The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) made an important alert during Futurecom 2011. Secretary-General of ITU Hammadou Toure said the Internet could collapse by 2015 if governments, regulatory agencies, content producers and telecoms operators don’t reach standards for sector regulation.
Toure emphasized that the current rules (which date to 1988) need to be updated. “The rules are from a time when there was just voice telephony, but today everything has changed,” Toure said. He hopes that the institution can convince all the players about the existing risk of a collapse during next year’s ITU conference, a meeting with 193 associated countries in November 2012 in Dubai. “We must find a formula that makes everyone a winner. This is the most difficult part and if we don’t make an agreement, there will be a crisis,” the secretary-general said.
The collapse would be driven by device growth, mobile telecommunications reaching more than 5 billion subscribers worldwide, video content and the emergence of machine-to-machine projects. “We see that coming and we want to avoid that,” Toure said.
In order to find a solution and win-win formula, Toure highlighted the importance of getting all players involved, including Google and over-the-top companies.
Follow RCR Wireless Americas on Twitter: @RCRAmericas
“We must find a formula that makes everyone a winner. ” – by which he means, all the people who are already rich.
Toure is a typical bureaucrat, claiming that things will fail without even more bureaucracy (and job security for the bureaucrats).
Yeah, this sounds fishy. They’ve been predicting the collapse of the Internet for years. This sounds like a corporate shill for those who are absolutely panicking that they will be relegated to a dumb pipe. They want metered billing so they can be spoon fed profits and not be required to innovate in order to keep their networks maintained.
Hey, let it break. It might fix a few things.
How about separate ipv4 space for each world area? So many of us are tired of having to fiddle around to keep out the hacks from Red China, North Korea, and Africa. They can go run AppleTalk for all I care…
Who cares, the world will end in 2012 anyways!
It’s just propaganda to generate more useless panic which will generate more revenue for someone.