Alice,
Thanks for sharing. This sentence below
and the predictions caught my eye.
And it will be the African Region -
which acts as a voting block and has also provided documents to the ITU as a
group - that ultimately decides where the axe comes down on the many different
aspects of the conference.
Predictions
Foolish as it may be, we have
some predictions for what will happen between now and the end of WCIT. Here
they are:
·
Nothing radical will appear
in the ITRs. Instead it will be agreed that they
will be reviewed in four or eight years' time and a range of working groups
will be formed to work on various issues and report to the Council next year,
take it to the ITU Plenipotentiary for initial review in 2014, and onto the
World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly (WTSA) in 2016.
·
The United States will push
its hand incredibly hard (bolstered by its huge
delegation of industry representatives and over-excited civil
society/Internet groups who have all persuaded each other of their own
truth). It will threaten to take a reservation once too often and will end up
being saved by either Canada or a European country.
·
The African contingent will get extra wording in about the
importance of
providing access to the developing world, but will fail in their efforts to
get the rest of the world to put in any money for the effort.
·
The Committee 5 meetings will
go on late into the night and the conference
will stretch into Saturday.
·
There will be a two-hour
argument about Palestine that will have nothing
whatsoever to do with telecoms or WCIT but Middle East representatives won't
be able to stop themselves from getting involved.
·
ITU Secretary-General
Hamadoun Toure will be forced to plea personally with
the room to be reasonable, consider the larger picture, and tell delegates
that the world is watching.
·
There will be an hour recess
while everything that has been argued over for
more than a year is finally agreed to in a private meeting between the main
actors. What results is then green-lighted by everyone even though they
aren't quite sure what the final text looks like.