Finally, after nearly 8 years of tug-of-war, ITU finally comes to terms that it needs to work with ICANN as I noted a few years ago (here and here).

The Internet should continue to be overseen by major agencies including ICANN and the ITU, rather than any new “superstructure,” the new head of the International Telecommunications Union said on Friday…

“We all must work together, each agency has its role to play. We must come to a better cooperation … and avoid setting up a superstructure which would be very controversial and very difficult to put into effect,” Toure told a news conference.

I am glad we can all put this behind us and focus on other more important things :-)

Since Houlin Zhao (Director of ITU-TSB) proposed the country-based approach towards IPv6 allocation, there have been several forums with debates on the topic. As expected, many of the the “Internet people” rejected the idea outright mostly on prejudge bias. Few are able to put forward very concrete answer to ‘but what’s wrong with the idea to have multiple issuing authority technically speaking?‘

So I am glad when Paul Wilson and Geoff Hutson put together the paper Competitive Addressing:

In the case of the Internet, addressing lies at the very heart of the network. Without a framework of stable, unique and ubiquitous addresses there is no single cohesive network. Without a continuing stable supply of addresses further growth of the network simply cannot be sustained. Without absolute confidence in the continuing stability in this supply chain the communications industry will inevitably be forced to look elsewhere for a suitable technology platform for the needs of networked data communications.

Geoff always like good paper but sometimes a bit difficult to read (his paper has a prerequiste of been both English and IT major which is pretty rare :-). Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to spend a little effort to read it through.

I was one of the few more vocal opponent on the concept of country-based allocation of IP addresses because I believe it only increase country politizing and IP resources wastages. I believe in allocating resources to the places where it is needed the most, not by political boundary.

But lately, I’m questioning if that position is conflicting with my firm belief on free-market and competition. Afterall, Zhou’s proposal does not eliminate the current RIRs IP allocation plan and more competition, more innovation is good for the industry…

Okay, this maybe an old news, only found it in my email when I was clearing them out. (Sorry Bob!) – ITU has just released its new statistics on global broadband penetration as of 1 January 2005.

Not sure the rest of the statistic but the line for Singapore looks a bit funny – perhaps because we track per household and not per 100 inhabitants as they did but the ratio of DSL and cable is certainly not 50-50 – it is more 80-20 (DSL-Cable) the last time I looked. Maybe I should check it again.

Incidently, they managed to get their news-blog going again on dashblog after their old radio server collapsed. So remember to resubscribe to their feed again.

There is an article on CNet with a misleading title The U.N. thinks about tomorrow’s cyberspace

The International Telecommunication Union is one of the most venerable of bureaucracies. Created in 1865 to facilitate telegraph transmissions, its mandate has expanded to include radio and telephone communications. But the ITU enjoys virtually no influence over the Internet. That remains the province of specialized organizations such as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN; the Internet Engineering Task Force; the World Wide Web Consortium; and regional address registries.

It is important not to equate UN with ITU (an agency under UN). UN is thinking of Internet Governance but it is charted WGIG. It is also important not to equate ICANN as Internet Governance. ICANN is part of the picture but not the whole. These differences maybe subtle but are world apart in the debate on Internet Governance.

Corrections aside, I am extremely happy to hear Zhou say “I do not consider ICANN an enemy…We tried to support ICANN as far as we could but on the other hand you see that ICANN’s mandate seems to be a little bit unclear…“. Now lets see if ICANN community would also play nice.

btw, my position on ICANN and ITU is that both of them are here to stay so please learn to live with each another (as noted in my previous entry).

Incidently, ICANN also just published Telcordia Report on .NET registry. The winner is Verisign.

Bob Shaw (from ITU) just did some presentation in Africa (focus on ENUM). But more importantly, I like what he said on Network Technology Shift, which is very similar to what I blog about last year.

ITU-T Definition of NGN (Feb 2004)
A Next Generation Network (NGN) is a packetbased network able to provide services including Telecommunication Services and able to make use of multiple broadband, QoS-enabled transport technologies and in which service-related functions are independent from underlying transport-related technologies. It offers unrestricted access by users to different service providers. It supports generalized mobility which will allow consistent and ubiquitous provision of services to users.

Anyone who still thinks ITU is clueless please raise your hand?

ITU has a good summary of the WTSA including the several Internet issues discussed in my previous entry. (via ITU SPU)

The two main topic of the whole assembly could be summaries as (1) NGN (aka the move to packet-switch network) and (2) Internet issues (aka Spam, ENUM, IDN and ccTLD).

WTSA is the meeting to layout workplans for ITU-T for the next four years. So even though ITU-T is supposing a technical group in ITU, the issues discussed here are more politically, like elections of chairs for various SGs, telco issues like callback and also several Internet issues.

I wasn’t able to stay for the conclusion for WTSA as I need to fly back to Singapore for N+I Asia. But here are some of the Internet issues that was discussed at this meeting.

1. Spam

There are two proposals on spam: one for ITU-T (working with IETF) to develop definitions and recommendations for spam and the other is a recommendation for ITU Council to propose to the Member States for a multiliteral MoU on spam.

Many of the developing countries see ITU-T as the organization to provide guidances for spam. One even expressed that if the world has adopted X.400, then spam would not have existed in the first place (ha!). As it stands, the first proposal didn’t get much resistance but the second one is not going through easily. Even countries who have sign MoU on spams aren’t prepared to do a multilteral MoU and many arent sure if ITU is the right place to do this.
Read the rest of this entry »

I totally screwed up on the IDN presentation yesterday. Jetlag hits me pretty badly so my brain is totally blanked out. I remember looking at the confused look at the audience and wanted to dig a hole right there. (I did much better on my IPv6 presentation which went very smoothly)

Anyway, as I mention, this is an extremely political meeting. I witness political maneuvers by different Member States both publicly and also privately in getting their positions through. Every words said in public, every private conversations, who has been whispering to who and even who tapped the shoulder of who have different layers of meanings and implications.

Case in point: after my presentations, a friend approached me and congulate me of the job well done. I was very embrassed until she told me that I did a good job of confusing the audience. And that, apparently, is a good conclusion.

(No, I am not going to explain why. It is a long story.)

Update: I was told I was too harsh on myself. Even though I dont remember what I said, apparently, I didnt screwed up too badly.

My god!.The 36 hours flight from Singapore to Brazil is still giving me nightmare! My throat, lips and even eyes is complete dried up due to low humility humidity in the plane. Drinking more water isn’t helping either. By the time I landed in Florianopolis, the only thing on my mind is ‘Oh dear..I am going to do this again on my way back’. Already, I feel regret making the trip at all…and pissing off my boss who has been trying (unsucessfully) to ground me for the last two months.

Thanks Anatel, the Brazilian regulator and host for the event is taking care of us pretty well. They actually sent a bus to pick me (and others) from the airport. Meeting the chief of the france regulator, the swiss regulator and director of ETSI on the bus and the conversation we have on the bus once again reminded me I am at an ITU event, where there are more politic then engineering problems.

The hotel is yet another nightmare. While the hotel (Port Da Ilha) booast of Wireless Internet access in the lobby and ADSL in every room, the reality is that the wireless internet is not accessible and the ethernet jack in my room aren’t even connected. *sigh* On the bright side, I am pretty impressed with the friendly Brazilian. Everyone I met, even strangers, are eager to help.

Dinner last night was hosted by Embratel. Have a lot of fun catching up with old friends and meeting new cool people. (Yes, there are cool people in ITU too). More about them later…