De-funding the ITU

Mon Jan 14 21:03:18 UTC 2013

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