In a possible sign of the influence of the ITU...

couldn’t attend. The ITU representative canceled at the “last minute” due to an upcoming meeting of the ITU Council working group, a SAMENA spokesman said. SAMENA is a telecom consortium of 45 operators and dozens of members from 25 countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Officials and executives from national regulatory authorities, GSMA, Wiley Rein, AT&T, Turk Telecom, and others were either invited to attend or scheduled to speak, the program said. The roundtable was scheduled to be at the Turk Telecom headquarters. The December ITU conference will revise the treaty. Tom Wilson, the SAMENA chief, in April had said the treaty revision is “an opportunity for change” (CD April 20 p7). Wilson didn’t clarify his remarks despite several email queries. Richard Hill, who is the ITU counselor to the December conference, and for the ITU-T study group dealing with economic matters, was scheduled to represent the intergovernmental organization during the SAMENA roundtable talk, according to a program we obtained. The SAMENA spokesman said Hill was not the official who canceled. ITU officials didn’t immediately respond to queries about who was scheduled to speak. Hill was slated for retirement before the December conference, but was retained beyond his term because of his specialized knowledge, officials had told us. Following a similar workshop in April at the European Network Telecommunication Operators Association (ETNO), Hill in an email, reiterated the views of ETNO officials who supported new business models to boost revenue assurance but were not cited in stories (CD April 20 p7). The ETNO officials made “comments to the effect that today’s Internet business models are becoming unsustainable in the face of an exponential growth in data traffic and that there is a need to address the current disconnect between sources of revenue and sources of costs,” Hill told us by email. The views, and others, were reported the following day because of time constraints (CD April 23 p4). ETNO, in a submission to the ITU Council working group this month had called for new business models for interconnection policies that would be based on the “value” of traffic, not just its volume (CD June 11 p10).