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Chairman’s Report of the ITU ENUM Workshop
ITU, Geneva - 17 January 2001
Introduction
The
Chairman (Roy Blane of Inmarsat Ltd., United Kingdom) welcomed the participants
to the ITU ENUM Workshop, which had been called to assist in identifying the policy
and regulatory implications of the impending commercial implementation of ENUM
in order to assist Member States and National Regulatory Authorities to
determine the associated operational and administrative issues involved.
The
ENUM Working
Group in the IETF has been working on the development of ENUM during the
past year in close co-ordination with ITU-T
Study Group 2. ENUM is both a distributed database and a protocol. It has been initially developed to map the
E.164 international telephone number to an Internet domain name address.
The
Chairman advised the participants that the aim of the workshop was to:
-
Assist
in raising the awareness and understanding of Member States and National
Regulatory Authorities with regard to the work which needs to be undertaken to
ensure that ENUM can be implemented in an international commercial environment;
-
Identify
and consider the administration and management requirements of implementing ENUM
-
Identify
issues which still need to be tackled and where possible by whom.
The
Chairman recognized that the schedule for the one-day workshop was ambitious
and sought the commitment and understanding of the participants to ensure its
success.
It
was agreed that the report and contents of the Workshop would be posted on the relevant section of the ITU web site[1]
and that other participating entities, such as the IETF, would be encouraged to
disseminate the output of the workshop as appropriate with their working
procedures.
The
List of Participants is attached in Annex
1 of this Report.
Information
Presentations
During
the morning session of the workshop four presentations were provided to assist
participants in their understanding of the topic and its operational and
technical implications. These presentations can be found in Annexes 2 - 5 of
this Report as below:
A
glossary of the terms and definitions used in the presentations is provided in Annex 6 of this Report.
Discussion of
Presentation Information and Key Issues Arising
During
the afternoon session the workshop focused its attention on discussing and
producing a list of key issues, which needed to be tackled in order to allow
the successful commercial implementation of ENUM.
A
list of these key issues is attached at Annex 7
of this Report.
In
addition it should be noted that, unless specifically stated, the list of key
issues were viewed as being of national importance and therefore required
review by each Member State.
In
order to clarify the reasons for the IAB decision to designate the domain name
“e164.arpa” for the purpose of implementing ENUM, Mr. Patrik Fältström of the
IETF’s Internet Engineering Steering
Group (IESG) provided some additional background information that indicates
the basis for this decision. This information is contained in Annex 8.
According
to Annex 8, an agency of the U.S. Department of
Commerce requested the redelegation of “.arpa” to the Internet Assigned
Numbers Authority (IANA) and this is further reflected in this domain’s “whois
record”. The IANA function is performed under a contract[2]
dated February 8, 2000 between ICANN and the U.S. Department of Commerce. On
January 8, 2001, the U.S. Department of Commerce indicated that it intends to
further extend this contract beyond March 31, 2001.[3]
Some background information papers were made available
to the participants at the workshop to enable them to understand in more detail
of some of the key issues that were identified. These papers were:
-
ITU-T
SG2 Delayed Document No.15 from France entitled Conditions for
Implementation of ENUM[4]
-
ITU-T
SG2 Delayed Document No. 20 from AT&T and Neustar entitled ENUM
Administrative Processes[5]
-
IETF
Internet Draft document from Netnumber entitled Tier-1 ENUM System
Roles and Responsibilities[6]
Copies
of these documents can be obtained from the respective organizations.
Additional ENUM-related information resources are available on the relevant
section of the ITU web site.[7]
The
following statements were provided by Member States at the end of the meeting
for inclusion in the report:
Statement
from the Administrations of France, Germany,
Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland, United Kingdom and the European Commission
“We appreciate the effort
that the ITU has taken to organise this tutorial on ENUM.
We take note of the
presentations and the discussion.
We will need to take urgent action to identify broad
principles for public policy and its implications.”
Statement from the Administration of United States of America
“The United States appreciates the efforts of the
ITU to raise awareness about the ENUM protocol recently developed by the
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). We note that ENUM is in the nascent
stages of emergence and is a matter of active discussion in many communities,
including industry. Work has begun in the United States to explore the
potential benefits of this new protocol from the perspective of overall
principles such as the promotion of competition, innovation, and consumer
choice, among other considerations. We will consider the information provided
by the workshop in our continuing deliberations.”
Conclusion
The
Chairman thanked the workshop participants for their input and praised the
information presenters for their efforts to aid the participants understanding
of the issues involved in the development and implementation of ENUM. In
addition the Chairman thanked Mr. Robert Shaw of the ITU for his efforts to
ensure that the workshop took place. Finally the Chairman thanked Mr. Andrew
Gallant of Neustar for volunteering to assist in the production of the list of
key issues, in real time, via the overhead projector for the participants.
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