St. Petersburg Web Design Blog

This week in Hong Kong, the International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations agency, representing 191 countries and 650 companies, is putting on the telecommunications industry’s biggest gathering, called ITU Telecom World, attracting about 70,000 people. But some of the conference’s attention will be focused on the role of the International Telecommunication Union itself. Should it concern itself with Internet governance — a role that its Western members find particularly objectionable — or should it focus on ground-level issues, like access to telecommunications in developing countries?

Hamadoun Touré of Mali, who was recently elected secretary general of the agency, its highest-ranking official, favors the latter approach.

“I wouldn’t want to see the I.T.U. trying to take over Internet governance,” he said at his first news conference.

But underlying tensions about the direction of the agency, which has its origins in the era of the telegraph, have troubled it since the Internet became such a prominent part of the world’s telecommunications networks.

In simpler times, the agency’s role as a global arbiter of radio frequencies and standards helped make it possible for the telegraph and the telephone to cross borders. But with the spread of the Internet in recent years, its basic standards were adopted voluntarily as more and more computer networks joined in worldwide and data traveled over the existing telephone infrastructure.

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