7 Tales of Bureaucracy
This telephone network was defined by the International Telecommunication Union, the ITU, in the 1988 edition of a document called the Blue Book, a 19,000 page compendium that contained the standards for things like how modems worked, how to compress audio, and the operation of Signaling System Number 7. Anybody defining Internet standards that interfaced effectively with the underlying telephone network needed the Blue Book.
But, I couldn't afford the Blue Book—it cost 2,500 Swiss Francs—and since I was making my living as a columnist for trade press publications such as Communications Week, since I couldn't write about what the Blue Book contained, I instead wrote a lot of columns about how I couldn't afford the Blue Book and why it should be free.
At the time, the Secretary-General of the ITU was a big Finn named Pekka Tarjanne, a job he got as a reward after a career in Finnish politics followed by 12 years as head of the Finnish PTT. Tarjanne had hired a lawyer named Anthony Rutkowski as his counsellor, and that was probably a mistake as Tony Rutkowski was in reality a double-agent, an Internet sympathizer who even used email.
In 1991, the ITU was not exactly a technically progressive organization. They had lots of rotary-dial telephones of course, because their founding treaty specified they got free phone calls from all the PTTs, a fact they were inordinately proud of and never ceased to point out.
But there was no email and only a single fax machine for the entire 17-story building, and this telefacsimile
