Re: WCIT outcome?

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

On Tue, Jan 1, 2013 at 3:31 AM, Brian E Carpenter <
[e-mail]> wrote:

> I'v been hesitating to join in here because this seems distinctly OT
> to me, but there are some basics that need to be understood:
>
> On 31/12/2012 21:08, John Day wrote:
> > At 1:05 PM -0500 12/31/12, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
> >> On Mon, Dec 31, 2012 at 9:51 AM, John Day
> >> <<mailto:[e-mail]>[e-mail]> wrote:
>
> ...
> >> MPs and Congressmen are elected decision makers. ITU participants can
> >> make decisions but they are not binding on anyone and only have effect
> >> if people like me choose to implement them.
> >
> > This was my point. The standards part of ITU is just like any other
> > standards organization. But there are other things it does which are not
> > like this, e.g. spectrum allocation.  There are other aspects with
> > respect to tariffs that are binding on signatories.
>
> 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**. 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.
>

I was never a grad student at CERN, I was a CERN Fellow. And I had access
to USENET from DESY but we were routing it through CERN at first.

Now it is an interesting question as to what might have happened if the Web
had not expanded as it did when it did. But one of the reasons that it
expanded was that there were a lot of parties involved who were actively
wanting to blow up the CITT tariffs and establish a free market. That was
HMG policy at any rate.



> 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.
>

When the big question facing DNS admin was legal liability in the various
domain name disputes that were proliferating, having a treaty organization
with diplomatic immunity actually had some advantages.

But that was a very different time diplomatically. That was before Putin
was ordering assassinations on the streets of London with Polonium laced
teapots and before the colour revolutions rolled back the Russian sphere of
influence. And our side was hardly blameless, it was the US invasion of
Iraq that poisoned the well in the first place.



> ** CCITT document D.1. The 1988 version includes the restrictions on
> use of leased lines:
>
> http://www.itu.int/rec/dologin_pub.asp?lang=e&id=T-REC-D.1-198811-S!!PDF-E&type=items
>
> The 1991 version is much less restrictive, but it remains the case that
> interconnections are all "subject to national laws" and that is the basis
> for all national limitations on the Internet today. Nevertheless, the 1991
> revision of D.1 was absolutely essential for the Internet to grow
> internationally.
>

The idea of fixing the contract terms in an international treaty is utterly
bizarre.



> It would be foolish to imagine that the Internet is in some way immune
> to ITU-T regulations, which is why the effort to defeat the more radical
> WCIT proposals was so important.
>

While technically true, I think your wording is misleading.

ITU-T has absolutely no control over the Internet unless member governments
decide to give it that power. The importance of the protests was that they
prevented the US and EU governments from agreeing to cede that power.

Within the US government there are different factions. What was important
was to ensure that the pro-control faction did not get the chance to agree
to give the store away.


-- 
Website: http://hallambaker.com/