[LEAPSECS] WRC Final Acts

[Poul-Henning Kamp]

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In message <20151205212640.GA25014 at ucolick.org>, Steve Allen writes:

>In the mean time there should be more studies involving
>the alphabet soup of agencies IMO, ICAO, CGPM, CIPM, BIPM, IERS, IUGG,
>URSI, ISO, WMO and IAU.
>
>That list of agencies is notable in that none of those are involved in
>defining standards for computing systems.

There is nothing notable about that:  There are no such ITU-compatible
organizations they could work with.

ITU being a UN treaty organization, it is a organization focused
on governmental interests, and it has always had extreme reluctance,
bordering on open hostility, to working with non treaty-based
and non-governmental organizations.

Most people forget that the OSI protocols originally started in ITU
(Then: CCITT) as "The Intelligent Network".

ITU's inability and unwillingness to talk to anybody but UN member
governments and their "tele-administrations" made IT vendors grab
a copy, stuff it into ISO, and take it from there.

ITU pretended that didn't happen until their "legitimate participants",
in this case the NATO governments, took a copy of the ISO work and
stuffed it back into ITU, in order to synchronize the text of the
standards.  They barely finished before it all became utterly
irellevant for ever.

Other notable skirmishes was the X2/V.Last/V.90/V.92 charade, where
again ITU pretended nothing happened above V.34 spees, until
governments finally had enough and dragged PCM based modems there.

The existence of the Internet, based on the RFC standards, have only
caused very minor concessions from ITU: They're willing to reference
RFC's as normative, but there is no coorporation or colaboration of
any kind between ITU and IETF.

It's not like the ITU memberstates could not change this if they
wanted to, the control the charter, but to my knowledge, nothing
of that sort has ever had a smidgen of support.

The closest you can find which could bridge the gap from the
computer industry to ITU would be ISO, which *could* become a UN
treaty organization if they wanted to, but which have repeatedly
refused to do so, because they no less pompous asses than ITU.


Poul-Henning

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