Subject: I-D Action: draft-rutkowski-itr-accession-harmful-00.txt

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 15 Jul 2013 09:23:54 -0700

A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts directories.

	Title           : Accession to the ITRs Considered Harmful
	Author(s)       : A. M. Rutkowski
	Filename        : draft-rutkowski-itr-accession-harmful-00.txt
	Pages           : 9
	Date            : 2013-07-15

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.

The IETF datatracker status page for this draft is:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-rutkowski-itr-accession-harmful

There's also a htmlized version available at:
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-rutkowski-itr-accession-harmful-00

Internet-Drafts are also available by anonymous FTP at:
ftp://ftp.ietf.org/internet-drafts/