As a Sector Member of the ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) the Internet Society participated at the World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly (WTSA-20).
We take a strong interest in how the Internet is managed and developed, since it is central to our mission. We are concerned about both and follow efforts that would threaten or negatively impact these aspects.
We think that the Internet, as a distributed and decentralized infrastructure, should be managed by multistakeholder governance mechanisms and organizations. As a result, we are skeptical of plans that, even if piecemeal, would undermine or overrun current multistakeholder processes for the management of critical Internet resources – naming, addressing, and routing – in favor of multilateral processes in which vote based decision-making is a sovereign prerogative of Member States.
We support an open standards approach and are worried about standardization work that might have an influence on the Internet’s global interoperability. We feel that such work should be done in appropriate standards development organizations. Work that intends to update, amend, or develop Internet technical standards should be presented to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
As delegates at WTSA-20 define the ITU-T’s work for the next study period and potentially lay the groundwork for future standardization work on new/emerging technologies, it is critical that delegates evaluate how such technologies and devices would impact the Internet if they were deployed on it. Will they continue to enable an open, globally connected internet or will they fragment it? This is not to say that the ITU-T does not play a role in standardization in our digital era; it certainly does. The ITU-T performs a critical and leading role in the domain of telecommunication standards, which are necessary to access the Internet.
What are the Internet Society’s objectives at WTSA-20?
In our WTSA resolutions matrix, we compared some of the proposals presented at WTSA against the principles we mentioned.
