Phillip,
The reason that rule is useful is that just as it is ridiculous for the US representative to the ITU to attempt to convey the positions of Comcast and Google, it is no more practical for one person to represent the position of Cisco or Microsoft.
Then I take it from this comment that you believe that all forms
of representative government (and reaching agreements) are
ridiculous?
Surely you don't believe that pure democracy will work?
That myth had been dispelled 250 years ago.
The process of a representative form for creating agreements
seems to be (as flawed as it is) about the best we have come up
with.
Wrt its application in standards outside the ITU it works the
same way. When a voluntary standards organization organizes by
country, it is to give voice to the small companies as well as the
Ciscos and Microsofts. The big guys can send 10s of people
(which represents a different problem) to meetings all over the
world. The little companies can't afford that but they have an
interest. Providing the means for them to agree on what their
interest is and to make it heard is equally important.
It sounds like you are arguing for the hegemony of the robber
barons moved to the 21stC.
Where the problem comes in is when you have a proposal that requires the active support and participation of stakeholders like VeriSign. When I told the IETF that DNSSEC would be deployed in dot.com if and only if the opt-in proposal was accepted, I was stating the official position of a stakeholder whose participation was essential if DNSSEC was going to be deployed.
It was a really minor change but the reason it was blocked was one individual had the crazy idea that blocking deployment of DNSSEC would cause VeriSign to lose dotcom. He was not the only person with that idea but he was the only person in a position to wreck all progress in the IETF if he didn't get his way.
For projects like IPv6 the standards development process needs to be better at identifying the necessary stakeholders and ensuring that enough essential requirements of enough stakeholders are met. Otherwise we end up with yet another Proposed Standard RFC that everyone ignores.
I would disagree slightly. It is not task of the SDO to
identify the necessary stakeholders but to ensure all of the
stakeholder are represented at all levels. The problems you
describe above result from breaking that rule.
The main fault of IETF culture is the idea that the Internet is waiting to receive everything that we toss over the wall. That is not how I view the utility of the process. If I want to have fun designing something I invite at most five people to the brainstorming session then one person writes it up. The only reason to have more then five people is to seek buy-in from other stakeholders.
Wrt some of your previous comments, I would agree. When
phone companies were owned by governments (remember this was often
both the provider and manufacturer parts of the business) , there
might have been a reason for ITU to be a treaty organization. I
can see that for wireless government involvement is still necessary.
However, given that providers are now private (often international)
businesses it is hard to see wrt standards setting how the topics
covered by ITU is any different than any other voluntary standards
organization.
Over the 30+ years I have been involved in standards it is pretty
clear that the bottom-up nature of standards creates standards bodies
among like-minded groups of people. This seems to be the natural
occurrence. I see no problem with this. There seems to be
a like-minded group of people who gravitate toward the kinds of
problems the ITU has traditionally dealt with. Fine. The market
will decide whether or not it wants to use them as it does with all
standards.
The question is what, if anything, is there left relating to
wireline communication that requires agreement among *governments*?
I can't think of much.
One other note: We are very sloppy in our use of the term
"Internet." And the ITU hierarchy and their allies have been
skillfully using this. We are not distinguishing clearly between
the internet itself and the *users* (or is it uses?) of the Internet.
It appears that most of what they want to regulate or constrain is the
"uses." This is equivalent to saying that they want to
regulate what is said over the phone. Clearly outside their
purview. But *we* act like it isn't. By not clearly
distinguishing between the two in the discussions, we have already
given up considerable ground.
Take care,
John Day
--
Website: http://hallambaker.com/