On 01/01/2013 18:32, John Day wrote: ... >> Not only tariffs. Historically, it was national enforcement of >> international >> regulations set by CCITT (now known as ITU-T) that prevented >> interconnection >> of leased lines**. > > But creating a VPN with in an international carrier that crossed > national boundaries would not fall under that rule? Actually neither > would a VPN operating over a couple of carriers that crossed national > boundaries, would it? That depended on how the various national monopolists chose to interpret the rules. In Switzerland we were particularly affected by the fact that the PTT monopoly was a specific line item in the federal Constitution. In the US, you had the benefit of Judge Greene. >> This is an arcane point today, but if CERN hadn't been >> able to use its status as an international organization to bypass that >> restriction in the 1980s, it's unlikely that TBL and Robert Cailliau >> would >> ever have been able to propagate the web. It's even unlikely that Phill >> would have been able to access Usenet newsgroups while on shift as a grad >> student on a CERN experiment. > > ;-) Actually what they don't know won't hurt them. ;-) We were moving > files from CERN to Argonne in the 70s through the 360/95 at Rutherford > over the ARPANET. Not exactly the way you want to do it but 15 years > later I am sure it was upgraded a bit. This would probably have counted as a store-and-forward network, which was exempted in many countries. >> Also, it is exactly because ITU was in charge of resource allocations >> such as radio spectrum and top-level POTS dialling codes that it was >> a very plausible potential home for IANA in 1997-8, before ICANN was >> created. Some of the ITU people who were active in that debate were just >> as active in the preparation for WCIT in 2012. > > Yea, this one is more dicey. Although I think there is an argument that > says that you need ccoperation among providers about assignment, but I > don't see why governments need to be involved. When phone companies > were owned by governments, then it made sense. But phone companies are > owned by governments any more. > > That doesn't leave much does it? (Not a facetious question, I am asking!) Indeed. But I think you'll find that in general, the countries that signed the WCIT treaty are those that still have some semblance of a government- controlled PTT monopoly. On 01/01/2013 18:36, Alessandro Vesely wrote: > Was D.1 to ease wire tapping? No. It was all about preserving the lucrative PTT monopolies. On 01/01/2013 22:13, Jaap Akkerhuis wrote: > In the early eigthies, after consulting with the telecom authorithy > in the Netherlands we got the green light to move data for third > parties, and thus the (then uucp based) EUnet was born. Exactly, and EARN (European BITNET) was just the same. > The green > light was given in the anticipation of the libiralization of the > EU telcom market. Exactly, and the 1988 revision of regulation D.1 was closely related to the general move toward telecom liberalization. As I said - this stuff *matters* for the Internet (both historically and for the future). Brian