I don't know the full scope of what ITU does, but I do know they are responsible for the X.509 specification[0]. It's a cornerstone upon which Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is built. HTTPS, TLS, etc. would not be the same without ITU.
They had an idea that the internet would be based on a system of federated directories, which would be used to find X.400 addresses for people and send them messages on the information superhighway.
This never happened, but parts of X.500 are everywhere. X.509 was one of the requirements for secure access to the directory which was recycled into certificates for the web by Netscape. LDAP is another offshoot, designed for organizations to have their own internal directory internally without needing all the other parts of X.500, and it shares some aspects of the data model with X.500 and so certificates. Active Directory builds on LDAP.
Fun fact: Microsoft Exchange Server had X.400 messaging support up to I think 2016 edition and I have sent an X.400 message even. However the format is pretty cumbersome: C=CH;L=Zürich;O=Zahllos;OU=Zahllos Internet Commentary Division;G=Zahllos is not a nice way to present a contact address. If the C=CH,L=Zürich look a lot like LDAP attributes and/or fields in a certificate, they are.
The ITU do many other things around telephony and communication, and the most obvious one is looking after country codes for phone numbers. If you decided to make a country tomorrow, the ITU would be where you'd go to get your country code delegation. E.164 is their standard for international numbers beginning with a +.
The deep lore is that most of the Internet's organizational structure was (deliberately) set up to be independent of the ITU, which was seen was captured by governments (including many authoritarian governments) and the telcos, which were at that time deeply opposed to the philosophy and practicalities of the Net. If you don't know much about the ITU it's because they lost that struggle.
It's surprisingly hard to find links to this! You can get a flavor of it from this piece from 1996 https://www.wired.com/1996/10/atm-3/?gad_source=1
That article itself is a piece of history referencing netscape as a contemporary company.
I guess most of us only really know about orgs like the IETF or W3C instead of this ITU, but a cursory look at the wiki doesn't really show a link between the two other than that they "cooperate."
Their specifications include the technology used in telephony, such as encodings/codecs, link adaptation schemes, etc. They also publish reference implementations of many of the algorithms used.
Fun fact: it is also the oldest UN agency.
Fun Fact: the malay word for “island” is “pulau.”
As in Pulau Penang.
I always wondered if there was some Indonesian influence in places like Palau, Micronesia, etc.
So, going to dox myself since there are likely under 50k of us on earth, but I'm palauan. I told my malaysian colleagues this and they mentioned this very thing to me about the word pulau. Palau is anglicisation of the palauan world "belau" although the 'b' can be a soft 'p' or vice-versa in the language depending on the word.
I haven't learned too deeply about what athropologists generally think of palau's original settlement and the carolines in general but likely my ancestors were part of the Austronesian migration as other commentors said, although most of the maps I see show it coming from the philipines instead of indonesia/malaysia, so it might be from the same original source albeit on different branches. We share some similar words (babii=pig and I find a striking similarity between "makan" and "mengang" which is palauan for "eating") but the language structure seems quite different to me than bahasa melayu/bahasa indonesia generally. Also, given the cross colonisation/migration of colonised people as labourers from before WWII, I'm not really sure which words are palauan or just imports from SEA generally in the modern era after european and japanese contact. For example, we eat rambutan which we call "rambotang" although I think the fruits were just imported by the colonisers.
That said, I now live in singapore and the first time I saw images of Batak houses it was jarring because they look a hell lot like our traditional chief houses called "bai" [1], and I had never seen anything else like them in elsewhere in the world. Due to historical reasons since the end of WWII we don't have many dealing with indonesia today.
[1] http://underwatercolours.com/travel-tales/the-palauan-bai
> ...I had never seen anything else like them in elsewhere in the world.
The indigenous people of the Mariana Islands built somewhat similar dwellings atop a foundation of large stone structures called latte[1]. The latte today is a distinct symbol of Chamorro[2] identity (e.g. prominently represented in the flag of the CNMI[3] and surrounded by a mwarmwar, a symbol of Refaluwasch[4] identity).
P.S. Not Belauan, but sis-in-law is. Almost certainly just dox'd myself as well. I suspect the aggregate of us are truly ultra minorities in these tech backwaters.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latte_stone
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chamorro_people
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_the_Northern_Mariana_I...
Indonesian and all the Polynesian/Micronesian languages are in the Malayo-Polynesian language family and share a common ancestor: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malayo-Polynesian_languages
According to the etymology section on the Palau Wikipedia article, there is no relation. Palauans calling themselves Belau makes the similarity less remarkable as well.
When making maps, describing features is simpler than naming things, e.g. Del Rio; Las Vegas; Sierra Nevada; etc.
I suspect something similar at work. But I could be wrong.
Here's the Wiki etymology
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Palau#Etymology
These are both austronesian languages and you can see they inherit from "proto-Malayo-Polynesian" so there is indeed a link, even if this specific word may have evolved from something different.
the "about" page in other languages returns a 401 unauthorized :/
Does not mention its LTD
If you mean TLD, it's .pw, but this has nothing to do with the ITU.