On Wed, Jan 2, 2013 at 7:33 AM, SM <sm(_at_)resistor(_dot_)net> wrote:
At 13:08 31-12-2012, John Day wrote:
jumped all over. Generally, ITU meetings require unanimity to have a
consensus. This
There seems to be different definitions of consensus; each body has its
own meaning for that word.
;-) Why is that daunting? ;-) I hear that excuse often. If we had had
that attitude when we started this effort 40 years ago. We would still be
patching the PSTN. There would be no Internet. Do you think the Internet
was a success because we convinced IBM and AT&T it was a good idea?!! I am
sorry to see that the younger generation is so faint of heart. Can't take
a little challenge!
Nowadays it is called being pragmatic. The little challenge might be
taking on the legacy. I wonder how many fairy tales are part of the
legacy. :-)
I think the reason is rather different. Back in 1970 the only way to get
things done was to ignore the regulations that prohibited what you want to
do. I remember when a modem came with an 'acoustic coupler' because
connecting it directly to the phone line was illegal. Many of those
regulations came from the authorities attempting to maintain wiretap
capabilities and passive eavesdropping capabilities. Plessey System X used
in the UK was designed to allow any telephone handset to be used to bug the
room it was in which is why the UK authorities made it illegal to buy a
non-Plessey phone and plug it in.
Today the Internet has quite a few supporters that have a place at the top
table of government. Tim Berners-Lee can pick up the phone and talk right
to the top of the UK government, that is what being a Companion of Honor is
actually about.
That does not mean that regulations have to be considered binding. It does
however mean that ignoring them is not necessarily the only or the best
option.
At 16:29 01-01-2013, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
ITU-T has absolutely no control over the Internet unless member
governments decide to give it that power. The importance of the protests
was that they prevented the US and EU governments from agreeing to cede
that power.
That might explain the the press releases about the WCIT discussions.
That and Microsoft being on the warpath after the NSA hacked their internal
PKI with a cryptanalytic attack to deploy the Flame malware.
At 17:11 01-01-2013, John Day wrote:
doing some of these as well. The UN is a very weak confederation, so the
question to consider is what aspects of *telecommunication* (not defense
or commerce or anything else) does it make sense that there should be
international regulation (or binding agreements)?
Y.2001 covers topics which affect commerce (I am ignoring other angles).
There is leeway for expanding the scope beyond a narrow definition of
telecommunication. Everybody will lobby for their pet project as there is
an opportunity to do so.
There are government interests in telecommunications, not all of them are
illegitimate.
Maintaining the ability to crack other governments confidential
communications now seems to me to have far more downsides than up. Using
the technology developed to break the Enigma codes to compromise
communications of other governments might have been a good thing if it had
only been used against the Warsaw pact (East Germany used actual Enigma
machines right up to the point the story was made public). But they didn't
limit themselves to that and the main business of the NSA from 1952 through
1976 or so was breaching the communications systems of US allies so that
they could engineer a coup when it suited them. It is probably not an
accident that the coups stopped happening in the mid 70s right around the
time electronic cipher systems replaced the mechanical ones.
But beyond the illegitimate concerns, there are some important legitimate
ones. In particular a country like France has to be concerned that if it
gets into a trade dispute with the US that the US administration can't
force it into submission by threatening to cut off its connection to the
Internet or any other essential communication technology.
This is not a theoretical consideration. The reason that there is no
central repository for RFID product identifiers is that the French
government decided that the proposals on the table would give the US the
ability to control the sale of French products by ordering the maintainer
of the registry not to publish them. That would effectively make it
impossible to sell them through the electronic supply chain. So they made
sure that the registry did not happen.
Ensuring that no country establishes a technological control point like
that is a legitimate government interest and an essential one. That is the
real reason that there is so much politics surrounding ICANN.
So one option would be for ITU-T to refocus its energies on protecting the
legitimate government interest of preventing domination. But it is not
necessarily the best one. A better option would be to design the technology
to factor out the control points so that the technology is neutral on that
point.
--
Website: http://hallambaker.com/