Don't Be Scared of the ITU

I've seen concerns that the ITU will use its muscle to promote censorship, fragment the internet, and transfer money from innovators to corrupt third-world governments and their puppet telcos. Are these fears exaggerated?

Short answer is that it's B***it.  The only issue the ITU wants to address is Internet settlement, which should have been addressed 15 years ago.  The ITU head has made their position clear repeatedly, but OTT players like Google have been spreading FUD because settlement isn't in their business interests.

Tom

Interesting, Tom. But couldn't settlement be used as a tool for censorship? If you control how networks connect, you can block networks from connecting. 

Settlement is just payment, Mitch.  Payment is how we get services today, so we can't say it supports censorship unless we believe that paying for the Internet is somehow censoring.  We get products today because retailers pay wholesalers, which is settlement.  Networks other than the Internet have run for decades globally based on settlement and the process didn't introduce a lack of populism.  Dictators can cut off settled networks like the PSTN and also the Internet.  Governments censor the Internet today by blocking sites.

Where we have a problem is that we have a food chain that distributes costs but doesn't distribute payment.  That's never going to produce an optimum industry.

Tom

And of course Google doesn't want to have to pay more for connectivity. Makes sense. 

That's the heart of the whole "debate".  All politics is local...and economic.

Tom

At last some meaning out of the noice and FUD of recent Dubai meetings!

If the FCC had addressed some of these issues responsibly in the Neutrality order here, we'd have been in a position to make a rational proposal in Dubai, but they didn't and so we're kind of on the outside looking in at the consensus.

Tom