[afnog] Fwd: Re: ITU debate

[Alan Levin]

sorry about the cross post, I thought this would be useful to the 
discussion.
	
Begin forwarded message:

> From: Timo Kiravuo <Timo.Kiravuo at nixu.com>
> Date: 19 November 2004 09:56:36 GMT+02:00
> To: chapter-delegates at lists.isoc.org
> Subject: Re: [chapter-delegates] Re: [pignet] ccTLD association
>>
>>> www.itu.int/ITU-T/tsb-director/itut-wsis/files/zhao-netgov01.doc
>
> This paper can be summarized as: ITU has a hundred years of
> communications experience, ITU is good at this, ITU is recognized by
> all governments, Internet is communications - therefore ITU should
> govern the Internet.
>
> From the governments', traditional telcos' and ITU's point of view it
> would make very much sense for ITU to govern the Internet.
>
> Domain names and IP addresses are not actually the main issue. ITU is
> perfectly capable and experienced in such matters. Moving national
> domain name administration from some other organization to the
> government will disturb status quo, but most likely it will not cause
> any great changes. Many countries have done it without riots and
> deaths.
>
> The main issue is what happens after ITU has "Internet governance".
> Since this paper already addresses the issue of infrastructure
> protection, we would very likely start to see reliability requirements
> for Internet infrastructure, comparable to current telephony
> requirements. Which is not completely bad, but most likely they would
> be existing telephony requirements processed with search-and-replace.
>
> Here the main problem with existing ITU knowledge would be the
> differences between the telephone system and the Internet. The
> telephone network is one big machine, which provides services. The
> Internet is a communications network, which has no services. On the
> Internet the services are provided by the users and the network is
> used to connect the users to the services. In practice the local ISP
> might store your e-mail and host your web pages, but the architecture
> absolutely differentiates these. I am not sure that most of the actors
> in ITU can comprehend the concept of services not being part of the
> network, but being provided by the users instead.
>
> Further on the ITU might take the view, that to protect the Internet
> infrastructure this current profiliation of wild un-standardized
> protcols can not continue. Instead there would be an open process for
> protocol standardization before implementation. All ISPs wiould be
> required to filter un-standardized protocols from the traffic.
>
> This would basically stop all development on the Internet technology.
> Most application layer protocols have been developed by small teams,
> deployed on ad-hoc basis and only standardized after they have been
> proven to be worthy. This process is very valuable and it must be
> protected.
>
> This is in my opinion the main reason why I would not be happy to see
> ITU control the Internet. Especially as ITU has a track record of
> developing and standardizing un-tested protocols and being wery slow,
> taking years and decades to do what could be done in months.
>
> So, why should we discard the currently working governance structure,
> which operates reasonably well? Especially as the current system is
> reasonably open, recognizes that the individual users have a right for
> an opinion, which has not been general a tradition in
> telecommunications and supports the development of new technologies.
>
> kiravuo
> ISOC Finland
>
>
>
---------------------------------------------
Alan Levin
Tel: +27 21 409-7997