Please consider signing this petition:
Please learn a little more about the ITU before doing so. There is more to the ITU than the dysfunctional ITU-T, and the political fallout from the US being seen as a big rich bully taking its wallet and going home is likely not worth the trivial amount of money involved. -- Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly
On Jan 12, 2013, at 8:17 PM, John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:
Please learn a little more about the ITU before doing so. There is more to the ITU than the dysfunctional ITU-T, and the political fallout from the US being seen as a big rich bully taking its wallet and going home is likely not worth the trivial amount of money involved.
On that I would agree. ITU-D and ITU-R do a lot of good work. ITU-T does reasonable work, for the most part, in regulatory matters, which neither the IGF nor the IETF address. Frankly, if the ITU gets shut down, ITU-R, ITU-D, and the regulatory component of ITU-T will have to be re-created to accomplish those roles. Where we have travelled in circles with the ITU is in conflicting technical standardization and in the desire of ITU-T staff to take over certain functions from ICANN and the NRO. Shutting down the ITU would be in effect discarding the baby with the bathwater. http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-R/pages/default.aspx http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Pages/default.aspx
On Jan 12, 2013, at 9:04 PM, "Fred Baker (fred)" <fred@cisco.com> wrote:
ITU-D and ITU-R do a lot of good work.
Care to try to cite an example? R we can't pull out of because NRO needs its slots. I'm not sure that constitutes "good work." It's minor ledger-keeping, and that's why it's excluded from the petition.
Shutting down the ITU would be in effect discarding the baby with the bathwater.
You're being awfully naive, Fred. It's a 147-year-old, $180M/year baby with a serious corruption problem, that wants to shut the Internet down so that it can go back to doing things the way it was before we all showed up. I expect you think you're being sophisticated and taking a nuanced view or some such, but you aren't. Note that the _entire_ congress disagrees with you. Not a single vote in favor of the ITU in S. Con. Res. 50 or H. Con. Res. 127. And if you think that any of the Internet agrees with you, you should take a look at Reddit sometime. -Bill
On Sat, Jan 12, 2013 at 10:49:59PM -0800, Bill Woodcock wrote:
On Jan 12, 2013, at 9:04 PM, "Fred Baker (fred)" <fred@cisco.com> wrote:
ITU-D and ITU-R do a lot of good work.
Care to try to cite an example? R we can't pull out of because NRO needs its slots. I'm not sure that constitutes "good work." It's minor ledger-keeping, and that's why it's excluded from the petition.
beside the NRO (the real one), DoD and the FCC and NTIA are all invested in a working ITU-R - there is something to be said for products that work outside the US borders as well as within.
Shutting down the ITU would be in effect discarding the baby with the bathwater.
You're being awfully naive, Fred. It's a 147-year-old, $180M/year baby with a serious corruption problem, that wants to shut the Internet down so that it can go back to doing things the way it was before we all showed up. I expect you think you're being sophisticated and taking a nuanced view or some such, but you aren't. Note that the _entire_ congress disagrees with you. Not a single vote in favor of the ITU in S. Con. Res. 50 or H. Con. Res. 127. And if you think that any of the Internet agrees with you, you should take a look at Reddit sometime.
it is true that among the public, congress has a lower approval rating than cockroaches (at least according to NPR). I understand a little of your vitriol, but since it is possible to fund -by sector-, there is no good reason to tar the entire Union with the same brush.
-Bill
/bill
On Jan 13, 2013, at 7:54 AM, bmanning@vacation.karoshi.com wrote:
Since it is possible to fund -by sector-, there is no good reason to tar the entire Union with the same brush.
Bill, please read the petition before attempting to comment on it. Again, the petition specifically excludes ITU-R, for exactly the reasons that you and I have both just cited. And if you think it's possible to fund by sector, you're not paying close enough attention, and haven't read the ITU budget documents I provided with the petition. - It's only possible for sector members to fund by sector. - This petition does not address sector members. - It's not possible for governments to fund by sector. - Money is fungible. So, here, have some rope: how would you fund by sector? -Bill
Even if there were no ITU we'd have to invent one, to paraphrase Voltaire's quip about God. There'd have to be some organization to negotiate and oversee international settlements and other, similar, regulations. And it would probably end up being about the same because who'd be involved but about the same people and organizations (particularly the PTTs et al)? If you sincerely wanted to get rid of the ITU or pieces thereof the only way would be to form some alternative organization, perhaps with different policy and process rules, and use it to supplant them. Actually, no matter how you got rid of the ITU that's what you'd end up with because much of what they do would happen somehow, but without a real plan probably by even worse means like shadowy inter-PTT organizations arising without any accountability or transparency. -- -Barry Shein The World | bzs@TheWorld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD | Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool & Die | Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
On Jan 13, 2013, at 1:47 PM, Barry Shein <bzs@world.std.com> wrote:
Even if there were no ITU we'd have to invent one, to paraphrase Voltaire's quip about God.
There'd have to be some organization to negotiate and oversee international settlements and other, similar, regulations.
Why? The internet has operated just fine without such for quite some time now.
And it would probably end up being about the same because who'd be involved but about the same people and organizations (particularly the PTTs et al)?
Which is a good argument that such an organization has, in fact, become an anachronism.
If you sincerely wanted to get rid of the ITU or pieces thereof the only way would be to form some alternative organization, perhaps with different policy and process rules, and use it to supplant them.
If you don't believe that the internet is in the process of supplanting traditional telephony, you aren't paying attention. The internet has had such organizations for some time now. The petition specifically focuses on moving US funding from the ITU to those organizations (which does give me pause… I think I prefer the organizations in question not being purchased by the USG).
Actually, no matter how you got rid of the ITU that's what you'd end up with because much of what they do would happen somehow, but without a real plan probably by even worse means like shadowy inter-PTT organizations arising without any accountability or transparency.
Such organizations would be scattered and far less effective. I would rather take my chances against them than the current ITU structure. Owen
There'd have to be some organization to negotiate and oversee international settlements and other, similar, regulations.
Why? The internet has operated just fine without such for quite some time now.
The Internet is held together with spit and duct tape, and sucks for connections that need a stable low-jitter channel, we've all noticed. It has no principle of universal service. The Internet does what it does surprisingly well, but it's not the same kind of network as the phone system. We all know of the abuses that can come with mandatory interconnection and settlements, but the solution is not to cut off the poor countries.
On 14/01/2013 15:27, John Levine wrote:
The Internet does what it does surprisingly well, but it's not the same kind of network as the phone system. We all know of the abuses that can come with mandatory interconnection and settlements, but the solution is not to cut off the poor countries.
less well developed countries often have their telecoms requirements serviced by an incumbent monopoly, often involving government ownership and usually involving little or no functional regulation. 20 years ago, the ISP that I worked for was paying about $20,000/meg/month for IP transit. It didn't drop to where it is now because of ITU regulations, interconnection settlements or by maintaining the government-owned monopoly of the time. I'm struggling to understand why people view these things as solutions to a problem, rather than the root cause. Nick
I'm of the camp that says that, in large measure, the only beneficial elements of international telecommunications agreements have been to define an international band plan for the radio spectrum. That was, afterall, the principal reason these treaties were signed, to prevent chaos within the spectrum. (That was also the genesis of the FCC. Too bad it didn't confine itself to that.) I'm sure there have been other useful things to come about but the have been abd continue to be considerably overshadowed by the detrimental effects of excessive meddling. -Wayne On Mon, Jan 14, 2013 at 04:14:56PM +0000, Nick Hilliard wrote:
On 14/01/2013 15:27, John Levine wrote:
The Internet does what it does surprisingly well, but it's not the same kind of network as the phone system. We all know of the abuses that can come with mandatory interconnection and settlements, but the solution is not to cut off the poor countries.
less well developed countries often have their telecoms requirements serviced by an incumbent monopoly, often involving government ownership and usually involving little or no functional regulation. 20 years ago, the ISP that I worked for was paying about $20,000/meg/month for IP transit. It didn't drop to where it is now because of ITU regulations, interconnection settlements or by maintaining the government-owned monopoly of the time. I'm struggling to understand why people view these things as solutions to a problem, rather than the root cause.
Nick
--- Wayne Bouchard web@typo.org Network Dude http://www.typo.org/~web/
A point of clarification: On 1/14/13 7:46 PM, Wayne E Bouchard wrote:
I'm of the camp that says that, in large measure, the only beneficial elements of international telecommunications agreements have been to define an international band plan for the radio spectrum. That was, afterall, the principal reason these treaties were signed, to prevent chaos within the spectrum. (That was also the genesis of the FCC. Too bad it didn't confine itself to that.)
There are at least three sets of treaty texts. The first is the output of the ITU Plenipotentiary conference, which consists of its Constitution and Convention and a number of resolutions, the second are the ITRs (over which we just had the fractious affair in Dubai), and the third are the Radio Regulations. You refer to the 3rd set of text and you clearly are not alone in terms of your thoughts about the ITRs since 55 countries did not sign them. Eliot
On Jan 14, 2013, at 7:27 AM, John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:
There'd have to be some organization to negotiate and oversee international settlements and other, similar, regulations.
Why? The internet has operated just fine without such for quite some time now.
The Internet is held together with spit and duct tape, and sucks for connections that need a stable low-jitter channel, we've all noticed. It has no principle of universal service.
The Internet does what it does surprisingly well, but it's not the same kind of network as the phone system. We all know of the abuses that can come with mandatory interconnection and settlements, but the solution is not to cut off the poor countries.
I have no reason whatsoever to believe that defunding the ITU would cut off the poor countries. Quite the contrary, actually. I believe that the combination of the ITU and the back-pocket distribution of settlement checks has held back the improvement of digital connections to poorer countries. Owen
On Jan 14, 2013, at 11:12 AM, Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com> wrote:
On Jan 14, 2013, at 7:27 AM, John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:
The solution is not to cut off the poor countries.
I have no reason whatsoever to believe that defunding the ITU would cut off the poor countries.
Quite the contrary, actually. I believe that the combination of the ITU and the back-pocket distribution of settlement checks has held back the improvement of digital connections to poorer countries.
Exactly. The ITU bleeds poor countries dry, by keeping communications costs exorbitantly high, while appeasing them with settlements. The Internet doesn't need to bribe destitute people with settlements, because it's five orders of magnitude less expensive: affordable enough that they can get online in the first place. http://oecdinsights.org/2012/10/22/internet-traffic-exchange-2-billion-users... The ITU has $181M/year. It'll do just fine without our money. No sense in throwing good money after bad. -Bill
On 14/01/2013 19:23, Bill Woodcock wrote:
The ITU bleeds poor countries dry, by keeping communications costs exorbitantly high,
Whoa. What bleeds poor countries dry is bad management of national resources, coupled with inherent kleptocracy, massive corruption and stifling regulation. In short: endemic mismanagement - and this extends way beyond the reach of just the telecoms infrastructure within the country. The ITU's impact in this serves only to provide some post-facto justification for preserving the status quo, nothing more. If any country wants to ditch the dinosaur model, they are free to do so and the ITU has no say in this whatever. And the countries which have done so have ended up with vastly improved infrastructure as a result, despite the efforts of those dinosaurs to convince the politicians with scary horror stories of what bad and evil things will happen if they lose their monopoly in the marketplace and are exposed to actual competition!
The Internet doesn't need to bribe destitute people with settlements, because it's five orders of magnitude less expensive
Exactly - and the fix for this is to deal with national policy mismanagement rather than international. Once you have enough fibre into a country to allow competitive access to the market, the international pricing issues become line noise. Nick
Sent from my iPad On Jan 14, 2013, at 11:03 AM, Nick Hilliard <nick@foobar.org> wrote:
On 14/01/2013 19:23, Bill Woodcock wrote:
The ITU bleeds poor countries dry, by keeping communications costs exorbitantly high,
Whoa. What bleeds poor countries dry is bad management of national resources, coupled with inherent kleptocracy, massive corruption and stifling regulation. In short: endemic mismanagement - and this extends way beyond the reach of just the telecoms infrastructure within the country.
The ITU's impact in this serves only to provide some post-facto justification for preserving the status quo, nothing more. If any country wants to ditch the dinosaur model, they are free to do so and the ITU has no say in this whatever. And the countries which have done so have ended up with vastly improved infrastructure as a result, despite the efforts of those dinosaurs to convince the politicians with scary horror stories of what bad and evil things will happen if they lose their monopoly in the marketplace and are exposed to actual competition!
I don't agree. The ITU's impact in part is to provide a continuing source of revenue to motivate, promote, and preserve this status quo. While the ITU has no legitimate say in it, the ITU provides significant economic incentives against "ditching the dinosaur" as you called it. There's a reason that ITU representatives hand-deliver settlement checks to many of these countries. Those countries that have done so have largely done so because they got lucky with visionary regulators that were motivated more by doing right by the country and its citizens rather than maximizing personal immediate gains. In many cases, this was the result of a higher level official overriding the telecom minister (or equivalent) and opening competition over the objections of said telecom minister (or equiv.).
The Internet doesn't need to bribe destitute people with settlements, because it's five orders of magnitude less expensive
Exactly - and the fix for this is to deal with national policy mismanagement rather than international. Once you have enough fibre into a country to allow competitive access to the market, the international pricing issues become line noise.
Even in trying to be pro-ITU, you have admitted that they are a proximate preserver of this problem. As such, defunding them seems a rational step in the direction of solution. It's not a panacea, but it's one step in the right direction. Owen
On 14/01/2013 22:42, Owen DeLong wrote:
Those countries that have done so have largely done so because they got lucky with visionary regulators that were motivated more by doing right by the country and its citizens rather than maximizing personal immediate gains. In many cases, this was the result of a higher level official overriding the telecom minister (or equivalent) and opening competition over the objections of said telecom minister (or equiv.).
Sorry, but this is nonsense.
Even in trying to be pro-ITU, you have admitted that ...
This is the problem discussing anything with you: you generate straw men at such a rate that there's just no point responding. Nick
On 1/14/13 11:23 AM, Bill Woodcock wrote:
... The ITU ...
How shall states determine what harms are lawfully attempted, and what harms are not lawfully attempted? Shall there be a treaty concerning "cyber" strife between states, or shall "cyber" strife between states be without treaty based limits? If one answers that without is less attractive than with, what is the means by which states arrive at treaties, without the ITU, or treaty bodies similar to the ITU, whether regional, or global, in membership and form? Shall all predatory or intentionally injurious uses of trans-jurisdictionally routed communications be {managed, reduced, mitigated, ...} by private parties, which are, inter alia, for the most part, for-profit corporations, with no, or negative, fiduciary duty to "police" the net? Flawed as the current institution is, and has been, for the duration of the the connectionist vs connectionless struggle, proposing to remove the state member organization without a proposal for an alternative public purposed organization, not all of which are state actors, means not have very useful starting points for the big questions -- shall there be any limit on state actions? shall there be any limit on non-state actions? Eric
On Mon, Jan 14, 2013 at 7:27 AM, John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:
There'd have to be some organization to negotiate and oversee international settlements and other, similar, regulations.
Why? The internet has operated just fine without such for quite some time now.
The Internet is held together with spit and duct tape, and sucks for connections that need a stable low-jitter channel, we've all noticed. It has no principle of universal service.
The Internet does what it does surprisingly well, but it's not the same kind of network as the phone system. We all know of the abuses that can come with mandatory interconnection and settlements, but the solution is not to cut off the poor countries.
I'm not sure that this mythical "kind of network as the phone system" allegedly is describes the reality of the phone network... That said, two comments: 1. I generally agree that the Internet has too much spit and duct tape, however; 2. Siccing the ITU on that problem - or allowing them near it - would be a disaster of a magnitude not often seen in human affairs. -- -george william herbert george.herbert@gmail.com
1. I generally agree that the Internet has too much spit and duct tape, however;
2. Siccing the ITU on that problem - or allowing them near it - would be a disaster of a magnitude not often seen in human affairs.
No disagreement there. The Internet isn't designed to be a phone network. Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly
On 1/12/13 10:49 PM, Bill Woodcock wrote:
... serious corruption problem, that wants to shut the Internet down ...
Bill, I don't accept the premise that (a) the settlement free peering model as modernly practiced can not also be characterized as problematic, and that (b) the intents (note the plural) of the states authors of the several policy proposals advanced at wcit are reasonably, or usefully so characterized. Eric
On 1/12/2013 9:04 PM, Fred Baker (fred) wrote:
ITU-D and ITU-R do a lot of good work.
-R is excluded from the petition. (From a number of postings, it appears that many folk haven't noticed that.) I don't know anything about -D. In the interest of adding some core information to the thread, could you provide a brief summary of its job and benefits (with any concerns that are broadly held)? I'm not asking you to defend your views but to provide a most basic tutorial on -D. The more objective the better. Thanks. d/ -- Dave Crocker Brandenburg InternetWorking bbiw.net
Some people have asked about the ITU-D. The -D stands for "Development", but it could also stand for "Discuss". This is the arm of the ITU that does capacity building and outreach of various sorts. There are four programs in D, including one that focuses on operational aspects and another on training material. There are also study groups in D where regulators and the sort show up to discuss societal aspects of technology. This is an important dialog. It provides us all an opportunity to listen in on where various countries need help, where they have misunderstandings, and what experiences they are having. D does not make standards or regulations. Of course the -D sector is not without its challenges. For one, it tends to take what happens in -T as gospel. That, I believe, is correctable in several different ways. One of those ways would be for them to collaborate more with organizations like this one. Eliot On 1/13/13 7:01 PM, Dave Crocker wrote:
On 1/12/2013 9:04 PM, Fred Baker (fred) wrote:
ITU-D and ITU-R do a lot of good work.
-R is excluded from the petition. (From a number of postings, it appears that many folk haven't noticed that.)
I don't know anything about -D.
In the interest of adding some core information to the thread, could you provide a brief summary of its job and benefits (with any concerns that are broadly held)?
I'm not asking you to defend your views but to provide a most basic tutorial on -D. The more objective the better.
Thanks.
d/
The regulatory side of ITU-T is responsible for much of the damaging legacy Telecom attitude of revenue entitlement. I think defunding that and seeing what is developed in its place might well be a good thing. Owen On Jan 12, 2013, at 9:04 PM, Fred Baker (fred) <fred@cisco.com> wrote:
On Jan 12, 2013, at 8:17 PM, John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:
Please learn a little more about the ITU before doing so. There is more to the ITU than the dysfunctional ITU-T, and the political fallout from the US being seen as a big rich bully taking its wallet and going home is likely not worth the trivial amount of money involved.
On that I would agree. ITU-D and ITU-R do a lot of good work. ITU-T does reasonable work, for the most part, in regulatory matters, which neither the IGF nor the IETF address. Frankly, if the ITU gets shut down, ITU-R, ITU-D, and the regulatory component of ITU-T will have to be re-created to accomplish those roles. Where we have travelled in circles with the ITU is in conflicting technical standardization and in the desire of ITU-T staff to take over certain functions from ICANN and the NRO. Shutting down the ITU would be in effect discarding the baby with the bathwater.
http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-R/pages/default.aspx http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Pages/default.aspx
On Jan 12, 2013, at 8:17 PM, "John Levine" <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:
The political fallout from the US being seen as a big rich bully taking its wallet and going home is likely not worth the trivial amount of money involved.
Trivial to whom? Is $11M/year trivial relative to the $181M/year ITU budget? Relative to the $2M/year IETF budget? Relative to the $600K/year budget of NANOG? The petition does not suggest "taking its wallet and going home," it suggests reallocating money from an organization that's fighting against the Internet, to organizations that are fighting for the Internet, and doing so much more efficiently. This is as much about funding NANOG and the IETF as it is about removing 7.7% of the ITU's budget. You really think the ITU can make better use of that money than NANOG and the IETF? -Bill
On 1/12/2013 11:07 PM, Bill Woodcock wrote:
On Jan 12, 2013, at 8:17 PM, "John Levine" <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:
The political fallout from the US being seen as a big rich bully taking its wallet and going home is likely not worth the trivial amount of money involved.
Relative to the $2M/year IETF budget?
Purely for accuracy: Current IETF expenditures are around US$ 5M - 5.5M. The ISOC "Direct Contribution Excluding Development" is just over US$ 2M: http://iaoc.ietf.org/documents/YEF-2012-2015.pdf d/ -- Dave Crocker Brandenburg InternetWorking bbiw.net
and going home is likely not worth the trivial amount of money involved.
Trivial to whom? Is $11M/year trivial relative to the $181M/year ITU budget? Relative to the $2M/year IETF budget? Relative to the $600K/year budget of NANOG?
Trivial to the US government, who's appropriating the money, of course. Not trivial to the ITU-R and ITU-D. You know what they are, right?
This is as much about funding NANOG and the IETF as it is about removing 7.7% of the ITU's budget.
If I were trying to think of a way to totally destroy the effectiveness of the IETF, loading it up with millions of dollars that come with political strings attached would be about the best one I could imagine. Congrats. R's, John
On 1/13/13, John R. Levine <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:
If I were trying to think of a way to totally destroy the effectiveness of the IETF, loading it up with millions of dollars that come with political strings attached would be about the best one I could imagine. Congrats.
Yes, please redirect from ITU-T to ICANN instead <G>
R's, John
-- -JH
participants (14)
-
Barry Shein -
Bill Woodcock -
bmanning＠vacation.karoshi.com -
Dave Crocker -
Eliot Lear -
Eric Brunner-Williams -
Fred Baker (fred) -
George Herbert -
Jimmy Hess -
John Levine -
John R. Levine
-
Nick Hilliard -
Owen DeLong -
Wayne E Bouchard