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ITU Plenipot 2014 Delegate List

Here are the 2,000 plus delegates accredited to the every four year ITU Plenipotentiary, as of October 10. The list is available to thousands via a standard ITU TIES account, freely available to anyone in the U.S. Secretary-General Touré has encouraged everyone to take advantage of the fact that ITU documents are public and circulate them freely. A few things I noticed:

Africa: Believes ITU is the most important event. Nigeria sends ~80< Kenya, Ghana, Morocco Cote d’Ivoire, Sudan, Zambia, Burundi, Cameroon and others a dozen or more. The ITU meeting is used as a crucial meeting point of the Africans for more than just the ITU. Since many of these countries can’t afford to go to all the other meetings, so any group that wants to relate to Africa needs to be here. Busan, Korea is not a vacation spot. They come to work.

Central Asia: Large delegations from Kazakhstan and others. Presumably meeting each other here in lieu if effective regional meetings.

England, France: Relatively small delegations, although England is leading an EU attack on the Russians.

U.S.: Only about 7 of about 140 U.S. delegates (5%) represent civil society or consumers. Multi-stakeholder?

U.S.: There are 8 from “three letter agencies” – DOD, NSA, HSA. They are not there to promote freedom of speech.

Secretary-General Houlin Zhao has seen poverty

18 year old Houlin Zhao was sent to live with the peasants. “I worked in the rice fields and in construction. It was a very hard time. My father made clothes and we were not affluent but what I saw in the country was very different. Even after 30 years as a technical expert I have never forgotten what I saw.” I asked what he was doing before 1973 because it was a challenging time in China. The country was still in upheaval after the Cultural Revolution. The failure of the Great Leap Forward was a decade in the past. Deng Xiaoping’s reforms were a decade in the future.

In 1975 Zhao graduated from the Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications and spent a decade working for the Ministry. He won awards, wrote articles and attended international conferences. Master of Science in telematics from the University of Essex in England.

Who’s Who Among the 100 on U.S. 2014 Plenipot

5 or 6 public delegates in 100. Update Oct 15 New list has ~7 public delegates out of about 140. The public advocates were outnumbered something like 10-1 at WCIT, as usual. Some of the top lobbyists aren’t even bothering to come. Verizon, Cisco and Google have cut back. The top people probably believe the even may have some loud talk but nothing important is going to happen. The U.S. is likely to be able to block anything we don’t like. We essentially don’t like the ITU doing anything of substance other than giving us some satellite slots. Hardly anything will get through.

The rest are from government, including some from DOD and other three letter agencies. On a similar article for WCIT, I wrote “Multi-stakeholder” is worthless if the only stakeholders are corporate.

I know most of the top U.S. government people. I believe Danny, Larry, Julie and most of the rest genuinely are working to keep the Internet open and democratic. U.S. Ambassador Danny Sepulveda is hard driving and very capable. He was close to both John Kerry and Barack Obama. I expected very different choices from an Obama person respected by several mutual friends.