23 January 2014, ​Los Angeles, California, USA

Closing Address

Ladies and gentlemen,

I would like to thank you all for your participation in this meeting. It is much appreciated.

I would particularly like to thank our hosts Broadcom and Qualcomm for their generous hospitality and providing these excellent facilities in this beautiful venue. I am quite sure that being in such a nice place has been very conducive to a productive and good humoured discussion.

This group is very important to the future of standardization work in ITU, as well as elsewhere – which is why the group has benefited from participation of policy makers, regulators, other SDOs and industry.

All of us here appreciate that standardization plays a fundamental role in connecting businesses and society, promoting innovation and new technologies, and that a healthy standards system is one that balances the needs of patent holders and standards implementers.

I believe we have made good progress this week, building on last year’s work, and I appreciate all the efforts made to compromise so that consensus can be achieved.

Through these efforts you have developed some provisional first steps on reasonable, and for the first time had a useful discussion on the ‘non-discrimination’ issue. I believe that discussion has at least enabled a better understanding of the issue, and hopefully will enable progress to be made on it at future meetings.

The next meeting will continue the discussion on these issues, and will again address injunctions. For those of you attending the ETSI meeting next month I wish you every success at achieving some compromise text on that issue, which we could build on at our next meeting in March.

The following meeting of this group in May will be the last meeting before this year’s TSAG meeting, which will be held 16-20 June. My intention is to submit proposals to that meeting to improve the policy, guidelines and forms based on the work that has been accomplished.

So let me close by thanking again our dedicated moderators, and especially Serge Raes our chairman who has expertly led the meeting through the agenda and maintained the good spirit in the room despite the contentious issues discussed.

These last two meetings have been an education for me, I must admit I have enjoyed listening to the verbal sparring, and I look forward to the next meeting.

Thanks again to Broadcom and Qualcomm, and especially Dave Djavaherian and Fabian Gonell, and also Justine Perl and Ethan Kaufman at the desk outside.

I wish you all a safe trip home and hope to see you all at the next meeting.