At 01:18 PM 10/15/99 , J. Baptista wrote:
>If I remember correctly, Tony Rutkowski during his tenur with the ITU
>advised them that if they failed to get involved, then the ITU would in
>fact disappear. This happened some years ago. They didn't take his
>advice then, and now I think it a bit late to back peddle for the ITU.
Hi Joe,
Actually it was former CCITT Director Theo Irmer
and I who said it'll still be there, but it will
have a "PTT Museum" sign hung on it.
There is a game being played here by the ITU
and its PTT constituents. The ITU is basically
divided into 3 parts: radio, development, and
telecom norms/standards. Radio consumes more than
half of the ITU's financial, staff, and meeting
resources, and that isn't about to change anytime
soon, as it performs global coordination of spectrum.
Another 25% goes to helping developing countries with
various kinds of projects. That's not about to change.
The final 25% goes to ITU-T (former CCITT) telecom
standards and norms (e.g. use of leased lines internationally).
That's what this battle is about - who controls and shapes
the standards and the operation of public telecom networks.
It's a high stakes game where large, old guard players
use the ITU to achieve strategic advantages, and Utsumi
is their "man."
The key word here is "public," since the ITU only deals with
public networks and services.
So the endgame here for as much Internet turf as possible
to be shoved under the "public" rubric which then allows
a certain set of players to achieve strategic advantages
by jiggering the standards and operations norms in the ITU.
It's a 150 year old game with a new Internet gloss on it.
That's why Schrader has it right!
--tony
