Dear all,
I have been following this discussing since and I'm learning a lot. Many
thanks to all contributors and special Thanks to
Phillip Hallam-Baker who initiated it.
Happy and Prosperous New Year 2013 to the IETF Family!
Best Regards,
Victor Ndonnang.
On 02/01/2013 02:11, John Day wrote:
Re: WCIT outcome?
At 7:29 PM -0500 1/1/13, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
On Tue, Jan 1, 2013 at 3:31 AM, Brian E Carpenter
mailto:brian.e.carpen...@gmail.com>> 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:jeanj...@comcast.net
<mailto:jeanj...@comcast.net>>jeanj...@comcast.net
<mailto:jeanj...@comcast.net>> 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.
I have heard tell (dropping into the vernacular) that to many, the web
was just another application like Gopher until NCSA put a browser on
it. The question is what would have happened had they put the browser
on top of something else?
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.
Agreed but the treaty organization was the WTO and another one I can't
remember right now! ;-) As long as the problem was punted to them one
was okay. I just don't see how ITU has purview over *uses* of the
network. (Nor am I willing to easily cede that.)
This is why it is not a good idea to go along with the ITU
beads-on-a-string model. By doing so, it already clouds the picture
and gives up ground.
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.
True, but what effect does this have? The US did burn up a lot of
good will for no good reason and then botched the job on top of it.
** 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
<http://www.itu.int/rec/dologin_pub.asp?lang=e&id=T-REC-D.1-198811-S%21%21PDF-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
