Well done, Bill. I had not seen your message before writing my previous message on this topic.
I was under the impression that the appointee was from the Australian TUG, not INTUG, but now you say it is both, so I assume you are correct. Again, no animosity toward Sinclair, and in fact I blieve that INTUG often played a very progressive role in the 80s telecom liberalization debates, but this is NOT a representative of noncommercial interests.
> In the event anyone's not familiar, a wee bit of background on the
> group of which she is the Chair of the Board, the International
> Telecommunications Users Group. INTUG was established by a bunch of
> large transnational corporations back in 1974 to advocate the
> liberalization of global telecom markets. They were, in effect, a
> sort of issue-specific International Chamber of Commerce. In
> parallel
> with other big business associations, they lobbied
> governments at both
> the national and multilateral level; I dealt with some of
> their folks
> in the 80s to mid-90s in the ITU context, and still have some of the
> docs they submitted to ITU and OECD from those days. They were
> especially active in advocating the loosening of regulations on the
> international private leased circuits used by financial and other
> corporate users to construct closed private networks
> bypassing public
> switched networks for global voice and data transmission (pre-
> commercial Internet), but also pushed for the reduction of
> international calling rates (fixed and mobile) under the accounting
> and settlements system. Thereafter, if I recall correctly,
> a lot of
> their early members bled off into other industry lobbying
> groups; the
> current membership http://intug.org/members/our-members/ seems to
> comprise national associations, some of which are not entirely big
> business, e.g. the membership of ATUG (which she also heads)
> "consists of 1/3 from the Top 1000 trading companies in
> Australia, 1/3
> from the Small to Medium Enterprise sector and 1/3 coming from small
> business, consultants, educational organisations such as TAFE and
> local government."
>
> In the Internet era INTUG's been less visible (at least to me)
> relative to other industry lobbying groups so I'm not aware of its
> positions on most ICANN issues, but it's a founding member of the
> Alliance for Global Business, which has taken stands on some
> relevant
> topics. For example, you can read the AGB's Global Action Plan for
> Electronic Business here
> http://www.witsa.org/papers/3rdEd-GlobalActionPlan.pdf
> . Some quotes of interest:
>
> *WTO members should recognize that specific WTO agreements governing
> trade in goods, trade in services, or trade-related intellectual
> property apply to electronic transmissions...Business will work to
> encourage all countries to implement effectively the TRIPS
> agreement.
> Business will also continue to develop and deploy technologies that
> prevent IP infringements in the online environment.
>
> *Business should have a significant role in the formation of policy
> for technical management of the domain name system and the
> development
> of policy. Through the various Supporting Organizations of the
> Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), and in
> particular the Business Constituency of the Domain Name Supporting
> Organization (DNSO), business will continue to work to ensure
> continued stability and security of the Internet, as well as
> appropriate protection of intellectual property. The protection of
> intellectual property (especially famous names) and efficient
> ways of
> dealing with cybersquatting remain priority issues for business.
>
> *Governments should recognize that the Internet is a new medium
> providing new opportunities and challenges. Existing regulatory
> systems must provide consumers with useful protection of their
> personal data and at the same time guarantee the free flow of
> information needed for the information society to produce the
> anticipated benefits. Governments should also recognize that self
> regulation may be a more flexible method of achieving data
> protection
> than government regulation. To that end, governments should: * work
> with the private sector to adopt interpretation of existing
> regulatory
> solutions based on the criteria in the paragraph above; * recognize
> the validity and adequacy of effective selfregulation
> augmented by the
> use of privacy-enhancing technologies; and * educate the
> public to use
> such privacy-enhancing technologies properly.
>
> And so on...
>
> I look forward to working on issues of common concern with the INTUG
> Chair and the other board appointees in the new SG for noncommercial
> users.
>
> Best,
>
> Bill
>
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