My sense is that the ITU has played with such ideas in the past, and the governments have for the most part found it in their interest to not screw with the Internet. Do you have any specific recommendations on how to keep that true? On Dec 18, 2009, at 12:05 PM, Bill Woodcock wrote:
On Fri, 18 Dec 2009, Dobbins, Roland wrote:
The decision on that will mostly be made in mid-March. By whom?
A working group of the ITU Council.
The RIRs aren't just going to say, "OK, ITU folks, it's all yours," heh.
Indeed not. However, the RIRs don't have a voice in the decision. This is an intergovernmental decision within the ITU Council. If the ITU Council were to decide that it's a good idea for the ITU to take over IP addressing and break it, they would then take it to the ITU Plenipotentiary. At that point, it could become policy of the treaty organization, and then member country governments would become bound to support the policy in their own legal structures. Odds are that would be expressed in laws similar to that of Korea, where it's illegal for network operators to get IP addresses from APNIC, their RIR, and they must instead get them from KRNIC, a Korean governmental agency. Which, in turn, proxies their votes in the APNIC elections, but that's another story. :-)
-Bill