Re: WCIT outcome?

Interesting as always.

At 9:14 AM -0500 1/2/13, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 2, 2013 at 7:33 AM, SM 
> <<mailto:sm(_at_)resistor(_dot_)net>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.
Huh?  The ARPANET was not ignoring any regulations.  Nor was the work 
at NPL or IRIA.
> I remember when a modem came with an 'acoustic coupler' because 
> connecting it directly to the phone line was illegal.
No, there was nothing illegal about it. The reason for acoustic 
couplers was that the RJ-11 had been invented yet and it was a pain 
to unscrew the box on the wall and re-wire every time you wanted to 
connect.
Ever see the French equivalent of RJ-11?  Good grief.  The French 
phone system must have carried a 100 amps!
It may have been illegal in some countries but certainly not in the US.

> 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.
While interesting, I am still not sure what this response has to do 
with the topic.
> 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.
Errr, there were several coups last year.  Do you mean US initiated 
coups?  Are you sure there haven't been any? ;-)  I really doubt that 
that was the reason that they seem to fall off.  The success rate of 
the ones they did do was not exactly great and the fallout was often 
not worth the trouble.
Treaties on these sorts of things are pointless.  Agencies like NSA 
or NKVD aren't going to be bound by them anyway.
> 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.
Then the RFID folks had written a lousy standard.  It is pretty easy 
to design a decentralized name space methodology, such that no one 
can control the whole thing.  Regulating to protect stupidity 
interferes with Darwin.  ;-)
> 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.
Very much agreed.  Which I believe we know how to do.  (But that too 
has its downside.)
> --
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