[Chapter-delegates] Statement relating to today’s ITU-T SG15 MPLS development decision

[Fred Baker]

On Feb 25, 2011, at 7:11 PM, Alejandro Pisanty wrote:
> 3. this is partly a statement and partly a question: with diverging standards for MPLS and VPNs available, there begin to be increased incentives to manage whole-country networks in a way that facilitates their isolation from abroad. Suppliers are subject to these incentives so there ensues a perverse virtuous circle for this market. I understand this is what is meant by the public statement we are discussing, and can be decried as one step closer to the "Kill Switch", to be denounced.

It would likely be network-wide, not country-wide, and would be about vendor lock-in of a network. Common specification and interoperable implementation is ultimately valuable to the customer, who can use any vendor as a second source. What this therefore forces is all vendors to implement both standards, which means that the vendors have to spend more money to build the product, which means that customers get to pay more for the product.

> 4. though details must emerge to make a more informed judgment, the ITU side's breach of agreement with the IETF is pretty serious and significant; it is likely not purely circumstantial and if it is indicative of a trend, that is a very bad trend. The very least it signals is that not all of the ITU is now geared to the agreements to work cooperatively with ISOC, the IETF, and ICANN, which were so hard to reach as recently as end of 2010 in the Guadalajara Plenipot.
> 
> So, a matter of importance, at the intersection of technology, innovation, standardization, society, and policy. Squarely in ISOC's need to attend to.

yes