WCIT outcome?

[Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]>]

We seem to have missed a discussion on the outcome of the Dubai WCIT
conference, or rather the lack of one.

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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Website: http://hallambaker.com/