Interesting, why is it causing quite a stir? Is it because they are trying to allocate a large pool of addresses?
ITU is trying to stay relevant and justify its existence, over the years they have been loosing their grip over telecom and networking standards. This last move to grab a chunk of IPv6 address space and become a registry does not have any valid justification and some of the reasons they have been crying out load at the IGF and ICANN meetings, all circle around ICANN's monopoly and USG control of some network resources. There is an "ecosystem" that grew up around these organizations where too many people/corporations are milking from and everybody wants to be in control of (or have a part of it) the cows. I don't know if already happened but ethernet (local, metro, wide) and TCP/IP are probably today the most deployed data communication technologies, add VoIP, keep few of the encoding and mobile (for a while) standards and I guess nobody needs ITU-T anymore, or do we ? Cheers Jorge