hard to see wrt standards setting how the topics covered by ITU
is any different than any other voluntary standards organization.
Over the 30+ years I have been involved in standards it is pretty
clear that the bottom-up nature of standards creates standards bodies
among like-minded groups of people. This seems to be the natural
occurrence. I see no problem with this. There seems to be a
like-minded group of people who gravitate toward the kinds of
problems the ITU has traditionally dealt with. Fine. The market will
decide whether or not it wants to use them as it does with all
standards.
The question is what, if anything, is there left relating to wireline
communication that requires agreement among *governments*? I can't
think of much.
One other note: We are very sloppy in our use of the term
"Internet." And the ITU hierarchy and their allies have been
skillfully using this. We are not distinguishing clearly between the
internet itself and the *users* (or is it uses?) of the Internet. It
appears that most of what they want to regulate or constrain is the
"uses." This is equivalent to saying that they want to regulate what
is said over the phone. Clearly outside their purview. But *we* act
like it isn't. By not clearly distinguishing between the two in the
discussions, we have already given up considerable ground.
Take care,
John Day
--
Website: <http://hallambaker.com/>http://hallambaker.com/