--On Friday, August 10, 2012 15:52 -0700 Eric Burger <eburger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > 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. >... Eric, In the interest of understanding our position in this area as well as possible, I don't think the facts support "TCP/IP in the market killed OSI" except in a vary narrow sense. It would be much more accurate to say that OSI self-destructed and the TCP/IP was then available as a working technology that satisfied most of the relevant requirements. The self-destruction resulted from some combination of untested specifications that weren't quite implementable in an interoperable ways, promises that things would be ready two years in the future (a sliding target for more than a decade), gradually growing awareness of excessive complexity and too many options, and possibly other factors. It is worth remembering that in the most critical part of that period, the IETF wasn't developing/pushing TCP/IP in the marketplace but had its face firmly immersed in the KoolAid trough: we even had a TCP/IP transition area into the 90s. I might even suggest that we have abandoned the principle of simple and clear protocols with few options and, in a few cases, adopted the "reach consensus by giving all sides their own set of options" model that was arguably a large component of what made the OSI suite vunerable to self-destruction. The once-legendary speed with which we could do things has also yielded to a larger and more process-encumbered IETF. Today, we may have more to fear from ourselves than from the ITU. None of that has anything to do with whether the proposed statement is appropriate. > 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. What happened last time was that a number of countries banned their communications carriers from carrying TCP/IP (or anything else) that didn't run over ITU protocols. Unsurprisingly, those bans were fairly effective in countries that were serious about them -- and that list of countries was not limited to out-of-the-way developing nations. Whether that would be realistic today is another question. The Internet is fairly entrenched, things have not gone well for countries who have tried to cut it off once it is well established, and some experts have even suggested that excessive restrictions on the Internet might constitute a non-tariff trade barrier. Relative to the latter and in these fragile economic times, one can only speculate on whether countries are more afraid of trade limitations and sanctions than of the ITU. More important, as Phillip (with whom I generally disagree on these sorts of matters) has pointed out, there is a long and rather effective history of what countries do when a UN body's behavior operates significantly against their national interests: they refuse to sign the treaties and, in severe cases, withdraw and stop paying dues and assessments. Remembering that there is no such thing as a Sector Member from a non-Member country, someone who was very cynical about these things might even suggest that the most effective way to get the ITU out of the Internet would be to have them pass these measures in their most extreme form with the medium-term result of wrecking their budget and, with it, their ability to function. Or one might speculate that is the reason why ITU's senior leadership appears to have largely backed away from the most extreme of those proposals. > 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. A form of that risk exists whether such treaties are created or not. If a country considers it sufficiently necessary to its national interest to withdraw from the Internet and adopt a different and non-interoperable set of protocols, it will almost certainly do so with or without approval from Geneva. I believe we should make that process as easy as possible for them, designing things so that they can't hurt others when they do so. Countries who isolate themselves from contemporary communications technologies have not been treated well by history, economics, or their own populations. We also should not discount some possible advantages: for example, the withdrawal of a few selected countries from the Internet and enforced requirements there to use only non-interoperable protocols could do wonders to reduce the amount of malicious spam introduced into the network. :-( > 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. Certainly there are risks. And certainly we should be aware of those risks and think through the various strategies we and others might adopt. But let's not confuse ourselves with specious arguments about disaster scenarios. Again, it seems to me that none of the above has much to do with whether this statement should be issued. john