Accession to the ITRs Considered Harmful
draft-rutkowski-itr-accession-harmful-00
| Document | Type |
Expired Internet-Draft
(individual)
Expired & archived
|
|
|---|---|---|---|
| Author | A. M. Rutkowski | ||
| Last updated | 2014-01-16 (Latest revision 2013-07-15) | ||
| RFC stream | (None) | ||
| Intended RFC status | (None) | ||
| Formats | |||
| Stream | Stream state | (No stream defined) | |
| Consensus boilerplate | Unknown | ||
| RFC Editor Note | (None) | ||
| IESG | IESG state | Expired | |
| Telechat date | (None) | ||
| Responsible AD | (None) | ||
| Send notices to | (None) |
This Internet-Draft is no longer active. A copy of the expired Internet-Draft is available in these formats:
Abstract
One of the treaties maintained by the International Telecommunication Union is the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs), whose purpose historically has been to create international service uniformity and a global monopoly cartel for provisioning legacy international telecommunication services. Nations such as the U.S. and Canada have typically neither signed them nor accepted their provisions. The 1988 version of the ITRs was similar in purpose and effect, but failed in its objectives because the mandated OSI services and ITU-T standards were unsuccessful in the marketplace. In addition, most of the world's Nation-States moved away from monopoly government-run telecom provisioning to competitive market models. This also resulted in a substantial decline of the ITU itself as an intergovernmental home for monopoly Nation-State providers. Given this institutional decline and the vestigial opposition of some ITU Members to this provisioning paradigm shift, efforts were begun a decade ago by some ITU participants and officials to imbue the ITU with a vast expansion of its scope and jurisdiction and impose new regulatory controls through revisions to the moribund ITRs. Most progressive national Administrations opposed these efforts. The conflict played out in Dec 2012 in Dubai at a global treaty conference known as the WCIT. Only 89 of the ITU 193 member nations signed the resulting treaty instrument at Dubai - largely those without significant national communication infrastructure, or those favoring strong regulatory regimes for Internet use. The result was an embarrassing miscalculation for those seeking these changes. It bifurcated the treaty basis for the ITU. This document analyses the many adverse effects of the resulting treaty, and identifies problems that may arise for those states acceding to the treaty. It concludes by noting how the Internet community, including citizens of non-signatory countries, benefit from the rejection of this broken treaty instrument.
Authors
(Note: The e-mail addresses provided for the authors of this Internet-Draft may no longer be valid.)