[LINK] ITU … plays for control again

[Frank O'Connor]

See: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-11-12/internet-ownership/4366508

These clowns won't give up, half of what they say in support of their case is plainly untrue and the other half is irrelevant, they represent a political rather than scientific basis for control of the Internet, and they'll probably (on past performance) want to charge like wounded bulls for doing it.

They had their chance in the world of networking with the seven layer OSI run by Big Metal and agreed on behind closed doors, and the various so called 'standards' which comprised it. That failed spectacularly, so now they want a shot at ruining TCP/IP and the hugely successful Internet.

"In an online opinion piece, the ITU's secretary-general, Hamadoun Toure, says only the UN can create an accessible, globally connected world."

But history supports the fact that the Internet was created by the American Military (MILNET) and the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPANET), and that it evolved since then to connect more than 2 billion users under the auspices of bodies like IANA, IETF, ISOC and more lately ICANN for DNS related coordination. Now I don't hold any huge amounts of admiration for ICANN, and see it as a sordid closed shop money grubbing exercise run by bureaucrats ... but the ITU offers nothing better and would do many things worse.

And whatever anyone says, the IETF should be left strictly alone to do what it has done so well for more than 20 years ... keep the Internet functioning well at the software engineered end.

I've said it before, but the ITU offers nothing and threatens much. I have no problems with them (and their very restricted number of big metal/telco/industry members) participating at the bottom two layers of the TCP/IP infrastructure ... but the Internet, Transport and Application layers simply don't need them.

Just my 2 cents worth ...