De-funding the ITU

Mon Jan 14 18:46:18 UTC 2013

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 at typo.org
Network Dude
http://www.typo.org/~web/