{"id":1483,"date":"2012-09-17T16:28:50","date_gmt":"2012-09-17T14:28:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ofcourseimright.com\/?p=1483"},"modified":"2012-09-17T16:28:50","modified_gmt":"2012-09-17T14:28:50","slug":"wcit-and-the-itu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/?p=1483","title":{"rendered":"WCIT and the ITU?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"image\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/File:Flag_of_ITU.svg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright\" src=\"http:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/thumb\/0\/08\/Flag_of_ITU.svg\/200px-Flag_of_ITU.svg.png\" alt=\"Flag of ITU.svg\" width=\"173\" height=\"115\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.itu.int\">International Telecommunications Union<\/a> (ITU) is making the news these days, in part because there is about to be a treaty conference called the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.itu.int\/en\/wcit-12\/Pages\/default.aspx\">World Conferences on International Tariffs (WCIT)<\/a>.\u00a0 What is the ITU? and what do they do?<\/p>\n<p>The ITU is a specialized agency of the United Nations that focuses on telecommunications.\u00a0 It has four components:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A general secretariat;<\/li>\n<li>A standardization sector or ITU-T;<\/li>\n<li>A radio coordination sector or ITU-R; and<\/li>\n<li>A development sector or ITU-D;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The radio sector coordinates spectrum allocation and so-called &#8220;orbital satellite slots&#8221;.\u00a0 It also is responsible for standardization of time.\u00a0 The development sector focuses on the special needs of developing countries.\u00a0 The standardization sector has over 150 years set international standards for telecommunications, starting with the telegraph.\u00a0 The general secretariat manages logistics of the three sectors, and represents the ITU to other international fora, and to the U.N.<\/p>\n<p>How has the ITU been relevant to you?\u00a0 There are several key standards that are worth taking note of:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>E.164 specifies pretty much what a telephone number looks like, starting with the international dialing code.<\/li>\n<li>G.711, G.719 and others specify how voice is encoded into data.<\/li>\n<li>X.509 is the basis for the public key infrastructure that is in use on the World Wide Web.<\/li>\n<li>D.50 specifies accounting standards by which international carriers bill each other, or so-called settlement rates.\u00a0 There&#8217;s real money involved in this one.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This is some pretty important stuff.<\/p>\n<p>The ITU-T was formed out of the CCITT, which was a coordination committee, primarily made of European governments.\u00a0 These days, its membership spans 193 countries. Only governments may vote, although civil society and paying sector members may have some influence.<\/p>\n<p>So what is WCIT?\u00a0 WCIT is a treaty-level conference in which all those lovely accounting rates are agreed upon.\u00a0 But they&#8217;re not stopping there.\u00a0 The ITU-T has had a very limited role in the Internet&#8217;s development.\u00a0 Standardization and governance over the Internet falls to several classes of entities:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>National governments with their own sets of laws;<\/li>\n<li>Standards organizations such as the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ieee.org\">IEEE<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ietf.org\">IETF<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/w3c.org\">W3C<\/a>, and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.3gpp.org\">3GPP<\/a>; and<\/li>\n<li>Not-for-profit organizations such as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.icann.org\">ICANN<\/a> and Internet Registries.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This latter group focuses on what I call &#8220;internals&#8221;.\u00a0 That is- how do you get an IP address or a domain name?\u00a0 The Internet has grown over 1.25 billion users with very limited involvement of the ITU-T.<\/p>\n<p>Now governments want to take a firmer hand in areas such as how addresses and names are allocated and cybersecurity.\u00a0 That is what WCIT is about.<\/p>\n<p>More about the ITU and WCIT in the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) is making the news these days, in part because there is about to be a treaty conference called the World Conferences on International Tariffs (WCIT).\u00a0 What is the ITU? and what do they do? The ITU is a specialized agency of the United Nations that focuses on telecommunications.\u00a0 It has &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/?p=1483\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;WCIT and the ITU?&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":172,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50,30,87,4],"tags":[97,98,404,447,446],"class_list":["post-1483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-complexity","category-humanity","category-internet","category-politics","tag-ietf","tag-ip","tag-itu","tag-standards","tag-wcit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/172"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1483"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1483\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1493,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1483\/revisions\/1493"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}