ETNO’s ITU Proposal Draws Hits in Amsterdam; Google Opposes New Rules
AMSTERDAM -- The European Telecommunications Network Operators’ Association proposal for International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs) was the target of Internet network operators during the meeting of RIPE, the Internet address manager for Europe and the Middle East. Maria Hall, deputy director for the Ministry of Enterprise, Energy and Communications in Sweden, and co-chair of the RIPE Cooperation Working Group, said “there might be a problem in a certain area, but do we really want to put that into the ITR[s]? In many cases the answer is ‘no.'"
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The proposal would establish a sending-network-party-pays principle and differentiation of services. But there’s disagreement about how much to extend the scope of the ITRs, the most recent version of which from 1988 only dealt with telephony.
"There is no proposal from Europe to expand the ITRs to deal with Internet,” said Anders Jonsson from the Swedish telecom regulator, and until recently chair of the COM-ITU group of the 48-member European Telecom and Postal Regulatory Body (CEPT). Jonsson said the current CEPT plan would not add any provisions on “fraud or dispute resolution or Internet connectivity, nothing on quality of service, nothing of spam, and nothing of routing or traffic.” All these issues should be mainly dealt with “between operators,” he said. “There will of course be a second discussion at our October meeting, and then we will see what will be the final position on all these issues."
There’s also a process underway in the EU to finalize a joint position of the EU member countries, which make up a majority of CEPT, that is also expected to be finalized in October, ahead of the final CEPT discussion.
Geoff Huston, chief scientist of the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre, which allocates IP addresses in the Asia Pacific region, earlier in the week was adamant in warning against a European bailout for telcos. “There is an axiom in business that if your business plan is completely broken and you are about to go bankrupt, if you go to Brussels and make the right case, they'll save you. Speak to the Greeks.” Huston warned that the side effects of potential new provisions in the ITRs on quality of service and interprovider settlements would be a step back.
Quality-of-service rules, Huston said, would go “against everything we ever understood about what makes IP effective. You only needed 20 bytes of header. You only needed stateless networking. What you do need is to add more bandwidth where it’s needed. Build 100 gig, build terabit, just go and do it and if your business model sucks and you can’t afford it, change your business model.” To ask Google for money was just a silly answer to problems with one’s business model, Huston told us.
Michael Blanche, Google manager for network, peering and content distribution in the Europe, Middle East and Africa region, said this would take the Internet back to the days of voice and intervene with the current model of Internet peering. Currently, Blanche said, “99.5 percent of all peering agreements are done without a single contract.” But the ETNO proposal would put down in the ITRs a framework that the network that receives the traffic would be entitled to payment to receive that traffic.
But it would mostly benefit large incumbent operators that receive the largest volumes of traffic, Blanche said: “They would get more money than the smallest operators, they would have more network power and there is this terminating monopoly that means to reach a certain user on a certain network there is only one network you can go through to get to that user. So you then need to have regulation in place to stop that provider from putting their rates up and up and up, to charge more and more for people to collect and deliver traffic to that user.” This is where network neutrality comes in, because “if the ISP you connect to becomes a toll booth, to deliver that traffic to you, then you know longer have freedom of choice.”
Internet network operators at the RIPE meeting asked what the chances were that the ITRs would have an effect on their work, especially given the opposition from the EU and the U.S. administrations about including the Internet at all. But the answers they got from observers and government representatives at the meeting were not definite. Jonsson said: “It comes down to the negotiations. There may be some issues that are more important than others and we have seen that in many conferences, that you have to negotiate and some instances you have to compromise on, that is for sure."
Gordon Lennox, former European Commission official, pointed to the ITU and its interests as an organization: “The ITU is big, it is about 800 people and it’s also a lot of money.” The organization might have a self-interest and might look at the ITRs as something that might help its position in the future, he said. Jonsson confirmed that the ITRs might give the ITU new tasks. Lennox said, despite potential reservations from member nations, the ITRs and documents developed in the next year at the ITU World Telecom Policy Forum might be used as references in the future. “That is why I suggest it’s very, very important.”