[governance] Re: IG questions that are not ICANN [was: Irony]

[Avri Doria]

On 12 dec 2007, at 03.44, William Drake wrote:

> No, I was making an argument that governments and industry from  
> around the world that can and do take actions of consequence  
> plainly believe in the importance of and get involved in ITU, which  
> seems a parsimonious explanation of why they spend a great deal of  
> time and resources participating.


one small anecdotal data point i have.  The S. Korean ministry of  
information and tech in 2007 made a decision to focus its standards  
making investment on the ITU for the NGN convergence architecture/ 
protocols, which caused the leading research institute to reassign  
everyone to IT work and to lay off contractors (that's me) who were  
working on any other standards activity.  anyone who has been to the  
ITU SG meetings lately wil have noticed this change of focus on their  
part (several have pointed it out to me).  to have  substantial  
indistrial player like S. Korea make suc a decsion is not a small  
thing, especially if you look at how intertwined their Industrial R&D  
is with Govt policy and research funding.

Yes, this is only a technical standards body in ITU-T and not one of  
the more policy oriented bodies.  But one accepts any part of the  
thesis that  technology and policy are tight coupled and that much of  
technology represents hardened policy, then this is a significant  
data point.  This can certainly be seen, one small example, in the  
way various technological choices could facilitate the ability  to  
set policies (in the sense of actions to be taken by a intermediate  
system entity) for actions to be taken upon deep data inspection of  
the traffi passing through a network.  Actions such as; drop, slow  
down, record ...


I would argue that since the WSIS defeat, ITU has been strategically  
picking its battles and cannot be safely counted as an insignificant  
force for the future. And would argue that the decisions made there,  
will have an effect on the nature on the Internet in the future.  So  
the more that people who care can participate in all phases of heir  
activities, the better.

I would also argue that we don't need a unified front position in CS  
o get involved.  It is enough the multivariate views of CS get  
expressed and get expressed effectively and often for them to affect  
the trade-offs made in the engineering/policy decisions on a decision  
by decision basis.  Sure if there is a unified position CS an be  
stronger, but we don't need to wait for that golden day.

a.

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