On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 5:43 AM, Jorge Amodio <jmamodio@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
ITU was founded previously as the International Telegraph Union before AG Bell's phone was patented, no doubt the evolution of telecommunications and the Internet puts ITU with its current behavior in the path of becoming obsolete and extinct, but you can't discount many positive contributions particularly from the standards section.
The original purpose was to stop consumers from reducing their telegraph bills by adopting codes.
As the multistakeholder model and its associated processes, which is far from perfect, continues to evolve, ITU must be part of the evolution. The issue is that as an organization they must accommodate and realize that now they are "part of it" and not "it" anymore.
ITU must change if it is to survive. But it was merely a means to an end. There is no reason that the ITU 'must' be kept in existence for its own sake.
Tim Berners-Lee has on numerous W3C AC meetings reminded people about the X-Windows consortium that did its job and then shut down.
There is also a big confusion and still lack of a clear consensus on what "Internet governance" means or entitles, and many take it as "governing the Internet," hence governments want a piece of the action, and the constant and many times intended perception that the Internet is controlled by the USG and its development and evolution is US centric, which I believe at IETF we know since long time ago is not true. But many countries, and as you well say those where there was or still is a single telecom operator and controlled by government, see it that way.
Many parts of the world do not understand the difference between a standard and a regulation or law. Which is why they see control points that don't worry us. I do not see a problem with the US control of the IPv6 address supply because I know that it is very very easy to defeat that control. ICANN is a US corporation and the US government can obviously pass laws that prevent ICANN/IANA from releasing address blocks that would reach certain countries no matter what Crocker et. al. say to the contrary. But absent a deployed BGP security infrastructure, that has no effect since the rest of the planet is not going to observe a US embargo.
I can see that and most IETF-ers can see that. But the diplomats representing Russia and China cannot apparently. Which is probably not surprising given the type of education their upper classes (sorry children of party bosses) receive.
About the countries that signed, not many but most did it with reservations, and those that didn't sign probably represent 2/3 or more of the telecom market/industry. An interesting observation after spending countless hours following the meeting, some of the countries that were pushing the discussion for a reference to the universal declaration of human rights are the ones who don't care much about them, particularly in respect to women, and on the other hand others complaining about discrimination and restricted access to the Internet are the ones currently filtering on the big pipes and have the Internet as the first thing on their list to shutdown during internal turmoil.
Funny thing about treaties is that the governments that signed the UDHR with great cynicism sixty years ago started to actually discuss it a generation later. Now two generations on it is what the entire political class has grown up with and it is accepted as something the country has committed to.
A similar thing happened with the first ban on chemical weapons which actually preceded the first large scale use in WWI. But in the aftermath the victors realized that breaking the ban could be used as the basis for a war crimes prosecution. Almost a century later the ban is pretty effective. The UK is currently hearing a case in the high court arising from the use of torture in Kenya. Pinochet was put on trial for his crimes in the end.
The same forces that pushed at WCIT will keep doing the same thing on other international fora to insist with their Internet governance agenda, the ITRs will become effective in Jan 2015, two years, which on Internet time is an eternity, and it will be only valid if those countries that signed ratify the treaty. Meanwhile packets keep flowing, faster, bigger and with more destinations, not bad for a packet switching network that was not supposed to work. (During WCIT I was wondering, could you imagine doing the webcast via X.25? )
Two years may be longer than some of the unstable regimes have left. I can't see Syria holding out that long and nor it appears can Russia. The next dominoes in line are the ex-Soviet republics round the Caspian sea where having the opposition boiled alive is still considered an acceptable means of control.
I agree that it is not clear what the outcome of WCIT12 was, but something that is clear is that ITU needs to evolve, or as Vint characterized them, the "dinosaurs" will become extinct.
I think that what we should be doing is to help the ITU become extinct by eliminating the technical control points that would make ITU oversight of Internet governance necessary.
This does not need to entail a great deal of technical changes but does require that we accept that they do have a valid interest.
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