So I have been invited to participate in the panel moderated by Tim Unwin that is described below. I did not use the session title, “balancing participation and facilitation” because that does not seem to correctly reflect the language in the descriptive paragraph below.
We have now fully emerged from an environment where service and carriage were tightly related, and where regulation was self-contained within a single organisation. New dimensions today include some where the ITU is a participating entity in a broader formal regulatory canvass, and some where facilitation relies on multi-stakeholder freewheeling market forces such as are associated with the Internet. This represents a challenging cultural change for the ITU to establish its active participating role. In the past much goodwork has been done by the ITU in developing regulatory capacity, especially in developing countries, and in traditional ITU areas of responsibility in standardisation and radiocommunications. The ITU should now spread its involvement into other areas in step withits emerging participating roles. A renewed balance between regulation – facilitation – participation is moving more from left to right in this sequence of roles, and whilst some control is given away greater role responsibility for the ITU now means coping with a greater non-regulatory aspect to its activities. The facilitation role has been very successful and new regulators have been educated by ITU activities in formal regulatory subjects. Those regulators and policy makers are now in need of support to deal with the full range of challenges of the modern environment.
Moderator
Prof Tim Unwin, Secretary General, Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation, United Kingdom
Panellists
Mr Dean Bubley, Founder and Director, Disruptive Analysis, United Kingdom
Mr Andy Haire, Principal, AJH Communications, USA
Mr Peter Pitsch, Executive Director Communications Policy and Associate General Counsel, Intel Corporation, USA
Dr Rohan Samarajiva, Founding Chair and CEO, LIRNEasia, Sri Lanka
I have not firmed up my thoughts yet, but the claim that ITU was ever engaged in regulation in the commonly understood sense seems problematic. As I used to tell my students, the decisions that come out of the ITU are called “recommendations.” The ITU’s country counterparts are still the Ministries for the most part, and regulators have trouble coming to ITU meetings in some cases, perhaps with the exception of the GSR. So was the ITU about providing a common platform for regulators? Or policy makers?
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