Geneva hosted last 5-17 April the first meeting of study group 3 (SG3) (Tariff and accounting principles and international telecommunication/ICT economic and policy issues) of the ITU Telecommunications Standardisation Sector (ITU-T) for the 2016-2020 study period. ANACOM only attended the plenary meetings and those of the working parties (WPs) held on 10-13 April.
This meeting approved the structure of SG3 for the period in question and discussed proposals for new questions to be studied and which merited approval by the plenary session:
- Q12/3 - Tariffs, Economic and Policy Issues Pertaining to Mobile Financial Services (MFS).
- Q13/3 - Study of Tariff, Charging Issues of Settlements Agreement of Trans-multi-country Terrestrial Telecommunication Cables.
A contribution was presented with proposals for defining over-the-top (OTT) services and the impact of those services on international telecommunications. This very controversial proposal will continue to be debated, as no consensus was reached on the definition of OTT services, which many countries consider exclusively under their own responsibility.
The growing importance of telecommunications as a means to provide residents of remote areas with banking and financial services led to a large number of contributions. Note that many of those contributions and requests for more ITU involvement in such matters were considered outside the scope of the Union, as they are rather the responsibility of banking regulators. This subject will nevertheless continue to be studied between 2017 and 2020.
Artificial intelligence merited some attention from SG3 owing to the existence of proposals to study its economic impact on telecommunication services. In this regard, the holding of a workshop on artificial intelligence was approved, to be held during a future SG3 meeting.
