INTERNATIONAL TELECOMMUNICATION UNION

Secretary-General’s Remarks
Special Information Session on GMPCS- and gTLD-MoUs
17:30, Thursday, 19 June 1997

•	Welcome to this informal information session on the GMPCS- and gTLD-MoUs.

•	By way of background, as I mentioned in my opening address to Council yesterday, I have taken the initiative during the past year to engage in two new and somewhat similar activities by agreeing to serve as the depository for the MoUs that have resulted from the work of last October’s World Telecommunications Policy Forum on GMPCS, as well as from the work of an International Ad Hoc Committee on Internet Generic Top Level Domains, or gTLDs.

•	Many of you are certainly aware of the results of the WTPF, and at least some of you are probably aware of the work of the IAHC.  In order to sure that all Council participants have the full picture, document C97/68 provides comprehensive background information on the MoUs that resulted from these activities.

•	As mentioned in this information document, the question of the ITU’s policy and strategy toward these activities is raised in Document C97/37, the “Draft Strategic Plan for the Union for 1999-2003”, as well as in Document C97/56, “Cost Attribution Plans and Options for Cost Recovery”.  These questions are also touched indirectly in Documents C97/29 and C97/66, the report of the Chairman and the recommendations of the ITU-2000 working group.

•	Since these documents require you to make decisions about the role of the ITU in this new kind of activity, in order to make sure that you have the full information we thought it would be useful to organize this special, informal information session.

•	I should of course stress that we are not here this evening to discuss these documents.  That opportunity will come next week, beginning on Monday morning when we discuss the draft strategic plan, and continuing Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning when we discuss ITU-2000 and the question of cost recovery,

•	As indicated in the agenda for this session, what we are going to do this evening is listen to two presentations – the first on the GMPCS-MoU and the second on the gTLD-MoU.  After each presentation, there will be an opportunity for questions and discussion.