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.
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