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

[Christopher Wilkinson]

Good morning:

Thankyou , all, for these explanations and background. I shall draw  
them to the attention of the Standardisation Policy departments in the  
European Commission
(who, after all, last year requested our opinion on their policy, and  
to which we responded with specific reference to IETF.)

For future reference, an ISOC Press Release should be self-contained  
and fully comprehensible to the completely uninitiated.

For the record, a quick search of my inbox suggests that there has  
been no reference to this issue on the Chapter Delegates List during  
the past (more than) two years. Please correct me if I am wrong.

Regards to you all,

Christopher.




On 26 Feb 2011, at 06:22, Fred Baker wrote:

>
> 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